After Mounting Pressure, MasterCard, Visa Restore Donations to Conservatives
MasterCard and Visa reinstated the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s ability to process credit card donations on Friday after several conservative media outlets reported on the ban.
According to Breitbart News, MasterCard had blacklisted the Freedom Center (a conservative think tank) after the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center and Color of Change labeled the organization a hate group.
Horowitz recounted in FrontPage Mag the controversy began last Tuesday when WorldPay, which handles the organization’s donations, was told by MasterCard the Freedom Center (DHFC) was a purveyor of hate.
“The organization Color of Change has published an updated website named bloodmoney.org and within it has listed a number of merchants that purport to accept MasterCard and have content which is hateful in nature. .. [and] which may be advocating for violence. We have identified the sites below as belonging to your institution…,” MasterCard wrote in an email regarding the DHFC.
Based on this information, Worldpay also stalled payments from Visa, according to Breitbart.
“Visa does not have direct relationships with merchants or websites that accept Visa payments,” the company told Breitbart. “We require the merchant’s bank to know their customers and ensure that only legal transactions are submitted to the Visa network. The merchant’s banks may also have their own Acceptable Use Policies governing their merchant relationship.”
MasterCard’s decision to cut off DHFC’s ability to raise donations online created “an existential threat” to the nonprofit’s future.
“We were mobilizing for a costly legal proceeding against MasterCard when, on Friday afternoon, four days after the attempt to destroy us, WorldPay and MasterCard backed down and informed us they were restoring our online services and donations,” Horowitz wrote.
He credits the light several conservative media outlets shined on MasterCard’s ban for the company’s decision to reverse its decision.
Among the conservative publications and personalities that Horowitz pointed to were: Breitbart, Drudge Report. Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax, OAN, The Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, and “a host of other sites.”
The pundit also warned that conservatives may have won this battle, but the war to silence their views will continue.
“One thing we know for sure is that despite this defeat, the left will keep up the pressure and the same thing will happen again—if not to the Freedom Center then to other conservative organizations and individuals,” he argued.
“This effort to shut down conservatism’s ability to raise the funds that make its voice heard was not the result of an arbitrary decision by some politically correct middle manager at MasterCard,” said Horowitz. “It was a decision at the highest corporate levels and the result of an elaborate and carefully designed campaign by leftist to silence conservative voices on the Internet and therefore in America’s national dialogue.”
The campaign against the DHFC was masterminded by two George Soros funded groups: Media Matters and the Southern Poverty Law Center, “which has managed to get itself taken seriously as an authority on ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate groups’ by a credulous and collaborative mainstream press.”
Horowitz went on to point out the incredible power social media, coupled with corporations like Visa and MasterCard, have to shut down free speech.
“The censorship powers of Social Media are awesome and historically unprecedented,” he contended. “When they are amplified by the arbitrary financial power of corporations such as Mastercard and Visa, the result is a leviathan willing and able to crush our basic freedoms and constitutional guarantees without a moment’s remorse.”
“If we cannot preserve freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, we cannot defend any of our freedoms, and we will have lost everything.”
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