Privatizing Tyranny

Of late the left has come up with new and improved ways of getting their agenda enacted, this time without having to bother with a troublesome legislature. The very latest is anti-gun Gov. Cuomo's effort to cripple the NRA by threatening any bank or insurance company that does business with them with delisting or at least crippling in the large New York market. Here he gets around any prohibitions against interfering with interstate commerce by simply threatening a long and expensive deluge of red tape. In the end I suspect he would lose, but getting from here to there would take six to 10 years and cost a fortune.

Shopify has announced that it will no longer support sales of anything gun related, and defines this using the boilerplate Bloomberg definitions pushed by the most restrictive states.

Twitter and Facebook are busily suppressing all the conservative messages they can find conveniently just before the elections so that any legal efforts to make them honor the first amendment probably won't get a hearing before the 2020 elections. Their argument is that as private businesses they can do as they please, which reminds me of the signs I used to see in businesses in the '50s stating "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." which was weasel-speak for "We don't serve blacks here."

My bullet and reloading stuff supplier, Rocky Mountain Reloading, was recently hit with a notice that their brass and lead component business was outside the realm of what their financial services supplier wanted to serve and that they had zero time to go somewhere else. This involved ginning up a new website as well.

You may be asking yourself why we would be switching to a new website when we just barely launched the one we had back in December. Well, we are free to finally make this announcement. We were one of the gun related companies that was targeted for destruction through elimination of our credit card processor. Luckily we had the foresight, knowing that it could become an issue, to put it in writing that they would not ever drop us because of our involvement in the firearm industry. Even so, we were issued a termination letter with threats to hold our deposits for up to six months. At the time we had over $40k in deposits for them to hold. We wouldn't have been able to pay our bills and we have been in a very bad position. Anyway, we contacted a lawyer and informed them that we were doing so and we were able to get them to allow us a window for finding a new credit card processor. That in-and-of-itself would be no big deal but the current website provider only had Paypal and our processor as payment options. Neither of which would allow bullet or casing sales. Again all this because the financial wonks have caved to the leftists and can use the "we're a private business and can refuse service to anyone." argument. If you reload, check them out. Good product, good prices. My own bank, Bank of the West has been overtaken by the PC movement as well. When I first started there it was a local operation and very friendly. They're still friendly enough but they've changed hands several times and the current parent company doesn't want to have anything to do with the tobacco, energy, or firearms businesses. The energy industry supplies a lot of jobs here in Colorado and I like it when people have jobs. They tend to vote Republican in order to help them keep more of their hard earned money. I'll be reluctantly be looking for a new bank then. So we see, more and more, the infringements on our rights are coming less directly from the government, which wouldn't be allowed to do that anyway, and more from private industry which depends on licenses and approvals from governments to exist. Tyranny by proxy, neatly privatized and all legal. Expect a lot more of this if no one figures out how to stop it. By way of stopping it, I'm told that if Twitter and Facebook were to be declared to be "common carriers" they would have to accept anyone and anything at all. Shades of the good old days. This would require legislation however, and requiring those two to allow free speech would open any politician supporting such an idea to charges of supporting Nazis and pedos from people who like having their opposition silenced.