How the American Government Will End Dissent by Freezing Bank Accounts

Will our government use the same financial tactics against us that it did against the Russians?

Before Canada went after truckers and the US targeted Russia for financial destruction, the IRS’ harassed Tea Party groups under the Obama administration:

The US Justice Department has reached a settlement with dozens of conservative groups that claimed the Internal Revenue Service unfairly scrutinized them based on their political leanings when they sought a tax-exempt status, court documents showed.

In a pair of lawsuits filed in federal court in 2013, the conservative groups accused the IRS of targeting organizations with such words as “Tea Party” or “patriots” when they applied to the agency for tax-exempt status starting in 2010.

The sides asked the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday to issue a declarative judgment in one of the cases involving 41 plaintiffs that would say the IRS was wrong to apply the United States tax laws based on an entity’s name, position, or association with a particular political movement.

It’s also worth noting that our government already feels very comfortable confiscating money from people on the theory that it MIGHT HAVE BEEN acquired via illegal means:

Thousands of people are stopped and stripped of their money each year by US law enforcement under a process known as civil asset forfeiture.

The controversial practice allows the government to seize people’s property – even without filing criminal charges – if it is suspected of being linked to criminal activity.

Supporters of civil forfeiture argue that it’s an essential law enforcement tool against drug traffickers, who are known to use cars and planes to ship large amounts of cash around the country. Critics say it’s routinely used against innocent people and disproportionately impacts people of color.

Challenging a civil forfeiture can be a long and costly affair, leading many to walk away from items such as cash and cars.

Like most conservatives, I’m all for being tough on crime, but should you be able to confiscate people’s assets without even proving in court that they violated the law? Absolutely not. “We’re taking your money and if you want it back, fight us in court for a few years to prove you deserve it” isn’t how “innocent until proven guilty” is supposed to work.

We’ve also seen a number of cases where PRIVATE financial entities have cut people off for what seems to be politically motivated reasons. Mike Lindell. Roosh and Charles Johnson. Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, Laura Loomer, Martina Markota, and Alex Jones. We could go on and on from there.

Now, you may not like all those people, but it doesn’t really matter. It wouldn’t matter if we were talking about Satan himself because, in the minds of many liberals, the difference between the worst, absolute bottom of the barrel, kooky, racist, evil monster you can imagine and say a run-of-the-mill conservative wearing a MAGA hat is negligible. Once the precedent of cutting people off of a financial service for their political views is set, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to banning even country club Republicans who end up on the wrong side of the latest trendy issue. It’s also worth noting that banks and payment processors like PayPal are in some of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet. If we can say to these companies that they can’t deny customers services because of their race or sexual orientation, why shouldn’t we be telling them that they can’t dump customers for political reasons? In fact, Republicans in Congress should be saying EXACTLY that and unleashing a profit-killing, regulatory hell on Earth on financial institutions that do it anyway.

Of course, all of this pales in comparison to what was done to the truckers protesting Canada’s draconian COVID regulations:

The federal government says the RCMP are working with financial institutions to “unfreeze” bank accounts locked by emergency orders that targeted people who organized, participated in, or donated to the so-called Freedom Convoy blockades.

Isabelle Jacques, assistant deputy minister of finance, told a Commons standing committee Tuesday that the RCMP began “sharing information” — related to the end of “unlawful” blockades — with banks and financial institutions as of Monday that should lead to affected accounts being “unfrozen.”

...In reply to a Conservative MP’s question about whether donations as small as $20 would have been affected, the finance official said it would be “rare” but not impossible that small donations could be covered.

If you don’t think there are Democrats in Congress that would happily freeze the bank accounts of people that gave $20 to their political enemies if they could get away with it, then you haven’t been paying much attention for the last few years. However, at least the Canadian freeze ended. The financial warfare the West has hit Russia with isn’t going to be so easy to walk back:

Over the course of two historic weeks, the US and its partners sanctioned Russia’s biggest financial institutions — including removing some from the SWIFT messaging system — ratcheted up debt restrictions, and sanctioned Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. ...The strategy has now shifted to driving the country into the ground. Last weekend, the G-7 countries froze Russian foreign exchange reserves held in their jurisdiction, severing Russia’s access to nearly $400 billion, or over 60 percent of reserves, overnight. ...In the coming weeks, market-watchers are likely to record a cliff-drop in the value of the ruble as Russia leverages its remaining financial resources to fend off a currency crisis. Bond yields will rise, and credit ratings will fall, triggering fears that Russia is reaching default, especially as bonds reach maturity this month. Initial economic findings project that Russia will experience a drop in productivity worse than during its major financial crisis in 1998.

