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If you thought the LGBTQ rainbow squad would show mercy on people who are part of the rainbow group but disagree with the trans ideology then you are sadly mistaken.

By 2024, this will be a mainstream position of the Left:

META ACTUALLY HAD A POLICY ALLOWING THIS: Zuckerberg U-Turns on Facebook People Smuggling Posts Following Scrutiny.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is ending a policy that allowed illegal immigrants to use the platform to seek people smugglers to ferry them across the U.S. border, admitting that much of the activity is tantamount to “human exploitation” and “overlaps” with human trafficking.

You don’t say.

FALLOUT: China bans export of its Loongson CPUs to Russia.

China is the subject of many semiconductor export restrictions, but it seems the Asian nation is also banning the export of its own Loongson CPUs to Russia and elsewhere. It’s likely to be a significant blow to Russia, which has been looking for an alternative to AMD and Intel processors since the companies stopped shipments to the country following its invasion of Ukraine.

Kommersant business daily (via Tom’s Hardware), citing sources close to Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development and in the electronics market, writes that the Chinese government has banned the supply of Loongson processors based on its own LoongArch architecture to the Russian Federation and other countries.

The reasons for banning the chip exports to Russia aren’t the same as other countries; it’s because they are used in China’s military-industrial complex.

I guess China doesn’t have the fab capacity to spare.

Related: ARM won’t sell its latest chip designs in China due to US and UK export controls.

JOE BIDEN’S NEGOTIATING PARTNERS: Iranian footballer sentenced to execution for ‘campaigning for women’s rights.’

Amir Nasr-Azadani, who once played for the national under-16s team, was arrested in September for allegedly taking part in an “armed riot” in Isfahan in which three members of the security forces were killed.

The 26-year-old defender with Iranjavan Bushehr FC was charged with “rebellion, membership in illegal gangs, collusion to undermine security and therefore assisting in moharabeh”.

The charge of moharabeh, meaning “waging war against God”, carries the death penalty in Iran.

The Mahsa Amini protests have been going strong for three months now, and show little sign of slowing down despite Tehran’s increasingly harsh measures.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The first private lander is headed to the moon: A SpaceX rocket carried the Tokyo company’s moon-bound lander off Earth.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: ThinkOrbital designing platform for in-space manufacturing, debris removal.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE OUT THERE, AT THE VERY OUTER LIMITS OF POE’S LAW:  they seriously think the take away is to advise the unvaxd to drive more carefully.

And some excerpts to get the full insanity as comments on that thread take the study apart:

This is all nonsense. They don’t even understand the implications of their research. The implications of their research that are most interesting is that most vaccine effectiveness population studies are horse shit

AND this one had me giggling so hard the cats are scared:

This isn’t science. It’s clown world.

THE AUTOCRAT IN YOUR IPHONE: How Mercenary Spyware Threatens Democracy.

In fact, the incident is only one of dozens of cases in which Pegasus or other similar spyware technology has been found on the digital devices of prominent political opposition figures, journalists, and human rights activists in many countries. Providing the ability to clandestinely infiltrate even the most up-to-date smartphones—the latest “zero click” version of the spyware can penetrate a device without any action by the user—Pegasus has become the digital surveillance tool of choice for repressive regimes around the world. It has been used against government critics in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and pro-democracy protesters in Thailand. It has been deployed by Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia and Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

If it’s not in use in the United States, it’s only because the U.S. government has its own version deployed. It’s been clear for a long time that they have no compunctions about spying on citizens.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: DOJ Official Admits Targeting Pro-Lifers Is Response to Overturn of Roe. “At least 98 Catholic churches and 77 pregnancy resource centers and other pro-life organizations have been attacked since May, but the DOJ has apparently not charged a single person in connection with these attacks. Meanwhile, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has charged 26 pro-life individuals with FACE Act violations this year.”

The law — and the DOJ — only protects people the Administration likes. That’s been made quite clear.

23-year-old Majidreza Rahnavard was accused of waging "war against Allah and His Apostle."

THIS COULD GET INTERESTING:

The arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday was sudden and unexpected in light of Bankman-Fried’s plan to testify before Congress. As a criminal defense attorney, my reaction to the arrest last night remains unchanged: this is the first time that I can recall where prosecutors moved aggressively to stop a defendant from making self-incriminating statements. His testimony would have been entirely admissible and likely devastating at trial.

