WSJ: "Dark Money"
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Shutting Down Support for the Truckers
Donors to Canada’s ‘freedom convoy’ are harassed and boycotted.
By Feb. 16, 2022 6:51 pm ET
‘Donor transparency” is a fixation of Democrats such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and others on the left who bemoan the influence of “dark money”—not their own money but others’. Canada is now offering a preview of what that transparency would mean for political speech.
After GoFundMe shut down the crowdfunding effort for Canada’s trucker protests, and before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to freeze, without court orders, bank accounts linked to the protests, supporters turned to a small website called GiveSendGo.
The Christian crowdfunding platform had received more than $8.7 million from individual donors intended for the “freedom convoy” opposing Canada’s vaccine mandates. On Sunday GiveSendGo was hacked and shut down by political opponents, who exposed the names, emails, locations and other personal information of 92,845 donors. Public harassment followed.
On Feb. 5, the owner of Ottawa’s Stella Luna Gelato Café made a $250 donation to the protest. When this became public, callers threatened to throw bricks through her store window. She ordered the shop closed. On Tuesday she recanted her support for the truckers to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
Twitter users are posting names, jobs and locations of donors—from corporate executives and civil servants to masseuses and taekwondo instructors. One account doing the “doxxing,” itself anonymous, clarifies: “If you disagree with the views of businesses listed here, do the Canadian thing: Do not patronize them, or write a sternly worded letter. That’s it.” Harassment will follow anyway, but even if not, do we need more boycotts? Liberals boycotting right-wing real-estate agents and conservatives boycotting left-wing graphic designers?
Major news outlets in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. are contacting the donors, asking them to justify their contributions. Many donors feel pressure to recant or desist from further financial expression of their views. For many journalists, that is no doubt the goal.
Americans experienced an example of this “donor transparency” some years ago with California’s Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage. Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign after his donation to supporters of the referendum came to light, and he wasn’t the only one. A film-festival president and a restaurant manager also were forced out following boycott campaigns.
The mandatory disclosure of donors to nonprofits, such as in the legislation passed in California and overturned in July by the Supreme Court, punishes unpopular causes and chills speech protected by the First Amendment. The effect is to entrench the media consensus and the heckler’s veto, which these days too often work in tandem.
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Kevin Williamson: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/trudeau-follows-the-money/#slide-1
In leaning on the sensitive pressure point of financial services, Trudeau is following the example of Democrats in the United States, who have used strategies ranging from securities investigations to insurance regulation to punish political enemies ranging from the National Rifle Association to oil companies. Using financial regulation to crush freedom of speech isn’t financial regulation — it is crushing freedom of speech by abusing the powers of a government office.
This kind of thing is not exactly new — in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt used emergency powers to seize all gold in private hands in the United States in order to fortify the Federal Reserve — but technological changes have made such schemes more insidious. Paper money can be stuffed into mattresses, and coins can be buried in coffee cans. But when money is electronic and the information architecture enabling most financial transactions is heavily regulated and easily subjected to invasive surveillance, then financial regulators enjoy powers that no FDR — or Napoleon, or Lenin — ever dreamt of possessing. The opportunities for mischief are serious and worrisome — and so are the opportunities for tyranny.
Activists who have tried to use politicized financial regulation to undermine the Second Amendment, to take one example, never seem to think about how the same tactics could be used against the First Amendment: The New York Times may enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights, but without access to banking and commerce, that constitutional right cannot be effectively acted upon, and, hence, may as well not exist as a practical matter. Try running a newspaper or a political party with no bank account.
I myself do not particularly sympathize with the aims or the tactics of the protesters in Canada. I don’t care much for unruly mobs of any persuasion. But even so, it is impossible not to see the plain fact that these protesters are being targeted not for their practical effect or their tactics but for their beliefs and for the sort of people they are, that an obvious double standard is at play, and that this is deeply illiberal. A politically neutral police effort to open the roads and protect the rights of property and travel would be one thing, but this is the opposite: far from politically neutral, and intended to narrow social life and political discourse rather than to keep them open. When the laws are enforced exclusively (or with extra vigor) against political enemies, that is not law enforcement — that is political repression.
And it is political repression even in instances in which the content of the law itself is unobjectionable — for example, there is a difference between reviewing the paperwork of tax-exempt groups and reviewing the paperwork of tax-exempt groups that you consider political enemies and hope to harm. Permitting protests you endorse and shutting down those that are critical of your government — and that is precisely what Trudeau is trying to do — is illegitimate.
In our time, we don’t burn forbidden books — Amazon just makes politically nonconformist works disappear. We don’t lock people up for having the wrong political beliefs — but we do make sure they cannot earn a living, go to school, or raise their children in peace. And we don’t have to send men with jackboots and billy clubs to break up protests — we have very polite Canadian bankers to do that for us.
It can be no surprise, then, that people are looking for digital platforms that protect their anonymity and keep their communications slightly beyond the reach of the long arm of the state. People who do not expect to be treated fairly and who have no confidence that their rights (or even their interests) will be taken into consideration are forced to improvise. And it’s even less surprising that cryptocurrencies and other escape routes from the banking system increasingly appeal to people who are neither cartel bosses nor international men of mystery. In a world in which unpopular political views can cut an individual or an organization off from the financial main stream, such innovations are necessities.