Even this description is short selling all that’s being done. Among other companies, VISA, Mastercard, and PayPal have pulled out of Russia. We’re stopping our oil buys. The property of wealthy Russians is being seized in Western nations with minimal legal justification.

*** Just as a side note, what we’re doing in Russia today is unprecedented and could have ENORMOUS, far-reaching consequences for the American and world economy that few people have thought about or even understand — including the people implementing them. For one thing, the whole idea that we’re mad at Russia so it's okay to confiscate any property wealthy people from that country lawfully own is the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a Banana Republic, not the West. It’s a foolish, dangerous policy we will likely regret. Furthermore, if Russia (Which is the 11th biggest economy in the world) defaults, it could create a nightmarish economic cascade for the United States and the rest of the world. Could we see a particularly brutal recession? A much speedier end to the dollar as a reserve currency? A much tighter economic alliance between China and Russia? Large numbers of American firms being permanently locked out of Russia and other nations? Surprisingly massive spikes in the cost of food and oil along with brutal new shortages? It just goes on and on. Putin is a bad guy and it’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for the Russian people who have been generally supportive of him up until now, but it really feels like no one thought this through and we just applied the whole “cancel culture” mentality to the world stage without considering the long-term ramifications. ***

On the other hand, the short-term ramifications of these policies are easy to see and thus, are extremely appealing to liberals in government who are always looking for new ways to force the populace to bend to their will. What better way could there be than to wage financial warfare on them?

After they freeze your bank account and “encourage” your bank, PayPal, and any crowdfunding websites not to do business with you, you’re not going to be able to pay your power bill, much less be a threat. If you think this couldn’t happen here, after the government happily forced people to shut down their businesses and told landlords they were no longer allowed to evict people, you’re pretty naïve. If you’re waiting on the law, the courts, common sense, or human decency to save you in a situation like that, you may be waiting years at best and hoping for relief that never comes at worst.

It’s also worth noting that COINCIDENTALLY, the government is now looking into a technology that could make all of this EXTREMELY EASY for them. That’s the digital dollar, which I wrote about on Culturcidal last year:

First of all, you might wonder how a digital dollar would curtail privacy. It would do that by creating a world where you couldn’t earn, spend, hold, or give away one red cent without the government’s approval. ...So, what types of things might we see our government do if it could, with a keystroke, take money out of your bank account? Certainly, it would make freezing people’s accounts a lot easier. If this had been in place in America this year, you can be certain there would have been Democrats calling for freezing all access to money for anyone involved in the Jan. 6 riots. How much further do you think people like Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Ilhan Omar would go if they had the opportunity? The smart bet would be on, “MUCH FURTHER.” For example, could you imagine far-left-wingers calling for directly distributing money “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need?” Granted, they wouldn’t phrase it like that. They’d say something more like, “What if we just took a certain percentage of the money that people LIKE YOU have and redistributed it to people with less as reparations? What sort of greedy people would oppose something like that?” Today, something like that would be a nightmare to implement. In an America dominated by a digital dollar, it could happen with a few keystrokes. Once it’s a possibility, you could even imagine socialistic Democrats running on a platform of doing exactly that.

So, what can you do to stop this from happening in the United States?

The first is to oppose the digital dollar at every opportunity and the second is to only support politicians that are against the digital dollar and who will step up to protect conservatives from being financially cut out of the system. That means going after banks and financial entities that refuse service to customers for political reasons and it means writing laws that explicitly, unambiguously limit the government’s ability to seize or freeze funds. That’s not a practice that can be done away with entirely, but it is an area where putting protections in place designed to stop the sort of thing that happened in Canada should be doable.

Don’t kid yourself. As you read this, there are undoubtedly politicians in DC right now SALIVATING at the idea of using these policies against Americans, and the moment they find a good excuse; they will try it.

Daily Wire @realDailyWire

Democrat Congressman: Seize Trucks From Protesters Headed To D.C., Give Them To Growing Businesses dlvr.it/SKVRVn

Unless Republicans take steps to protect their constituents, it’s just a matter of time until the sort of things we’ve seen in Canada and Russia are used in the United States against conservatives. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and now is the time to make sure this never happens here instead of crossing our fingers and relying on the human decency of people that have none.

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