JPMorgan Chase Is Up To Its Old Tricks...

Authored by Scott Shepard via RealClearMarkets.com,

JPMorgan Chase is back to debanking. Once again, it’s not providing any explanations. And once again it’s targeting people who dare to question the Left Government/Woke Business conspiracy against liberty...

At about the same time, it appears, Chase debanked, without warning, Drs. Syed Haider and Joseph Mercola. Wait, no. Not just them, but also Dr. Mercola’s employees – and his and their families. All without explanation.

These debankings don’t come without context.

You may recall that last fall Chase debanked Senator, Ambassador and Governor (so, you know, pretty well respected) Brownback’s religious liberty organization, after having debanked General Flynn and a series of other conservatives. Chase got called on the Brownback debanking and first stonewalled and then lied, a half dozen times, about the reasons for the debanking, and then went back to stonewalling.

That’s relevant again because, whaddya know, the debanked doctors turn out to be conservatives, too – or at least they’re sufficiently opposed to the woke big government/big business monolith that they were willing to question the efficacy of the lockdown regime. In fact, the New York Times wrote a story about him in the summer of 2021 calling him “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Information Online.”

Why? Because he’d dared to “publish[] over 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on Covid-19 vaccines since the pandemic began, reaching a far larger audience than other vaccine skeptics, an analysis by The New York Times found.” He also published “posts often ask[ing] pointed questions about [the vaccines’] safety and discuss[ing] studies that other doctors have refuted.”

Oh, the horror. Disagreement about scientific questions? Can not have. Especially if the right scientists have refuted some underlying positions.

You know, the way the right scientists refuted the lab-leak theory.

Mercola also helped to publicize a study that claimed that the “covid vaccines were ‘a medical fraud’ and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease.”

Wait. That all turned out to be right, didn’t it? Wasn’t he right? Haven’t the Times and Mercola’s detractors been refuted about those claims of misinformation? Weren’t they the misinformants?

Haider similarly questioned the efficacy of the vaccines, and documented the slow admissions that he and other skeptics had been correct in their claims.

Now, if this is a political debanking, it initially seems odd that it’s coming years after the controversy about the vaccines had died down. But the key may lie in the Times story itself, which explained that “[t]he activity has earned Dr. Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman demeanor, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 percent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, and Erin Elizabeth, the founder of the website Health Nut News, who is also Dr. Mercola’s girlfriend.”

Well, that would fit the pattern. Kennedy is an enemy of the unistate. He’s a bad guy to know or share any connections with, these days.

(By the way, check in on the Center for Countering Digital Hate. I know you’ll be shocked to discover that their functional – rather than their purported – definition of hate is “anything that deviates from woke policy goals.”)

Now, I don’t have any opinion on the veracity of other claims that Mercola and Haider may have made. I, like decisionmakers at Chase, am not a doctor. And I certainly don’t have any public opinions about the 2024 primaries. But that’s hardly the point. Once again we have a situation in which Chase has shut down accounts of people orthogonal to the big-gov/big-biz conjuncture without explanation.

And this time, in a move reminiscent of the type of bills of attainder that are constitutionally forbidden to American governments, the ban extends not only to companies, but to individual employees and their families.

Unless there’s a terrific, non-partisan, non-censoring reason for all of this, that’s monstrous.

It’s always possible that the fact that Chase’s debanking of organizations and people (and now their families) just happens always to fall on those espousing anti-woke positions, even though Chase adamantly refuses to provide any true explanations for them, but is happy to tell lie after demonstrable lie. It’s possible.

Really, though, what are the odds? They’re certainly getting longer.

Coutts Bank of Britain recently debanked Nigel Farage, who championed Brexit. All of the other banks of England followed along. But then it was discovered that the debanking had been political. So the British government is investigating, and the head of NatWest, which owns Coutts, has been, as they say, sacked.

You’re up, American politicians. Time for a full investigation of debanking at JPMorgan Chase and some of the other malefactors of great piles of other people’s wealth, like Bank of America.

Find out what’s really going on and why, so that some of the mighty may fall the way of the NatWest CEO.

The Brits have long understood taking sharp action pour encourager les autres. Time for us beyond the sea to learn.

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Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Director of its Free Enterprise Project.