Trump is no free speech warrior, he is just as guilty of censorship as Biden

In fact, he is making things even worse...

The Trump administration is making it easier for payment apps like PayPal to ban users for any reason, including expressing opinions they disapprove of. This means we could be entering a world where you are not allowed to earn money unless your opinions meet the approval of corporations. This would be the ultimate way to shield our dying systems of capitalism and imperialism.

The Republican plan is to repeal a rule implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to require companies to resolve disputes in a smooth and timely manner. The change would make it much harder for customers to challenge unfair decisions, and they could be very deliberately left in limbo.

PayPal has been partnering with the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation that seems to exist solely to shut down criticism of Israel, under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism and racism. In this era of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence, we could easily find ourselves demonetised for saying something as simple as “Free Palestine” - and that is very much the goal here.

Ominously, the ADL announced in a press release:

The initiative with PayPal will be led through ADL's Center on Extremism, a leading authority on extremism, terrorism and hate. PayPal and ADL will focus on further uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements. In addition to extremist and anti-government organizations, the initiative will focus on actors and networks spreading and profiting from all forms of hate and bigotry against any community.

It’s worth pointing out the ADL considers pro-Palestinian activism to be a form of anti-Semitism, and its own press release says it is targeting “anti-government organizations” so you can imagine the type of “extremism” it is going after.

Fewer than half of Americans are sympathetic towards Israel, and more and more people are waking up to the horrors of imperialism, so the empire is finding ways to silence its critics. One of the best ways to do that is to deny those with influence the ability to earn money. So much for free speech. So much for the free market.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this story is that many Republicans who are backing the law change had previously spoken against debanking. This will come as no surprise to our readers who are all too aware of Republican hypocrisy. The Trump administration are no more champions of free speech than they are of anti-imperialism, and only a fool would think otherwise.

Republican voters need to learn their party is not on their side any more than the Democrats are. Both parties are awful, but too many voters are only able to see the evil in the other team. We’ve spent years criticising Democrats for this, it’s only right that we turn our attention to Republicans now they’re in charge.

Whereas Trump is right to call for peace in Ukraine, he is obviously doing it for the wrong reasons. Similarly, he is right to criticise Europe for its attacks on free speech, but he is doing that for the wrong reasons too. Trump is every bit as authoritarian and imperialistic as his European counterparts, he just has different goals.

Trump did not back out of the Ukraine war because he cares about Ukrainians or because he is owned by Putin, he simply did not want to back a loser. The best win for Trump was to exploit Ukrainians for their mineral wealth. The biggest difference between Trump and other imperialists is that he keeps saying the quiet parts loud.

On the speech issue, Trump is simply shifting from censorship in favour of neoliberals to censorship in favour of conservatives. This means for many of us, little will change: those who criticise imperialism or the Gaza genocide will be every bit as censored as we were before.

The key difference is pro-censorship centrists who were protected under Biden will find themselves censored too, and the nutters who support Trump will find their bile amplified.

From my perspective, we are just swapping one form of hatred for another, but the biggest concern is those who make a living from criticising the empire will now be demonetised. Censorship is the only motivation for Trump’s move to allow debanking.

Ironically, one of the people to oppose the move is Trump fan Laura Loomer who has been banned from platforms such as PayPal and GoFundMe. She complained that “Republicans are now paving the way for more debanking in America.”

While some of you might have celebrated when Loomer was debanked, this kind of thing was only ever going to hurt us more. We’ve seen anti-imperialist outlets like Mint Press News debanked in recent years, we’ve seen Stripe demonetise Substackers, we’ve seen YouTube demonetise creators who challenge establishment narratives. Demonetisation is not democratic, it’s corporate fascism.

Trump recently announced that “free speech is back in America” and called out the Democrats for trying to jail political opponents, but then he posted this on Truth Social:

There are some protections from debanking in the US, but Trump wants to remove those puny protections. Once they are gone, you can expect to see anti-imperialists targeted for censorship like pro-Palestinian immigrants and protesting university students.

Expect to see a situation where the likes of PayPal and Stripe are blocking the payments of writers and journalists who offer alternative perspectives. Expect to see a more censored internet. And while you might think this will only happen in the US, Europeans have been making their own moves to censor the internet. This means writers like myself could be screwed either way. We face the very real risk of losing our livelihoods simply because we are telling the truth.

The politicians who criticise China for censoring the internet have outsourced their own censorship to corporations. They have privatised our right to speak like they have privatised everything else. The last thing we need is more corporate control over our lives.

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