I previously wrote how Bankman-Fried was doing harm to his case by speaking in the media and to Congress. So why would the Justice Department move to stop the self-inflicted damage? You have a major target who was about to voluntarily testify for hours.

That is ordinarily a dream for prosecutors, but the Justice Department moved quickly to prevent that from happening. At that stage, Bankman-Fried was not charged or in custody. He was not protected by Miranda or other constitutional rules from self-incriminating statements.

Indeed, some of us had already warned that he was causing himself considerable damage in making such statements. This was a defendant with a large legal team facing possible criminal charges who seemed eager to speak about his actions and motivations. Most prosecutors would sit back, make popcorn, and watch this unfold.

The curious move led many to question whether the Biden Administration was eager to prevent questions on Bankman-Fried’s political contributions and associations. He was the second highest donor to Democratic causes in the last election cycle.  His mother, a law professor at Stanford also heads a major Democratic campaign fund.

It is also possible that the Justice Department simply wanted to show the public that it was moving aggressively despite his close Democratic ties. It may have secured sufficient evidence (including possible cooperating witnesses) to satisfy the basis for charges and an extradition request. Moreover, the charges are likely to make some Democratic figures uncomfortable as this matter enters the criminal process.

Yet, that still does not explain why the Justice Department would not want to hear a full account from Bankman-Fried before effectively shutting him down as a criminal defendant. This is the first time that I can recall where the prosecutors, rather than defense counsel, moved effectively to muzzle a defendant.

Whatever the motivation, the timing of the charges effectively stopped the windfall of information coming from Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried is accused of diverting customer funds from the start of his cryptocurrency exchange to support his hedge fund, Alameda Research. He is also accused of using his fraudulent practices to fund a lavish lifestyle, buy real estate, make venture investments, and fund Democratic causes. The range of charges includes wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering.

Notably, the eight counts include violating campaign finance laws, a charge that could prove embarrassing for some powerful political interests.

The charges are on top of charges announced earlier Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged Bankman-Fried defrauded investors and used proceeds from investors to buy real estate on behalf of himself and family.

The details of those transactions might have been voluntarily disclosed under intense cross examination if the Administration allowed him to appear as a witness. Moreover, Bankman-Fried was already causing himself considerable harm in media interviews.

Bankman-Fried’s parents have left Stanford and are reportedly in the Bahamas with their son. They could themselves face questions. His father, Joseph Bankman, is a tax professor and was a paid employee of his son’s company. His mother reportedly worked with him on some of these massive donations to Democrats.

The parents are reportedly now concerned that the legal costs in the case could “wipe them out.”

Bankman-Fried has admitted that only a few hours of efforts a day might have avoided these losses. It sounds like a “my bad” defense. That will not fly in court and building on that defense might have sealed his fate.

The question is why the Justice Department moved to stop Bankman-Fried as he worked so hard to make the criminal case against himself. He comes across badly in these past interviews like a trophy-laden millennial who believes that he just needs to play to win. It is not quite that easy in a criminal case.

If he testified, Bankman-Fried could not only have made any criminal defense more difficult but he could have potentially tripped the wire for allegedly false or misleading statements under oath. It was a target-rich environment for Congress — and a potential bonanza for prosecutors.

Bankman-Fried was in a dangerous free fall. Despite his legal team, Bankman-Fried seemed to be praying for someone to “stop me before I speak again.”  Someone just did.

The Biden Administration’s move seemed to bring a more positive meaning to Ronald Reagan’s “top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language”: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

#JOURNALISM: Cuban dictatorship arrests refugees trying to escape on a raft, Reuters reports they were ‘rescued.’ “Of course, and as expected, neither the AP nor Reuters made a single mention of a similar but much more deadly incident that took place in Bahia Honda in October. Less than two months ago, the Cuban Coast Guard rammed a boat filled with Cuban refugees escaping the island in Bahia Honda, sinking the vessel and killing 7 refugees, including a 2-year-old toddler. That incident has come to known as the Bahia Honda Massacre. But reporters for both the AP and Reuters know that if they mention this in their reporting, their press credentials will be removed, and they’ll get kicked off the island.”

Have you heard about the little plan to curtail automobile traffic in Oxford (UK)? In sum, motorists will be able to travel freely in a designated area closest to their home, but should they get itchy feet and would like to drive to an area yea-over, they need to apply for a special certificate.

