March 13, 2023 at 11:59 a.m.
River News: Our View
Wisconsin needs legislation to ban use of gun codes
"White families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies ...," the president said, and then he made this curious statement: "Some people still want to do that."
Some people still want to do that. The president actually said that. We're not sure if he thinks it's 1955 instead of 2023, or if he really believes there are hooded hordes of white people still riding about and hanging black people.
Either way, it's a sad commentary on his mental condition.
Anyway, as far as we know, there are no actual lynchings of blacks or other people of color going on in the United States and there hasn't been for a long, long time. But we will give the president the broader point. There is a lynching going on in America, it's just not limited to people of color - it is the lynching of the civil rights of all Americans of every color.
The progressive left has launched a massive and systemic attack upon our constitution, dragging the rights enshrined within it out of the document in broad daylight and stringing them up on the tree limbs of their woke doctrines. The assaults are on virtually all the civic seats of power in this country. And with every institution they capture, the noose around the neck of our own civil liberties tightens.
And, as former President Trump put it at the recent annual CPAC conference, the left has so far been very successful at capturing those institutions: "We're not a free nation right now," the president said. "We don't have a free press, we don't have free anything."
His potential rival for the Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was acknowledging the same reality when he told Sean Hannity that, even though he won a landslide re-election by about 1.5 million votes last year, it wasn't enough to govern through traditional channels and on the traditional turfs of politics but was instead necessary to take the battle against wokeism onto the very turfs where it has been so triumphant - in the universities, in the public schools, and in large corporations and financial institutions.
In every area of life, our freedoms are being assaulted and dismantled, DeSantis said.
It's been like that for a very long time in our public schools and universities, but lately the draconian attacks on liberty have intensified greatly in the corporate and financial sectors of America.
Disney has become so woke and politically active in progressive causes that it prompted the state of Florida to end the company's self-governing status. Then, too, several weeks ago we wrote about the plight of George Alan Kelly, the cattle rancher accused of murdering a trespassing illegal immigrant but who has proclaimed his innocence.
No matter. The wizards of GoFundMe acted swiftly to ensure he could not raise money for his defense on its platform, and, as we pointed out, PayPal and other payment processing platforms have gone even further, working with extremist left organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center to help identify opponents of the progressive regime and defund them.
When the ruling elites take over our education system to indoctrinate our children, they threaten the future of those children. When they capture the nation's means of communication - and thus of dissent - they are snuffing out democracy's voices.
And when they use today's banks and payment processing platforms to seize bank accounts or de-fund their opponents, blocking them from access to their own money or denying them the ability to raise money or make a living, that is an existential threat to survival itself, and it heralds the arrival of totalitarianism.
As we report in today's edition, the latest move by financial institutions to gain control over every aspect of our lives involves doing more dirty work for the federal government - realizing the dream of every progressive and bureaucrat to create a federal firearm registry as a prelude to official gun confiscation.
Discover Financial Service, which issues Discover credit cards, has announced that a new code will be given to every transaction at a retail gun store, starting in April. So every time someone uses the card to make a purchase at a gun store, that person, that retail location, and the amount of the purchase will be logged into Discover's systems, which Discover could use, at any time, using criteria of its own choosing, to create a list of national security threats to turn over to the government.
So far, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express haven't implemented use of the code, but word is they will soon. Visa even said as much in a statement, though it emphasized that it was opposed to the code.
It's more sinister than that. The idea for the code - and the petition for the code submitted to the International Organization for Standardization - came from Amalgamated Bank of New York. Here's how Amalgamated Bank describes its mission:
"We're the bank for people who care what their money does in the world. When you deposit your money at Amalgamated, it supports sustainable organizations, progressive causes, and social justice. We are committed to environmental and social responsibility."
Well, that's fine and dandy, but it is now using those progressive resources to clobber and command other financial institutions to act in just the progressive way this one bank wants ... or else. And, despite their misgiving, companies like Visa, Mastercard, and American Express will toe the line because they cower at the thought of being confronted by the woke mob, which will organize protests, boycotts, and disinvestment campaigns against them if they don't.
Other banks and financial institutions are acting in similarly horrifying ways. After the January 6 Capitol riot, Bank of America, apparently on its own initiative and with no prodding from the government, data-mined its own customer base, looking for BOA credit card transactions in the greater Washington area on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Bank of America then cross-referenced that list with anyone it could identify through its past transactions as having purchased a firearm anytime and anywhere. It then turned that final list over to the FBI.
Suddenly Bank of America was not just a financial institution with vast numbers of accounts it could control and with reams of customer data it could abuse, it was a vigilante but de facto law enforcement agency. And Discover, Visa, and all the rest could do the same, compiling for the government the registry the government cannot compile on its own.
The problem with the financial industry is thus two-fold. On the one hand we have financial institutions like Bank of America and Amalgamated Bank that have already been captured by the progressive left.
They are no longer capitalist enterprises, but giant ideological robots on a social justice mission.
On the other hand, we have financial platforms and credit card companies like Visa who seem for the most part to be on the receiving end of intense pressure to cave in and do what they're told.
Which is what Discover did. It would be tantalizing to know, though - and we do not know - if the government was involved in applying that pressure, just as it was with pressuring Big Tech into censoring people.
All of this shows just how right DeSantis is, that the fight for liberty is on multiple fronts: political, cultural, educational, financial. It's going to take a door-by-door guerrilla war, entity by entity, to fight and free those institutions politically.
In part, that door-to-door fight means state-by-state, and indeed legislation to prohibit the use of the gun code has been introduced in about a dozen states.
Wisconsin needs to be another of those states, and, if no legislator is yet drafting such a bill, we call upon our local lawmakers to do so immediately.
Second, Second Amendment supporters must head to the barricades to let the financial institutions they do business with know how you feel about them surveilling innocent citizens for the government, and worse, acting as judge and jury against people they don't like. Let them know we can vote with our pocketbooks, and we are already voting.
Maybe the president was right after all. Apparently some still love a good old lynching, if by lynching he means the stringing up of our constitutional rights by a posse of corporate and bureaucratic collectivists.
Indeed, Joe Biden himself seems to be enjoying the lynching as much as anyone, as he watches his administration extirpate our rights one by one.
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