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Conservatives Have to Ask for Checks by Mail as Credit Card Companies Blacklist

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It wasn’t that long ago that “liberalism” stood for open-mindedness and tolerance. The freedom to speak your mind, hold diverse opinions, and not be blacklisted for being different were once all left-leaning values.

These days, that seems like a distant memory.

More and more, it appears that leftist groups are enforcing a sort of New McCarthyism against any voices who dare dissent from liberal talking points.

It’s easy to dismiss this claim as alarmist. Yet a growing stack of evidence points to unsettling collusion among corporate giants, and it’s becoming hard to ignore the signs that something which looks very much like censorship is taking place against conservative voices.

One of the most recent examples of this troubling trend just took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This well-known non-profit organization goes back to 1988, and runs popular online conservative destinations including FrontPage Magazine and TruthRevolt.

This week, supporters of the right-leaning group received a chilling message from the Freedom Center: The two largest credit card processors in the world had stopped doing business with the non-profit organization, effectively cutting it off from its funding.

“We’re under attack by the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the email, which was shared by recipients online, began.

“For years, the SPLC has labeled the Freedom Center a hate group and tried to get organizations like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter to ban us and silence our message,” the email continued.

Do you expect this type of censorship against conservatives to become more frequent?

“Yesterday, SPLC finally convinced MasterCard and Visa to cut us off,” the Freedom Center’s message explained. “Now we can’t process donations from any major credit card companies.”

The statement went on to ask for emergency donations in the form of old-fashioned paper checks as a last resort.

Horowitz, an intellectual and bestselling author, is no radical. The center that carries his name can best be described as a defender of American values.

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“The DHFC is dedicated to the defense of free societies whose moral, cultural and economic foundations are under attack by enemies both secular and religious, at home and abroad,” the group explains as its core mission.

But defending core American values is all it takes to be labeled an extremist these days.

“Everyone has to realize there’s a multimillion dollar Soros-David-Brock campaign to silence conservatives,” Horowitz himself said on Twitter, replying to a user who shared the email explaining the Visa and MasterCard situation.

“The Silicon Valley problem is really a byproduct of this since Sen. (Mark) Warner has threatened the Techs if they don’t censor conservatives,” the well-known author continued, making it clear that he believed there was a purposeful effort among liberal corporations to silence the right.

A few years ago, that might have been dismissed as a far-fetched conspiracy theory. These days, it’s no laughing matter.

We have already seen similar tactics used by liberal groups to isolate even mainstream conservative organizations from their sources of funding. As The Western Journal reported earlier this year, completely law-abiding firearms businesses have felt the squeeze from Citigroup, a giant banking conglomerate.

“If you’re a local gun shop which follows every law and banks with Citigroup, selling a hunting shotgun to a 20-year-old who passes a background check could now get your account shut down or your credit cards frozen,” WJ reported in March.

Then came a blatant effort to defund the NRA, using banking as a type of political enforcement tool.

The NRA “is suffering setbacks with respect to the availability of insurance and banking services — as a result of a political and discriminatory campaign meant to coerce financial institutions to refrain from doing business with the NRA,” that organization’s spokesperson, William Brewer, said in early August.

That is without even mentioning the disturbing trends occurring on liberal-owned tech and social media platforms, where evidence shows conservatives being quietly silenced, or outright banned.

It’s natural to be skeptical whenever people begin bringing up collusion and connivance. But anybody who thinks this type of focused effort from big tech and big finance to choke off political dissenters is impossible has their head in the sand.

Here’s our challenge: Be skeptical … and then dig into it for yourself.

Take a look at the patterns that appear to be occurring with increasing frequency, and ask yourself if it looks like bias against conservative voices.

Freedom to hold diverse political opinions and to share them with like-minded people isn’t a liberal or conservative ideal. It’s an American principle, and every citizen who values open-mindedness needs to be aware of what is happening.

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Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico.




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