Bipartisan Opposition Grows to Debanking by Wall Street

A bipartisan coalition of unlikely “bedfellows” opposed to financial blacklisting by tech giants and Wall Street behemoths is rising.

Independent journalist Lee Fang wrote that CFPB Director Chopra noted in a legal filing last week that political and religious groups “across the spectrum” have been “debanked,” or lost their banking services by major financial institutions. Chopra and the CFPB hope to curb this practice.

Fang cited the hundreds of supporters of the anti-vaccine mandate Canadian truckers that were debanked and lost access to their bank accounts and lost access to their PayPal accounts over claims of “misinformation.”

Pro-life groups such as the Arakansas Family Council and the Ruth Institute has also been debanked by J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo over allegations that the groups promoted hatred.

In a similar fashion, those protesting in favor of the Palestinian cause in American and the United Kingdom have had their accounts blocked.

Fang said that the unlikely “bedfellows” – that is the Christian conservatives, Republican legislators, and populist Biden officials such as Chopra – have created a new coalition to protect free speech. They would have to overcome big tech and banking lobbyists, as well as officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and leftist nonprofits who “favor unlimited corporate rights to remove users over allegations of misinformation or hate.”

Chopra argued that the explosion of financial tech platforms has led to many corporations to censor free speech by debanking without much recourse for the average American.

Jon Schweppe, the policy director for the American Principles Project (APP), wrote, “This is awesome. @chopracfpb is leading an important bipartisan anti-debanking effort. ‘The new free speech on financial platform push, led by the CFPB director Rohit Chopra, opens up a significant rift within the Biden administration and offers a glimpse of potential ideological realignment.'”