David Sacks writes,
“Last summer, I warned readers of [Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack] that financial deplatforming would be the next wave of online censorship. Big Tech companies like PayPal were already working with left-wing groups like the ADL and SPLC to define lists of individuals and groups who should be denied service. As more and more similarly minded tech companies followed suit (as happened with social media censorship), these deplorables would be deplatformed, debanked, and eventually denied access to the modern economy altogether, as punishment for their unacceptable views. That prediction has become reality. What I could not have anticipated is that it would occur first in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north, with the Canadian government itself directing the reprisals. It remains to be seen whether Canada will be a bellwether for the U.S. But anyone who cares about the future of America as a place where citizens are free to protest their government needs to understand what has just occurred and work to stop it from taking root here.”
Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked—and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised—many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.
The self-conception of these pundits and politicians could not be more at odds with reality. They pose as defenders of democracy while invoking emergency powers without legislative or public debate, or without an emergency for that matter. They claim that diversity and tolerance are their highest values while insisting that only one political point of view is acceptable and censoring the alternatives. Above all, progressive elites see themselves as the champions of the disadvantaged while demonizing working-class men and women whose economic livelihoods have been devastated by their draconian Covid policies.
We must also stop the definition creep around “terrorism,” a term whose use has become so elastic that it now even includes angry moms fighting school boards. Just this month, the Department of Homeland Security made a little-noticed change in its definition of domestic terrorism, citing “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19” as a key driver of what it deemed a heightened domestic terror threat environment. As we have seen for over 20 years, “terrorism” is the magic word by which any curtailment of rights and expansion of government power can be justified.
Those of us in the free world have been asked to suspend many of our freedoms for the sake of our collective health during this pandemic. But asking us to compromise our right to peaceful protest, or to have our finances seized without due process of law in the name of a fake emergency, can never be made normal. In the words of Justice Gorsuch, “Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical.”
Read more here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/a-social-credit-system-arrives-in?r=2bxqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=url
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