A motorist is allowed to have 100 days a year where he or she can transcend the borders of their little neighborhood, but there will be paperwork. If one chooses to travel 101 days outside of one’s zone, there will be fines. Municipal cameras will kindly keep an eye on license plates to ensure compliance.

Now, the astute reader will notice the similarities this scheme has to a strategy put forth by the WEF: to end private car ownership completely. The reasoning is thus: climate change is poised to foment such dire consequences, drastic action must be taken.

Evidently it is much easier to monitor the comings and goings of common folk than to inquire into the costs of the privileges and benefits of the self-appointed ruling class has on the planet.

The plan in Oxford is likely to work. Oxford is a community with a large, transient student population. While students might have personal cars, in the day-to-day many likely find it easier to walk or bike or to take a bus rather than to deal with the hassle of finding parking (let alone affordable parking) at their destination. It is very likely that the student’s car, even if kept at home, is charged by some entity for parking.

Again, as a significant proportion of the population are students, it is unlikely that they will using their cars regularly to take them beyond the confines of the hamster wheel of their daily life, and certainly not for 100 days a year. In short, students will not be affected very much by the reduced-driving plan. After all, they are supposed to be going to classes and studying and preparing for their future.

Outside of London, even with the fabled British Rail criss-crossing the countryside, the preferred method of commute is by car. Unsurprisingly, there is resistance from the middle-class—the people who have to get up in the morning, get in a car, and drive to a place of employment that is likely not two skips down the street.

Keeping down the complaints might prove to be a little more difficult for the authorities, but as Mr. Trudeau has showed with the truck drivers, it can be done. It may be a little messy and painful, and a law may be broken here and there, but it can be done.

In theory, the idea of a car-free, nearly medieval city-center is very appealing. Who does not like the idea of sauntering down the cobbled streets and stopping to enjoy a coffee or another libation at an outdoor table, and not to have one’s view blotted by a line of parked cars, or by a line of cars creeping along?

Yes, this is a dream, but having cars is a reality. In Pontevedra, Spain, cars have been successfully taken out of the city center. Part of the plan was to provide underground parking for cars on the periphery of the city. But none of this has the “stick” provision of the UK plan. The mayor and city leaders strove to build a community where everyone valued the very pleasant outcome.

To keep people in “zones”—now, on a slightly voluntarily basis, but in the future, perhaps not so voluntarily—is akin to keeping them in prison. While the bars may not be visible, they exist. Controlling city traffic is a problem that can be tackled, but it can be done without punishing the citizens who choose to live and pay taxes in a specific area.

But if the problem is not city traffic, but if it is something as dubious as climate change, perhaps we all should be shunted back into caves—the sooner the better.

Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.

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One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”

There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy. 

They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”

Then, toward the bottom: “If you have funds in your PayPal balance, we’ll hold it for up to 180 days. After that period, we’ll email you with information on how to access your funds.”

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents—simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)

These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists—the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services,” was meant to empower. 

PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The people who founded PayPal—the so-called PayPal Mafia—include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.

“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.”

When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users. 

“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion. 

But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. 

One of the people who apparently posed an unacceptable threat was Eric Finman.

On July 18, 2021, Finman, 24, a Bitcoin investor and entrepreneur, woke up to learn that PayPal had declared war on the startup he’d launched four days before.

The idea of Finman’s startup, Freedom Phone—basically a rejiggered Android with an American flag on it—was to give individuals access to whatever app they wanted. 

Apple’s App Store frequently bans apps—like Metadata+, which notifies users every time the United States conducts a drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. By contrast, Freedom Phone’s app store lets anyone download anything. That includes Parler, the far-right social-media platform the App Store temporarily suspended, and Twitter, which the App Store recently threatened to kick out.

Apparently, that didn’t sit right with PayPal, which banned Freedom Phone permanently from the app. (This came days after Shopify and Amazon Pay did the same.) “I just felt my stomach completely and utterly *drop*,” Finman messaged me.

To add insult to injury, PayPal held up $1.2 million in payments to Finman’s company. Eventually, Finman got his money, but the delay, he said, “killed all the momentum.”

Or consider Colin Wright. 

The evolutionary biologist received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Barbara in 2018 and writes critically about gender ideology. 

In June, he was kicked off PayPal—and, soon after, Etsy, where he sold t-shirts and mugs promoting his newsletter. PayPal told Wright that, if he wanted to know why he’d been ejected, “an attorney or law enforcement officer must submit a legal subpoena.”

