Former First Lady Melania Trump has revealed that her Republican political affiliations led to various service providers, including a bank and an email service provider, denying her service after she left the White House.
This issue casts a light on the seemingly inexorable rise of “debanking” – a sinister form of cancel culture that cuts those who hold lawful yet unorthodox, sceptical, or critical views off from essential services and has no place in a liberal democracy.
In an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Melania was asked about “pushback from so many areas of your life that you never saw before,” and how “suddenly the powers that be wanted to cancel you”. She responded by detailing several instances of cancel culture in action, noting that “the bank suddenly informed me they will not be able to do business with me anymore,” and an “email distribution service provider just rapidly terminated my agreement”.
The former First Lady also recounted an incident involving a university that initially accepted her donations for foster students’ scholarships but later reneged upon realising her involvement. “They didn’t want to do business with me because of political affiliation, my political beliefs,” she said, before pointing out that the real victims of this decision were in fact “children from the foster community.”
It comes as people are growing increasingly concerned that digital banking will make it easier for them to be cut off from their money if ever a government — or financial services provider in thrall to the idea of “stakeholder capitalism” — decrees that their lawful political opinions, dissenting views or deeply held religious convictions constitute “hate speech” or “misinformation”.
Nor can this concern be dismissed as the paranoid fantasy of a small group of tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. As we hurtle towards a cashless economy, cases of financial censorship are starting to crop up with alarming frequency.
In February 2022, for instance, Canada froze the bank accounts of anti-vaccine mandate protestors, with Deputy Canadian PM Chrystia Freeland making clear that banks would also be asked to freeze the personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests, with no due process, no appeals process and no court order necessary. Online donations platform GoFundMe then withheld donations specifically to Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates in what came to be known as the Freedom Convoy.
Around the same time, PayPal de-platformed left-wing alternative media sites Mint Publishing and Consortium News for publishing stories that questioned the rationale for the West’s support of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.
That summer, PayPal and Etsy deplatformed the evolutionary biologist and gender critical writer Colin Wright for expressing his belief in biological reality.
PayPal also shut down the accounts of the Free Speech Union and UsforThemUK, a parents’ group that fought to keep schools open during the pandemic, due to “the nature of its activities”. On both occasions it did so without prior warning, meaningful explanation or recourse to a proper appeals process.
More recently, Ko-Fi, an online platform that allows users to sell their work and raise donations, removed a number of accounts belonging to feminists and feminist organisations due to their gender critical views.
Last year, the former head of the right-wing UK Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, revealed that his long-standing account with Coutts bank had been closed, after an internal risk committee determined that his views on Brexit, migration, LGBT rights and Net Zero “did not align” with the bank’s “values.”
Former Brexit Party MEP Henrik Overgaard Nielsen was also informed last year that his account with MetroBank would be terminated, while former Brexit Party MEP Baroness Claire Fox recently revealed that she had suffered the same experience, and suspected political motivation.
In the US, Representative Jim Jordan’s ongoing House Judiciary Committee investigation into federal law enforcement’s “receipt of information about American citizens without legal process” has discovered that federal investigators asked banks to search and filter customer transactions by using terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,” ostensibly as part of an investigation into the January 6th demonstrations at, and assault on, the US Capitol.
Individuals who shopped at stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods or purchased the Bible may also have had their transactions flagged. A source familiar with the Committee’s investigation has since confirmed that the information received by the federal government was used for purposes beyond the January 6th investigation.
In India, after the imposition of numerous legal sanctions and the prosecution of active investigations against leading opponents of Narendra Modi’s government, critics and rights groups accused India’s ruling BJP party of using law enforcement agencies to freeze the bank accounts of the main opposition party Congress just weeks before the announcement of national elections, which began in April 2024.
Earlier this year, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser recently proposed freezing the bank accounts of those found to have donated money to any group the government declares to be “far-right.” At the time, Faeser was vague as to how this would work in practice, how ‘right wing extremism’ will be defined, whether Germany’s left-leaning tripartite coalition government will get to decide on that definition, and what penalties will be directed at those who donate to right-wing parties or organisations.
One thing she did make clear, however, was that: “No one who donates to a right-wing extremist party should remain undetected… Those who mock the state must deal with a strong state.”
