Escaping From the Money Pit

Customers Are Being Debanked For Opinions that Diverge from Moneyed Interests. But is Bitcoin the Answer to This?

Jeff Childers at Coffee and Covid had an interesting piece regarding people losing their jobs due to controversial tweets. In our AI obseesed interconnected world it is now easier than ever to lose status, pay and prestige due to any number of opinions that diverge from the narratives of vested interests. As he writes:

“The New York Sun ran an intriguing story yesterday headlined, “Elon Musk Pledges to Pay Legal Bills of Twitter Users Mistreated for Posting on the Site.”

The Sun’s article referred to a Saturday tweet (or is it “X” now?) by Elon Musk, where he promised to pay the legal bills of anyone mistreated by their employer on account of posting or liking something on Twitter, I mean X:

As you can see, Musk’s tweet garnered over 735,000 “likes” as of this morning. The response has been strong. Nobody yet knows what the rules or criteria are, and no one’s legal bills have been funded so far. But enthusiasm is running high.

What might unfair treatment look like? Here’s one recent example:

According to the related article from Inside Higher Ed, Mark Tykocinski resigned as president of Thomas Jefferson University and as dean of the university’s medical school, after being outed for “liking” tweets critical of coronavirus vaccines, gender-affirmation surgery and college diversity, equity and inclusion offices.”

It’s insane that liking a tweet can cause you to lose your job, but what about getting debanked? I was recently reading an article about doctors being cancelled by banks and financial services companies due to their truthful opinions. Dr. Mercola received recent attention for it. I was especially chilled by this statement:

In February 2021, the FDA sent Dr. Mercola a warning letter after he recommended supplements like vitamin D and zinc as treatments for COVID-19.

When recommending vitamins can get you debanked, there’s a big problem.

Dr. Syed Haider, a physician who has also recommended alternative COVID-19 drugs like ivermectin, says he has been receiving similar treatment.

“I just tweeted about how my business bank account and PayPal were shut down with no notice for no reason and today my Airbnb rental was canceled 3 days into a 28 day stay and now Mercola tweets that his bank accounts along with those of his CEO and CFO and their spouses and children are shut down with no reason and no due process. This is the passive-aggressive, dystopian, woke, social-credit hellscape that is our dying country,” Dr. Haider tweeted Wednesday.

The physician warned his almost 100,000 followers on social media about using the same credit card to purchase social media services like Twitter Blue as for services from totalitarian corporations. This allows the corporations to view a customer’s social media activity and opens them up to harassment.

“Used the same card for Twitter Blue as I did to pay for my Airbnb that was cancelled 3 days into a 28 day stay. News flash verifying your ID on social media by paying for a blue check with a credit card means the card company now knows what the cardholder is posting and can use a third party service to be notified of online dissident card members. Twitter Blue was a bad idea. If you’re going to do it anyway use a prepaid card,” Dr. Haider tweeted.

“The major banks, financial management firms, and insurance companies are de facto deciding how we will be able to live. They are becoming our new legislatures,” said New Hampshire State Rep. J.D. Bernardy.

In January, mortgage-lending giant Wells Fargo announced it will only provide new home loans to minorities as the bank prepares to step back from the mortgage market. Whites who are existing Wells Fargo customers will also be eligible for mortgages.  

Also in January, Wells Fargo suddenly closed the account of Brandon Wexler, a well-known gun dealer who had been with the bank for 25 years. The bank suggested it will no longer do business with firearms dealers when it told Wexler it was too “risky,” according to The Reload.

In 2020, Wells Fargo suddenly closed Republican Senate Candidate Lauren Witzke’s bank account without explanation. 

Bank of America, of its own volition, decided to track its customers who may have been at the US Capitol on January 6, 2020, and report them to the FBI. Following the Capitol breach, payment processor Stripe stopped processing payments for Trump’s campaign and anyone who was at the Capitol that day.  

In October, Bank of America also shut down the bank account of a popular conservative influencer and refused to provide an explanation. 

What I wonder in all of these cases is what the debanked people in question did to get access to their money. Did they just transfer it to another bank? How long did it take to do that, and what fees or penalties were incurred? If the banks, especially with the assistance of AI, begin to targent dissident opinions en mass, what can actually be done about it? If my mother’s bank demands that she submit to an iris scan to get access to her social security deposit, which is now automatically rolled into a CBDC, what options does she have? The vast majority of the world population still uses something that is thought of as money as a medium of exchange in day to day life and often exchange their labor for access to this. So how do you find technology which doesn’t track but does those same things?

Tech-Daimons Are Trying to Shut Down My Blog

Rolo Slavskiy is apparently having problems with Stripe, the payment processor used for substack subscriptions.

“For now, that means that until I get things sorted, I can’t get my paycheck, which sucks because I need money to live in society and most people do as well, generally speaking.

I think all of it is related to the Biden regime starting to squeeze Americans harder via the IRS. I also heard some related news about how COVID dissidents have had bank accounts shut down and Nigel Farage and his supporters from ex-UKIP were de-banked as well. I had my old bank account closed about a year ago because I hadn’t been in the US for so long even though I still used it and I have no idea why that happened, so I chalk it up to these new measures.