“A lot of activists have tried to cancel me, and that’s just because I talk a lot about the sex and gender debate,” Wright told me. Since these activists, Wright said, ”don’t really have a good response, they just try to make it so that everyone who has good arguments isn’t able to make a living by talking about it.” 

Then there’s British journalist Toby Young.

Young is the founder of the Free Speech Union, an advocacy group, and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Skeptic, which has questioned the efficacy of Covid vaccines. 

On September 15, 2022, PayPal informed Young that his personal account had been suspended. A few minutes later, he learned the Daily Skeptic’s account had also been shut down. A few minutes after that, he learned the Free Speech Union’s account was defunct. 

In under a half-hour, he’d been cut off from the financial-services world. 

“I was appalled when I discovered PayPal had suspended my accounts,” Young told me. “The authoritarian, social-credit system developed in China was now being implemented in the West, except instead of ideological compliance being enforced by the Chinese Communist Party, it was being policed by a woke capitalist corporation.” 

Other recently suspended PayPal accounts include Gays Against Groomers, which opposes “the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization” of children; and UsForThem, and Law or Fiction—both U.K.-based groups that opposed the British government’s response to Covid, including school closures and mandatory masking. PayPal has also suspended the accounts of the anti-establishment site ConsortiumNews, which has criticized U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war; and several alt-right and Stop the Steal activists. 

Nor do you just bounce back from being shut out. Wright said it takes years to build a core audience—the people who click on the recurring-payment box on your PayPal account. “When PayPal cancels that, it’s not like I can just bring those 200 people to another payment processor,” he messaged me. “Those are cut off permanently. Maybe I can send them all an email and ask people to sign up elsewhere, but there’s gonna be a major, major major drop off because people have to whip out their credit cards again on a whole new system.”

Nobody outside PayPal really knows how this process works. There is no clear cause and effect. The likeliest scenario involves a user posting something deemed problematic on a social-media platform, and an activist or PayPal employee flagging this, and then, without warning, PayPal shutting down the account.

When I asked a PayPal spokesperson about the company’s suspension policy, she emailed me: “PayPal has and will continue to enable free speech and expression, while appropriately protecting our customers and platform from fraud, counterfeiting and other illicit activities.”

To make sure none of the haters fall through the cracks, PayPal has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center—which has labeled as “extreme” the Family Research Council, a conservative activist group; Charles Murray, a political scientist best known for co-authoring the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born critic of Islam and supporter of women’s rights, among many others.

The collaboration features a research initiative that examines how extremists in the United States use financial platforms to fund their activities; the results are to be disseminated throughout the financial-services industry and shared with policymakers and law enforcement. 

Civil-liberties groups decry the lack of transparency. “This lack of due process has a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, including people of color and religious minorities,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation letter, addressed to PayPal CEO Dan Schulman and other PayPal executives, stated.

Making matters worse is PayPal’s recently updated Acceptable Use Policy—which clears the way for even more suspensions, bans and fines. The policy, released in October, prohibits all “objectionable” activity, warning that violators face a $2,500 penalty. As with PayPal and the ADL’s war on “hate,” there’s very little clarity. Anyone whose politics, language or tone offends the powers that be could be labeled “objectionable.”

David Marcus, a former PayPal president, tweeted that the new policy “goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity.” Elon Musk replied, “Agreed.” 

Finally, there’s Dan Schulman—poster child for stakeholder capitalism, who has been CEO since 2014. In January of this year, Schulman, while speaking at the World Economic Forum, was fuzzy when it came to defining the boundaries of free expression. “The difficult part there is identifying what is hatred and what is freedom of speech,” Schulman said. “Nobody teaches you that.”

Schulman, as one Silicon Valley insider put it, was a member of the “professional management class”—impeccable credentials (Middlebury, Harvard MBA), years of experience in publicly traded companies (American Express, Sprint, AT&T), and tons of accolades (the New York Urban League’s Frederick Douglass Award, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ Ripple of Hope Award, the Fortune list of World’s Greatest Leaders and Fast Company’s Top 100 Creative People, among others).

“The CEO has got like every woke award you can win,” David Sacks, the company’s first chief operating officer, told me, referring to Schulman. “It’s a symbiotic relationship—he implements their agenda, and, in exchange, they give him awards, and that furthers advancement up the corporate totem pole of woke capitalism.”

The question was: How had this happened?

