CITIZENS NEWS

PayPal's plan to fine users for 'misinformation' was a totalitarian trial balloon

By newseditors // 2022-10-14

North American banking institutions continue to degrade themselves, spiraling downward from at first creating policies to shut down accounts of individuals and organizations deemed to be politically incorrect to now acting as major totalitarian state players: they are outright confiscating money from clients with whom they have political and moral differences. (Article by Doug Mainwaring republished from LifeSiteNews.com) Remember back in 2014 when SunTrust Bank canceled the Benham Brothers’ accounts because of their pro-life and pro-conjugal marriage public support?    Or in 2017 when VANCO, an online donation processor, at the behest of banking giant Wells Fargo, cut off services to the Ruth Institute, a global non-profit organization that seeks to create “a mass social movement to end family breakdown”?  Or in 2018, when Visa and Mastercard cut off the donation processing services to the David Horowitz Freedom Center?  The banking industry has now gone from “We refuse to do business with those whose pro-life, pro-family, pro-religious freedom, and pro-election integrity views we find abhorrent” to “We’ll steal your money” and “You don’t have the right to keep private property.”  Their goal is this: Crush truth-tellers while perpetuating an illusion of normalcy for those who mindlessly repeat the woke party line, no matter how egregious the affront to reality and morality.

PayPal’s trial balloon 

After experiencing an enormous backlash on social media a couple of days ago, PayPal quickly walked back its outrageous plan to fine users up to $2,500 –– debited directly from their accounts –– for “misinformation.” The tech titan remained opaque on whether it will implement sanctions for what it perceives to be “intolerance” against homosexuals and gender-confused people.    PayPal’s move went one step beyond GoFundMe’s canceling of donations to the Canadian Truckers who stood against the onerous vaccine mandates of the Trudeau Administration earlier this year. PayPal said it would actually raid its clients’ private accounts to punish their opinions.  LifeSiteNews’ Raymond Wolfe explained that the new user agreement from PayPal would have updated the left-wing payment giant’s “list of prohibited activities” to include “sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials” that “promote misinformation,” determined at PayPal’s “sole discretion.”  The policy change would also have prohibited posting content that PayPal considers to “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing” and would have expanded the company’s ban on “discriminatory” content to cover specific “protected groups” and characteristics, including sexual orientation and “gender identity.” 

The policy, slated to take effect on November 3, five days before the U.S. midterm elections, would’ve had a chilling effect on forthright public discourse. But that was the goal.

PayPal attempted to cover its tracks, claiming that the “misinformation” language in the new user agreement was sent out “in error.” It was not. It was a trial balloon. PayPal wanted to see how far they could go to punish those who seek to protect children and young people from monstrously dangerous medical practices.     

We have surely left Western civilization behind 

The trajectory of woke national and international corporations toward totalitarian treatment of their customers became abundantly evident around the time of the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Obergefell decision.   Before Obergefell, Christians were relentlessly lectured about how homosexuals just wanted “the right to get married and be left alone.”  But within hours of the Obergefell decision, organizations which had spent years focused like a laser on corrupting the immutable definition of marriage immediately shifted their energies toward normalizing transgenderism for adults, then for kids.  Now, even the once-respected American Medical Association (AMA) and other medical professional organizations are asserting that anyone who is against gender affirmation medical treatments for young children is a terrorist who ought to be prosecuted.    Woke institutions and corporations, in lockstep with our woke government, judge conservatives – especially Christian conservatives – to be enemies of the state. Why?  To silence sublime truth in order to achieve their Neo-Marxist agenda. Woke leaders are utterly incapable of, and opposed to, conserving anything, including the timeless definitions affirmed by every culture around the globe for millennia: Marriage & family, man & woman, mother & father, boy & girl, and son & daughter.     To their discredit and shame, their relativism – a willful untethering from and rejection of truth – knows no bounds, yet they claim to be the great protectors of democracy.   Yoram Hazony, in his recently released book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, explains: 

The relativist sees in politics and morals a realm in which an endless variety of perspectives compete with one another for power without striving to attain what is true, and without anything being right in God’s eyes. The conservative, on the other hand, sees in politics and morals a realm in which an endless variety of perspectives compete with one another for power, each of them striving to reach the one truth, which is what is right in God’s eyes.

“Postnational, rule-driven democracy is both bureaucratically heavy-handed and contemptuous of traditional or customary morality,” observed Daniel J. Mahoney in an article headlined The Specter of ‘Fascism.’ “Its ideology centers around imposing an imperial and imperious conception of human rights on all those institutions and associations of civil society that resist postmodern relativism, sentimental humanitarianism, and the ideology of unencumbered human rights.” Mahoney quotes Polish philosopher and statesman Ryszard Legutko. Legutko pointed out that “it is considered to be ‘reactionary’ or even ‘fascist,’ and certainly illiberal and ‘extremist’ to defend truth as a goal of education, beauty as an aim of art, fidelity as the goal of marriage, and love of country as an essential element of citizenship.” “Inclusion (understood perversely or ideologically), sexual liberation, and political correctness, in contrast, are at the heart of a new form of democratic ‘correctness,’” noted Mahoney, adding, “If ‘reproductive rights’ and gender ideology are truly the sine qua non of democracy, then we have surely left Western civilization behind." Read more at: LifeSiteNews.com

corporations fascism politics democracy misinformation totalitarianism finance biased PayPal