The way things are trending, the future will see execution as the penalty for conservative thought. The evidence is clear that the Left is ramping up its war on conservative free speech. We’ve already witnessed the social media’s joint censorship of Alex Jones as well as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s attempts to get banks and insurance companies to stop working with the NRA. And let’s not forget YouTube’s wholesale removal of Dennis Prager’s “Prager U” videos.
The Left’s latest target is the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), Visa and Mastercard have discontinued serving the DHFC because the far-left Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) pressured them into believing that the center is a hate group.
The Daily Wire tells us of the SPLC’s actions against Horowitz:
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In an email to supporters on Wednesday under the subject “Transaction Denied,” the DHFC announced that at the request of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the two credit card companies will no longer be allowing donations to DHFC.
“We’re under attack by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),” the email begins. “For years, the SPLC has labeled the Freedom Center a hate group and tried to get organizations like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter to ban us and silence our message.”
“Yesterday, SPLC finally convinced MasterCard and Visa to cut us off. Now we can’t process donations from any major credit card companies.”
Horowitz, himself, published a message about the action at Breitbart News:
It’s cynical, calculated and supported by the Democratic Party. The reason Mastercard and Visa gave us for cutting us off and thus sabotaging our online fund-raising operation is that the SPLC told them that we were a hate group.
It is wrong to focus on the Tech heads as the culprits because as businessmen they have a vested interest in keeping their platforms politically neutral. They have been threatened by Senator Mark Warner and other Democrats if they don’t censor conservatives. The fact that Mastercard and Visa are now part of this juggernaut indicates how dangerous this has become.
The SPLC started as a civil rights organization with positive intentions, fighting racists such as the Ku Klux Klan. However, in recent years it has veered to the far left, unjustly leveling accusations of racism and hate against right-wing voices. They branded as “bigoted” many groups and individuals whose only crime lies in their refusal to embrace the SPLC’s left-wing agenda, including Tea Partiers, The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Christian organizations that don’t believe in same-sex marriage or abortions.
The SPLC spent most of the 2016 presidential election cycle attacking future President Trump as racist. The group even declared the phrase drain the swamp as racist.
It branded Maajid Nawaz, a former Muslim extremist who now spends his time trying to prevent the spread of radical Islam in the West, an “Islamophobe.” In 2015 the SPLC put Dr. Ben Carson on its extremist watch list because he opposed same-sex marriage.
I wish I could tell you that the crusade against conservatives was limited just to the cases noted so far. But the sad reality is that the Left is using every underhanded tactic it can muster to shut down the free speech rights of conservative voices large and small. And liberals won’t stop until the only sound they hear is their own echo.
Cross posted at The Lid
