The Purge continues into the financial sector.
Stripe, the popular payment-processing platform, has reportedly ended all ties with the campaign of President Trump and cut the campaign’s payment-processing services, thereby preventing the Trump campaign from accepting credit-card donations.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Stripe is blacklisting the Trump campaign after the breach at the Capitol Building last week. The financial tech company,valued at $36 billion and founded by Irish citizens Patrick and John Collison, is one of the most prominent choices for handling online payments for millions of online businesses and is integrated into various donation platforms.
Stripe claims that President Trump violated the company’s policies against “encouraging violence” following events on Capitol Hill, when a large crowd that had attended a rally calling for objection to electoral votes certified by states with rampant fraud entered the Capitol Building without permission, prompting lawmakers to briefly hide in their offices.
Per Stripe, its decision is justified under its terms of service, under which users agree that they will not accept payments for “high risk” activities which include any business or group that “engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property.”
This isn’t the first time the company has taken action against what it considers right-wing extremism. In 2018, Stripe closed the account of social-media company Gab after the mainstream media reported that a gunman who killed 11 people in an attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue had posted anti-Semitic content to the platform.
That is not unlike the current war being waged against Parler; following the Capitol breach last week (and after many Americans migrated to Parler in response to Facebook and Twitter’s decision to delete President Trump’s account), both Apple and Android-developer Google removed the app from their app stores. Amazon, whose web services were being used to host Parler, subsequently cut the platform off, so that both the Parler website and app were down.
Of course, any person can see the bias in the way these standards are applied; the point of social-media platforms is that people post personal views, which in some cases may be ugly, but these views do not reflect those of the app-maker. Google and Apple don’t remove Facebook or Twitter despite the racist, antisemitic, jihadist Islam, and other extreme and inciteful content found on them.
Stripe and social media aren’t the only ones to have banned the president of the United States. The e-commerce platform Shopify banned TrumpStore.com, which is run by the Trump campaign and Trump Organization.
Shopify said in a statement: “Shopify does not tolerate actions that incite violence. Based on recent events, we have determined that the actions by President Donald J. Trump violate our Acceptable Use Policy, which prohibits promotion or support of organizations, platforms or people that threaten or condone violence to further a cause. As a result, we have terminated stores affiliated with President Trump.”
The New American has previously drawn the comparison of the current tech crackdown on right-wing views with the events that followed the Reichstag Fire in Germany in 1933.
In the historical case, the burning of the Reichstag, the meeting place of the German legislature, was used by the Nazis to jail their political opponents (whom they blamed for the fire) and remove opposing parties. Then, with the legislature firmly in their control, they enacted “emergency powers” that vested the executive branch with broad powers, setting the nation on the road to totalitarianism.
In 2021 in America, an “assault on the legislature” is likewise being used to stamp out the establishment’s opposition, as anyone holding a pro-Trump position is now being accused of inciting violence.
Just as many academics believe the Reichstag fire was orchestrated by the Nazis themselves to give a pretext for eliminating their rivals, so is there publicly available footage suggesting that Capitol Police opened the gates to allow the crowd onto the premises, motioning them towards the Capitol Building.
One thing is for certain: The purge is not only a threat to freedom of speech and to the cause of conservatism (as it makes it harder to diffuse the truth), but is rapidly creating a divided, polarized America that will be a fertile ground for civil war.
