Federal agencies gave banks automated censorship tools to flag as possible domestic terrorists any Americans who buy Bibles or support the enforcement of immigration law, says testimony today before a House committee.
“Federal agencies are funding tools for the financial sector similar to those social media is using to target misinformation and hate speech,” says written testimony from Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel at the nonprofit First Amendment law firm Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Federal regulators are successfully pressuring financial institutions to discriminate against customers based on their religious and political beliefs. If the federal government discriminated directly, it would be unconstitutional, notes Tedesco in testimony this afternoon to the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. On March 6, 16 state attorneys general called on Wells Fargo to stop “using debanking as a political tool to extend the policies of the Biden Administration throughout the economy.”
“Wells Fargo has institutionalized discrimination by imposing race and sex-based quotas into credit agreements with customers like BlackRock,” says a letter from the attorneys general. The bank is among others working to end customers’ use of low-cost energy sources and increase their grocery bills to meet Democrats’ economic central-planning goals, the letter says.
In short, the same sorts of government pressure erecting an Iron Curtain around the Internet are already constructing a financial social credit system like Communist China’s inside the United States. Tedesco notes the FBI gave financial institutions a document that
