Debanking Realignment: CFPB to Protect Christian Free Speech
Populist realignment brings some voices in the Biden administration into a tacit alliance with Christian conservatives against Wall Street.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a legal filing to an appeals court last week, cited the “debanking” of Christians as a form of the “across the spectrum” discriminatory behavior by financial institutions it is seeking to curb.
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.
In recent years, activists from both the right and left have been banned from bank accounts and digital financial platforms over political speech-related allegations with virtually no due process – a phenomenon informally known as debanking.
Hundreds of supporters of the anti-vaccine mandate Canadian truckers movement were debanked and left with no access to bank accounts and had money removed from PayPal accounts over nebulous claims around “misinformation.”
Pro-life groups such as the Arkansas Family Council and Ruth Institute have similarly lost access to bank services with JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo over allegations that the organizations promote hate.
Meanwhile, over the last year, activists in the U.S. and U.K. supporting Palestinian humanitarian causes have received notifications that fundraising accounts have been blocked and transactions frozen.
The issue presents a new cross-current of unlikely bedfellows. Christian conservatives and a flank of Republican legislators are fighting alongside populist Biden administration figures such as Chopra for free speech rights and new protections against debanking.
They are up against an alliance of tech giants and banking lobbyists, along with some voices at the Department of Homeland Security and liberal nonprofits, who favor unlimited corporate rights to remove users over allegations of misinformation or hate.
While many prominent Democrats have embraced speech restrictions, Chopra has charted his own course and reached out to the right.
In remarks earlier this summer before the Federalist Society, Chopra argued that the growth of financial tech platforms has increased the dangers of private actors engaging in “oppressive or censorious” behavior with no democratic recourse for ordinary Americans.