Redlining is a little understood term with a sorry history. It involves “the systematic denial of various goods or services, either directly or through the selective raising of prices.” Traditional redlining was keeping blacks out of certain neighborhoods by denying them access to financial services.
Political redlining today is keeping conservatives of all races from expressing themselves in the marketplace of ideas. You accomplish this by denying them access to social media platforms and financial services.
Mark Alexander wrote about this last month.
We are witnessing the denial of our right to speak freely. Alexander writes: “When Americans are targeted because of their constitutionally protected political and/or religious views… leading to coordinated efforts to deplatform and then defund those individuals and businesses when financial institutions selectively refuse services, it constitutes a new form of ‘redlining’ in violation of their most fundamental civil rights. Without a Republican gauntlet, there will be a considerable surge in the systemic redline suppression of fundamental civil rights.”
Redlining is a tool for targeting
We are absolutely mistaken if we think political redlining begins and ends with free speech. There’s another civil right, the right to defend yourself, the Left is also targeting. The Biden administration is reviving Operation Choke Point which used banks to target businesses in the firearms industry.
They were trying to deny legal industries even basic access to the banking system.
American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher writes: “That is why Choke Point and similar game playing in the capital market is ideal for the political left: No formal rule is being violated, the banks are in no position to resist, and the borrowers have no recourse. Equality under the law is thrown out the window because the left fundamentally believes in nothing as much as its own political power, while the bureaucracy — much ignored in the reality that it is an important interest group — is left to enhance its own powers at the expense of market forces.”
It is time to remember…
…Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas? He said: “Restriction of free thought and free speech… is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”
Today’s Big Tech censors and their speech suppressing brethren on the Left have forgotten Justice Douglas’s warning.
Brendan O’Neill writes in Spiked, “It is undeniable that we live in a society where freedom of expression is in crisis. Whether we are being censored by the state, by self-styled guardians of correct-thinking, by mobs or by ourselves, we are being censored. And this matters. It matters because, at both the individual level and the social level, freedom of speech is essential to human flourishing.”
The question is: Do good and decent people across the political spectrum have the guts to call a halt to this before it’s too late?