How had PayPal—birthed in the fertile crescent of innovation, the old Silicon Valley of web 1.0—become . . . this? How had this company, which had been all about liberating the individual, become a pillar of our emerging social-credit system?

Eric Jackson, who was interim vice president of U.S. marketing in the early days, said: "PayPal's founding vision was to empower people and give them more control and freedom. The company today is so far afield from that founding vision. It's clear that it views its role as moderating what people can think, say and do. It is completely at odds with the vision that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin created for the company. As a part of the old PayPal team, it makes me really sad. Because we were trying to build something that enhanced freedom and protected people. Now, we're seeing people act in a diametrically opposed manner to that."

Jimmy Soni, the author of The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, emailed me that yes, PayPal’s vision was “informed by libertarianism,” but in the early 2000’s, amidst the collapse of the dot-com bubble, “the goal was simply to keep it alive, especially as so many other start-ups were going under in ‘00 and ‘01.”

The first inflection point, the old guard agreed, was September 11, 2001 and the federal government’s response to the terrorist attacks—including adoption of the Patriot Act. 

Among other things, the Patriot Act imposed tight controls on money flowing in and out of the United States. “It would obviously make sense to ensure that Osama bin Laden shouldn't be allowed to open a PayPal account,” Jackson said. 

Then came Ebay’s acquisition of PayPal, in 2002, for $1.5 billion. 

On the day of the acquisition, July 8, PayPal announced it would stop processing payments for sports-betting sites. The company also chose not to retain any of the founders. The message was clear: We’re breaking from the past. We’re going to be a different company moving forward.

The next flashpoint came in December 2010: WikiLeaks. 

After being pressured by U.S. officials, PayPal suspended the account of the activist group that released millions of classified documents—with information about, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, CIA surveillance, and the Democratic National Committee. Thom Bradford, a former engineer at PayPal’s Berlin office, said: “I was naive enough when I worked there to believe that the Wikileaks thing was just a bizarre, isolated incident that they did because they were being pressured by the government, and they didn't want to be subjected to heavy-handed regulation. But now it seems as though they take pleasure in it.” 

But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020—the summer of Covid lockdowns, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the burning cities, the presidential election—that the contours of the new controlling authority came into focus. 

It was not a conspiracy. Democratic officials were not colluding with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and owners of legacy newspapers and cable networks and studio chiefs and university presidents. It’s that, in a matter of a few months, maybe a year, they had all embraced the same leftwing identitarianism, the same slogans, the same hashtags and pronouns, the same statistics, the same talking points, and they reinforced each other, and they made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to challenge the new orthodoxy. 

The social-credit system, which was not a formal system or network but a loosely fitted together constellation of influential brands and organizations and institutions, punished those who did not hew to the unofficial party line and rewarded those who clapped the loudest. It bore a familial resemblance to the much more established social-credit system in China, which was an extension of the country’s financial credit system and was meant to assess businesses’ and individuals’ “trustworthiness,” which sounded reasonable when you were talking about facts versus misinformation, but less so when it came to opinions—politics. 

Referring to the Chinese Communist Party, Kara Frederick, who previously led Facebook’s Global Counterterrorism Analysis Program, said: “I started noticing discomfiting similarities in what the consolidated centralized power of the CCP was visiting on its internal population, and what this combination and symbiosis of corporate power in the form of big tech and the federal government is, frankly, seeking to turn on specific American citizens.”

Frederick recalled, for example, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., applauding the new PayPal-ADL partnership. Or Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s then-press secretary, announcing, on July 15, 2021, that the White House had identified “problematic” Facebook posts that spread “misinformation” and that it expected the social-media site to take down.

If you protested the status quo—if you were a trucker in Ottawa in early 2022 angry about the country’s vaccine mandates, if you were against defunding the police, if you were against critical race theory seeping into your six-year-old’s classroom, if you questioned the wisdom of exposing children to drag shows, if you believed in everyone’s right to argue openly about all of the above—you were, oddly enough, in a suspect class. You were, increasingly, at risk of being deplatformed, debanked.

"What happens is these companies create the machinery of account deplatforming, suspensions, moderation, and it starts being used for legitimate reasons, but then what happens is it gets hijacked for political reasons," David Sacks told me.

This was certainly Eric Finman’s experience. 

