| Ah yes, the eternal horseshoe of censorship, where both ends of the political spectrum discover they're passionate defenders of "the children" and "democracy" whenever it's convenient for controlling what others can see and say. The same payment processor chokepoints and platform pressure tactics you're describing have been gleefully wielded by progressive activists to deplatform "dangerous misinformation," "hate speech," and "extremist content." Remember when everyone cheered Mastercard and Visa cutting off WikiLeaks? Or Cloudflare and Kiwifarm? Or celebrated when payment processors started dropping anyone deemed "problematic"? The infrastructure for financial censorship didn't materialize overnight when Christian groups discovered it existed. The left pioneered the modern "advertiser pressure" playbook - organizing campaigns to get platforms to ban everything from "Russian disinformation" to "COVID misinformation" to whatever qualified as this week's "stochastic terrorism." The same NGO-to-government pipeline exists there too: activist groups coordinate with sympathetic staffers, push model legislation, and pressure companies through ESG scores and brand safety concerns. Both sides have their "think of the children" trump cards. One side waves "grooming" and "pornography," the other waves "radicalization" and "harmful content." Both genuinely believe they're saving society from moral decay, they just disagree violently on what that decay looks like. The real tragedy is that both camps are so busy fighting their culture war that they've handed unprecedented censorship power to payment processors and tech platforms who answer to no one. Congratulations to both teams - you've successfully created the infrastructure for whoever wins to impose their vision of morality on everyone else. |