Imagine applying for a business loan and finding out that your conservative political views, or the Christian charities you’ve supported, are being used against you.
What the hell does any of that have to do with your ability to pay back a loan?
Well, apparently, that’s the kind of thing that was happening inside some of America’s biggest banks. And guess whose fingerprints keep turning up in the paperwork?
Yep, the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center.
The same left-wing activist organization that has spent years handing out its infamous “hate group” labels to organizations like Revolver and anybody it considers “dangerous” or extreme.
The SPLC has built quite a reputation for deciding who belongs on its naughty list. And many conservatives have been screaming from the rooftops that their definition of “hate” is so politically loaded that if you just disagree with the left, you can end up on the list.
Thanks to a new bombshell article, we’re getting a much clearer picture of just how damaging those SPLC labels can be.
A new federal banking report has uncovered some rather disturbing examples of major banks using that SPLC list when deciding whether to provide services to conservative businesses and religious organizations.
Thanks to the SPLC and their fake “naughty or nice” list, American people were dealing with real-life financial consequences because they made bank employees uncomfortable.
And what’s really sinister is how the SPLC would wave off concerns about Christians being debanked and call it a conspiracy theory.
We always knew it was real, and now the federal government does as well. They went digging through bank records, and what they found makes the SPLC’s dismissal look awfully sketchy.
The bombshell findings come from an October 14 report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency who oversees national banks.
The review was conducted under President Trump’s executive order examining whether banks were denying services to Americans because of their political or religious beliefs.
Federal regulators examined thousands of bank documents, internal policies, and individual decisions.
And as we already knew, yes, Christian, and political debanking was real.
According to an Oct. 14 report from the Office of the Comptroller of Currency, a federal bureau within the U.S. Treasury Department that regulates the nation’s banks, the SPLC’s bigot-flagging operations were politically influencing debanking decisions at major financial institutions across the country, including PNC Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and TD Bank.
The 47-page report said the SPLC played a key role in the debanking of, as well as the denial of financial services to, conservative clients wanting to support Christian groups or individuals financially.
But just last year, the SPLC published a “Hatewatch” memo claiming that institutional debanking of the religious Right was an imaginary threat existing only in the minds of Christian supremacists called “dominionists,” those who believe that Christians are “called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society” by taking control of all institutions.
Well, imagine that…
The SPLC was busy calling all of this some wild conspiracy theory, while actual bank employees were citing their list in decisions affecting American customers.
That’s frightening.
But think about the power involved here. The SPLC doesn’t regulate banks. It doesn’t write banking laws or decide who qualifies for a loan… it’s some two-bit left-wing activist organization with a radical political agenda.
But this is the place national banks would turn to for opinions about which groups and people are supposedly hateful.
One very explosive example involves PNC Bank, where internal discussions show exactly how this kind of thinking played out.
In late 2021, PNC was considering a line of credit for a media company whose owners held conservative political views.
According to the Examiner’s reporting, bank employees specifically referenced the SPLC’s “hate group” classifications when discussing whether to proceed.
WE:
Treasury Department oversight officials say they discovered that PNC Bank declined to issue a line of credit to a media company in late 2021 due to “reputation[al] risk” concerns about its conservative owners.
The situation was brought before the bank’s environmental and social governance group, and employees at the bank allegedly noted that one owner’s foundation “has funded several Christian conservative groups, including several identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
“I’m in the camp of a hard no,” one PNC Bank employee stated, according to an email excerpt included in the Treasury report. “I think it becomes really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC’s beliefs/values.”
Since when is a bank supposed to decide whether your political opinions align with its corporate values before doing business with you? This is anti-American, North Korea-style nonsense.
The people running this company weren’t applying for membership in PNC’s political club. They were applying for a line of credit, for crying out loud.
What makes this really disturbing is how easily some half-baked activist group’s political judgment can get dressed up as this very professional and legitimate business concern.
And it gets worse…
The PNC case involved access to credit. But the investigation also uncovered shenanigans involving the payment systems that allow businesses and nonprofit organizations to collect money in the first place.
One case involving JPMorgan Chase’s former payment subsidiary, WePay, is a real humdinger.
WePay provided payment-processing services to businesses and organizations, including nonprofits that depended on electronic donations. In 2021, the company closed an account belonging to a conservative religious nonprofit.
Its internal records described the customer in political and religious terms, and the SPLC’s designation of the organization was (of course) part of the discussion.
Then something interesting happened a couple of years later…
WE:
In another alleged incident from June 2021, WePay closed the account of a customer characterized in the company’s internal screening system as a “right-wing religious conservative nonprofit with strong anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.”
Internal discussions about the customer allegedly mentioned the SPLC’s categorization of the organization as an “extremist hate group.”
JPMorgan Chase reputational risk officers accordingly advised WePay that “from a reputation risk perspective, we would recommend an exit from this account.” Two years later, a reputational risk officer at the bank allegedly removed all references in the internal tracking system that labeled the nonprofit organization “right-wing” and “religious.”
Instead, the employee described the organization as “a conservative education and research organization” whose mission is “promoting, protecting, and strengthening traditional family values, which include [being] pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-family.”
The same organization that was originally described in the bank’s records as a right-wing religious problem was later described in much more normal terms.
A conservative education and research organization promoting traditional family values.
Think about how differently those two descriptions sound.
One practically screams controversy, while the other describes positions held by countless Americans.
That’s why the SPLC’s influence over these kinds of decisions is downright unfair and disastrous.
And the federal review found a bigger pattern of sketchy “reputational-risk” policies being used to evaluate customers based on their political, social, or religious beliefs.
Meanwhile, the SPLC spent its time running around dismissing Christian debanking concerns as a conspiracy theory, and we can clearly see their mitts all over countless cases.
Let’s be clear, the SPLC doesn’t have the authority to close anybody’s bank account. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know who sent banks the SPLC list to begin with? How did all of that shake down?
Because when major banks are willing to treat their personal political feelings as financial red flags, they shouldn’t be in the business of loaning anybody anything.