He got that Freedom Phone’s brand didn’t jibe with the new corporate consensus. Its laissez-faire approach, its embrace of “freedom”—that was out of step with the canceling ethic, the pro-equity-pro-lockdown-pro-Ukraine politics. But still. He called himself a “moderate Democrat.” He was against telling people what they could say or read or download. “If you ban the Chapo Trap House people on the left, they end up moving into their own group chats,” he said. “If you ban the Q people on the right, they end up moving into their group chats. Both go unchallenged. We need to be able to talk to each other and go up against each other.”

Matt Kibbe, the president of Free the People, which produces documentaries and podcasts that promote libertarianism, added: “The way these social-credit systems work, they don’t happen overnight—they happen drip by drip.” 

The revolt against the machine has started, but it’s mostly a bottom-up, grass-roots affair.

After he was shut down, Toby Young, in London, called PayPal’s Customer Support to appeal his suspension. When his appeal was denied, he wrote a letter to British officials calling on them to adopt legislation preventing banks and payment platforms from discriminating against users with opinions they disapprove of. The letter attracted the support of 42 members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. 

“Why is it that these large corporations based overseas think they can effectively intervene in public debates in the United Kingdom?” Young said.

Shortly after the letter was released, all three of Young’s PayPal accounts were restored.

But the real revolt, if there is to be one, is likelier to come from within the technocracy—the people with the money and power to force a major overhaul of a system that seems designed to keep the great undulating mass of users distracted and divided.

A few days ago, I emailed Elon Musk.

“Are you worried that a company you helped found—PayPal—is now part of an emerging private social credit system?” I wrote. “And is buying Twitter, in part, an effort to fulfill the mission that PayPal seems to have abandoned?” 

It seemed unlikely that he’d reply. He was busy reimagining his new social-media company, shooting rockets into space, upending the electric-vehicle industry, trolling AOC. 

But one hour later, at 6:55 p.m., eastern time, an email popped up in my inbox. From the new owner of Twitter.

It was just one word:

“Definitely!”

Rupa Subramanya’s last piece for us was about Canada’s assisted-suicide program. Read it here. And support our reporting by becoming a subscriber today:

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DEVELOPING: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas after U.S. files criminal charges.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.

Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that the federal government anticipated moving to “unseal the indictment in the morning.”

Bahamas Attorney General Ryan Pinder said that the United States had filed unspecified criminal charges against Bankman-Fried and was “likely to request his extradition.”

In a statement, Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”

“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere,” continued the statement.

Related: Alameda’s Caroline Ellison Spotted In NY Amid Speculation She Is About To Roll On SBF After Hiring Iconic Clinton Lawyer.

Subsequent reports have only reinforced this rumor, and the latest is that Ellison is being represented by DC law firm, WilmerHale…

… best known for its Government Affairs Department Chair, Jamie Gorelick, who was the former No. 2 ranking member in the Clinton Justice Department, and in a recent interview, she referred to Garland as her “wingman.”

If indeed Ellison is working the Feds while currying favor with SBF’s former closest friends, the days of Bankman-Fried — who may or may not soon commit Epsteincide — outside of a prison cell are numbered.

On the other hand though, Jamie Gorelick? What could go wrong?

BRENNAN IS WORSE THAN A DISGRACE:

In a functioning republic he’d be in jail, except that in a functioning republic, he’d never have held the jobs he’s held.

And I’m getting very tired of the “have you no decency?” routine coming from people who have made very clear that they possess no decency whatsoever.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China will launch 2-in-1 asteroid deflection mission in 2025. “China is now looking to launch its first planetary defense test mission a year earlier than planned and on a larger rocket.”

I’m very much in favor of this capability, but it’s worth noting that when you develop the ability to intercept and impact an asteroid, you’ve developed the ability to intercept and impact a lot of other things.

THE LAST 747 EVER BUILT HAS ROLLED OFF BOEING’S PRODUCTION LINE.

THOSE WHO DEFY EMPEROR JOE THE 1ST MUST PAY:  Coast Guardsmen near retirement deprived of benefits over religious vax objections.

I CREDIT PREHISTORIC SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES: Oldest DNA shows Greenland once was home to forested ecosystem. “The sequences were obtained from frozen soil and indicate that the region, was once home to mastodons and reindeer. The area is now barren and home to hare, musk ox and few plants. . . . Greenland was much warmer then, but the researchers did not expect the DNA sequences to reveal forests of poplar, spruce and yew trees such as those now typically found at much lower latitudes, alongside sedges, shrubs and birch-tree species that still grow in Greenland, according to Nature.”

Vanguard indicated its decision rested in a desire to maintain the freedom not to restrict its investment options.