In my case, I would think that I’d get a warning from Substack first before getting the boot. So, I want to be cautiously optimistic and say that it really is just some IRS-related bullshit and not Stripe, the payment processor, giving me the boot. I’m 100% sure though that I will be de-banked in some way in the future for what I have written in the past and it is only a question of “if” and not “when”. Er … flip that.

Either that or because I am unvaxxed or identify as a “Rashist” or something like that.

So will you, by the way, eventually.

Funny enough, the only way to beat the censorship and de-banking is to accumulate enough of a support base to be able to keep working despite the intellectual sanctions. Once you incur one ban, the information is shared, and a cascading network effect of concurrent and coordinated bans and suspensions ensues. From there, it becomes a cat and mouse game of constantly switching to alternate platforms and dragging your supporters along with you. A lot of people I’ve known and worked with over the years have had to go through this process and it isn’t fun, let me tell you. But, if worse comes to worst, and I can’t process payments here or even blog here eventually, I’ll just move to Telegram. Sadly, the Russian government is so pro-West and stupid that despite talking about it for decades at this point, they still haven’t set up an alternative internet infrastructure of core services like registrars, cloud services, payment processors, media platforms and so on. The few Russian internet tech giants with potential have either been chased out of Russia by Putin’s oligarch friends (VK, Telegram) or have been sold off and moved to Israel (Yandex) or moved to Dubai last year to avoid the sanctions as part of the big tech exodus from Russia.

Imagine if Western dissidents had a support network of backbone services that they couldn’t be kicked off of. Wouldn’t you provide something like that if you were serious about standing up to the West? Do you know how much damage such a simple measure would do to the power of the Western elites, who rely on sophisticated methods software supremacy to shadow-ban, surpress and silence their opposition? Rhetorical. You know the score by now and shouldn’t be surprised that the Duma embezzles the money or spends it on building the digital gulag according to WEF standards.

Anyways, the only problem with me moving to Telegram is that most of you do not have Telegram and will categorically refuse to download the app on either your phone or your computer, even though all the best info and commentary is on there in both English and Russian (which is translatable). Likewise, literally none of my readers appear to know what crypto is or how to use it either. I know this because while I didn’t have a bank account during the early days of the blog, I asked for donations to my crypto wallet and I got literally zero donations. But, the moment I was able to get Stripe up and running, people started signing up and supporting the blog. Now, I’m grateful for the support, truly, but I do think it is kind of funny that people who consider themselves to be dissidents don’t know how to use an anonymous (or semi-anonymous) financial tool like crypto because they say they will be tracked or that it isn’t perfect or think that it is illegal to own Bitcoin, but feel comfortable handing over their credit card info instead.

This, to me, is just further proof of how hopeless and yet also how unserious the whole situation is because even regime-critical people cannot be bothered to take even elementary measures to a) support de-banked dissidents and b) conceal their support for these dissidents in some way. It also tells me that if tomorrow I got kicked off Stripe (usually they ban you for life) and de-banked and de-Substacked, I could, in theory, just open up my own blog for a time, old-school style, but I would not be able to pay rent with it. Why? Well, because even though the tech now exists to basically allow people to pay for stuff online using crypto (which you can’t be banned from because it goes directly from computer to computer) in a very similar way to paying for stuff on Amazon (I know, I just bought some tobacco online using crypto this way on a Shopify-like clone), the vast majority of people will refuse to actually use such a service because it would involve like, what, maybe an hour tops of work upfront learning how to use the new tech.”

I wish he had named names because I often find myself stuck in app overload hell. I’m going to step back and explain my issues and why I never used a Bitcoin or other crypto wallet. I considered it especially in 2021 and I think I generated a wallet address on some app on an old phone which subsequently never got used. So what would I have wanted to do with it? I would have wanted to turn Bitcoin into money that I could use in every day transactions.

There were several exchanges which offered services which seemed to require as much identification and verification as any old bank or financial institution. One could not accept me on learning that I was a US citizen. I bailed on another after my identity verification failed several times as the picture of my passport was too blurry or something. I’m not going to go through iris scans a la Worldcoin. Getting out any hypothetical money that I or some generous donor put into my Bitcoin wallet looked to be similar to setting up a bank account. Plus there were fees involved in transfers.

Beyond that, what would I be using bitcoin for? I would want it to be used as money, i.e. an exchange for something of value in the real world. Whether I was using this Bitcoin to hypothetically buy dog food, pay an electric or internet bill, or buying food or gas is irrelevant. I would want a payment method which is accepted at most places and which has close to zero transaction costs to use.

In Thailand Bitcoin doesn’t even begin to get there as they supposedly banned crypto payments in April of 2022. Even before that the 13 or so retaurants in Bangkok that accepted Bitcoin payments was not going to cover a single one of my day to day needs. Most people are de facto using crypto as either a store of value with other investment accounts or are traders. In either case it sounds like something that would require all of the same hoops to access funds as any regular bank.

I would love it if someone were able to walk me through how Bitcoin and the like is actually used as money. Is it transferred to a bank account and then withdrawn as cash? What are the coversion rates involved?

In times of crisis people have settled on barter and I think if things became terrible then this might make a comeback. Let’s pray it doesn’t come to that. But what are the solutions for day to day transactions? It looks like we all could be sitting ducks to FedCoin and all of the attendant strings attached. All they have to do is get their ducks in a row…

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