Rebel News Blacklisted by PayPal

Canadian conservative media website Rebel News has reportedly been blacklisted by PayPal, the web’s leading payment processor, another incident in a growing trend of financial blacklisting of conservatives.

“PayPal, the online credit card processor just cut off Rebel News,” said founder Ezra Levant.

“This could actually destroy us. We use PayPal to process a million dollars a year. That covers half our staff payroll.”

Levant says his legal team will file a lawsuit against PayPal “as soon as next week,” for breach of contract and unlawful interference with economic relations.

The Rebel News founder says that his personal account, and the account of Rebel’s nonprofit were also shut down. In a video for Rebel News, Levant showed an email correspondence from PayPal that did not specify what rule the news organization had allegedly breached.

PayPal and other online payment processors have increasingly targeted conservative voices in recent years.

PayPal alone has suspended service to the free speech video platform BitChute, conservative street artist Sabo, English secularist campaigner Tommy Robinson, Republican political candidate Laura Loomer, Infowars, Jihad Watch and the American Freedom Defense Initiative (both later reversed), and the Core Issues Trust (CIT), a Christian charity in Ireland.

This is part of a growing trend that has seen far-left activist pressure financial institutions including credit card companies like Mastercard to suspend service to their political opponents. In 2019, far-left activists lobbied Mastercard to create a “human rights council” to monitor and potentially cut off payments to the “far right.”

Some liberal organizations have warned that the politicization of financial services is a mistake. In 2018, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it was “deeply concerned that payment processors are making choices about which websites can and can’t accept payments or process donation.”

Breitbart News has reached out to PayPal for comment.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.