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Many doctors, perhaps tiring of the old ways of medicine with its frustrating disappointments and frequent heartbreaks, are moving into an exciting new and growing field. Killing their patients. On purpose. For a fee.

I’m not sure what the going rate per scalp is. Maybe a reader in the insurance industry can help us out.

Surely it has to be indexed by the pound and age, though. Just think. Kill a kid, who can’t weigh more than thirty, forty pounds, and you can with one arm cart the corpse to the organ processing lab. Just think what you can sell a kid’s kidney for.

But slay geezer with a BMI north of 40 and it’s going to take at least three guys to get him on the gurney and wheel the meat to the morgue. You’re not going to get any kind of premium on his liver, and it may cost more than you can recover to cut him up.

So you charge less to kill the kid, and charge more to slaughter the senile. Economics 101.

Let the billing department worry about that. (What’s the ICD-10 code for Physician Kill?) I’m more curious about the numbers.

Before that, new readers may not know that in olden days I used to offer fashion advice to men. E.g. never wear clothes with writing on them, unless it’s part of an event.

I have sartorial advice for docs joining the Killer Corps. Have some sort of patch or ornament that is visible and distinguishes you from the other doctors, so that in case of emergency customers can pick you out without stress.

I’m thinking smiling skull lapel pins, maybe with crossed bones under the skulls. Or, like in the military tradition, you get a red stripe on your sleeve for every four certified kills. Might lead to a little vanity, and even unfriendly competition, but no system is perfect.

There are many hidden benefits to an insignia. Say you, a licensed Kill Corps certified board member, come upon a car accident, guy lays in the wreckage bleeding and in pain. If you had some kind of recognizable insignia, the guy can without delay see it and you can end his misery on the spot. (If you don’t have your medical kit on you, you’ll have to improvise. This is why you should always carry a knife.)

Incidentally, an ambulance driver may be able to ask the guy how much pain he’s in on the Liquidate Likert scale, but what’s that driver going to do if Bleeding Guy says “Intolerable”? Nothing, that’s what. Best he can offer is to rush him to the ambulatory abattoir. Given traffic these days, it’s going to waste a lot of valuable time.

My point is this guy could have been dead a lot sooner if ambulance drivers and EMTs are given training in emergency killing.

I’m sure more of this training would have been implemented by now were not doctors so famously jealous of their prerogatives. But think of the patients, gentlemen! And, uh, gentleladies.

As is usual, Canada is at the forefront of progress. Word is that, last year alone, doctors slit the throats, metaphorically speaking, of some 10,000 Great White Northerners.

According to that same report, doctors took credit for “over three percent of all deaths” in Canada. For purposeful killing, I mean. If we add in iatrogenic deaths that three percent rises a lot higher.

The report also says that the number of doctor deaths is up by thirty-three percent from the year before. These rates continue and doctors are going to have a better batting average than coronadoom.

And then with how Science grows year on year, we might look forward to a time when doctors are doing all of the killing. Think of it! Fine, clean, sanitary slaughters, done with scrupulous care by trained experts. You can’t ask for better than that.

This is outside of accidents and patients who are too frightened to go to hospitals, of course. It’s not entirely hopeless with accidents, either. We hear the cheering story of Rod McNeill, who fell, was brought to the hospital, and left.

But doctors were still able to find him a month later and slip him the ax.

His daughter, Erin Smith, wanted her father’s medical records, but she was denied. I’m sure we all agree that that would have violated the privacy of whoever did the killing.

Trust doctors. They are experts. They know how you should die better than you ever could.

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EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Walmart CEO warns that retail giant could HIKE prices or shut down some stores if ‘historically high’ thefts at the chain continue and prosecutors’ lax approach to dealing with criminals is not corrected.

The grand jury date was scheduled two months after Reade filed a police report against Biden.

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: South Korea spent $200 billion, but it can’t pay people enough to have a baby.

South Korea recently broke its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate. Figures released in November showed the average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is down to just 0.79.

That is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population and low even compared to other developed countries where the rate is falling, such as the United States (1.6) and Japan – which at 1.3 reported its own lowest rate on record.

And it spells trouble for a country with an aging population that faces a looming shortage of workers to support its pension system.

You can’t subsidize kids enough to make them financially worthwhile, especially when the culture points the other way.

Flashback: The Parent Trap.

Related: Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness.

Also: car seats as contraception: “Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”