Laura Dodsworth has interviewed Toby about PayPal’s shocking and “ironic” deplatforming of the Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic. In the introduction on her Substack page (which you can subscribe to here) she sums up what makes this latest piece of censorship from the woke tech giant so worrying.
PayPal has closed the accounts of the Free Speech Union, the Daily Sceptic and founder Toby Young’s personal account. Since all three accounts were shut at once and PayPal won’t specify exactly why it has taken this action, it would appear to be a blatant case of censorship.
This is Big Tech bowdlerisation and banditry as PayPal is also withholding Toby’s funds (which it has the right to do) while it decides whether to apply damages. Make no mistake: this is a chilling insight into a world of social credit scores and programmable currencies, where your money can be turned off at the flick of a switch if you don’t behave.
It does not bode well that the Bank of England is consulting with PayPal, among others, about how to develop a CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency].
Here’s an excerpt from the interview.
How do you feel about it?
I’m really angry about it. How dare they? I’ve had my personal account for nine years and never heard a peep about violating its policies before now. I’ve been paying the 1.5% commission on all transactions without complaint. Where does it get the nerve? To just pull the rug out from under me, with no notice, just accused, tried and convicted all at once, with no possibility of parole. Thank God PayPal isn’t running the criminal justice system!
What are the implications for your organisations and for you personally?
I only used my personal account three or four times a year, although it has more than £600 sitting in it and I can’t get that out. PayPal reserves the right to hold on to the funds for 180 days in case it wants to extract “damages” for violating its Acceptable Use Policy. But the cancellation of the Daily Sceptic and FSU accounts is really serious. About a quarter of the Daily Sceptic’s donors were using PayPal and about a third of the FSU’s 9,500 members are using PayPal to process their recurring membership dues.
Is this an existential threat to what you are doing?
No, we’ll survive. In fact, I think we’ll come back stronger. And the FSU is going to try to get the law changed so PayPal and other financial services companies can’t deplatform other people for expressing political views they disapprove of. I feel like saying to PayPal, “You messed with the wrong guy.”
How will you mitigate the threat?
We’ve had to contact all supporters of the Daily Sceptic and the FSU using PayPal and tell them to switch to a different payment processor. But, inevitably, some of them won’t open the email, some will assume it’s a phishing scam and some just won’t bother to switch. We’ll undoubtedly lose a lot of revenue as a consequence.
What legal action can you take? What are PayPal’s contractual obligations to you?
I’m currently looking into that. More soon. But whatever happens, we’ll make a complaint to the Financial Conduct Authority.
What sort of company are you in? Who else has this happened to?
It’s happened to Us4Them, the lobby group set up by three mums to try to get schools reopened during the lockdown. The U.K. Medical Freedom Alliance and the Exposé – both have raised reservations about the mRNA vaccines, so that’s probably the reason they’ve been deplatformed – and, in the U.S., Colin Wright, a gender critical evolutionary biologist, and a couple of Left-wing sites that oppose the war in Ukraine, Consortium News and Mint Press. But I’m sure there are many others. In February, PayPal announced it had closed 4.5 million accounts.
Laura provides a helpful list of possible actions for those who’ve had enough of “censorship, deplatforming and the erosion of liberty”. They include:
- Become a member of the Free Speech Union.
- Complain to PayPal about this transparently political act of censorship.
- Write to your MP if you have concerns about censorship, deplatforming and the financial punishment of these websites. As the Bank of England and Treasury investigate the development of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) it’s vital that people’s financial security is protected. Not only do individuals and businesses need protection now from companies like PayPal, but they will need it even more so in an increasingly cashless society. It does not bode well that the Bank of England is consulting with PayPal, among others, about how to develop a CBDC.
- Share the #BoycotPayPal hashtag on Twitter.
- Share this article and spread the word.
Worth reading in full (of course).
Stop Press: Toby points out that he has expunged all traces of PayPal from both the Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union. So if you’re a donor to the first or a member of the second, there’s no need to change anything unless PayPal was processing your payments. He has already emailed all those affected by the PayPal account closures telling them what they need to do. If you haven’t heard from him, there’s no need to do anything.
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Oh dear – another advert for Ivermectin. Why even take this ‘medicine’ if Covid is a hoax? Order some pills from India – completely trustworthy!
Here’s a picture of life in India – what a lovely Government they have there, eh?
Here’s another picture from India:
You appear to be confusing the trolls who insist bacteria & viruses don’t exist with the evidence led types who praise Uttar Pradesh for its appropriate use of Ivermectin.
Shilling and old-school patronising racism in one post. Nice.
This is beautifully written, though deeply sad. The exact same darkness is creeping in all over the world. Strange, isn’t it? I appreciate the comparison with communism because I have wondered how this compares with living under tyrannies of old. This one is difficult because it has crept into the hearts and minds of almost the whole population. God have mercy on us all. I hope for you that you can find hope this Christmas in the Christ child, who conquered evil 2000 years ago and will ultimately vanquish it forever. Merry Christmas to you.
And to you.
Let evil into your heart and you are courting damnation. Mistake the evil in your heart for good, and you are damned.
Merry Christmas to all those who have renounced evil.
In one part of Spain they are using the likes of Superman, Batman, Wonder woman to encourage children to take a jab or two.
There is no room to record booster jabs.
I wonder if permission under copy write was agreed too.
Vile
For years I have been telling people that the regime ruling over Romania is communist at its core, but in different clothes. Ceausescu wasn’t overthrown because the people in charge of the Revolution wanted change. They just wanted their turn. And Ceausescu wasn’t shot by firing squad because of his crimes. He was shot so as not to expose the plans of the new regime.
And when it comes to food rations… well, here’s the thing. As bad as communism was with their food queues… at least you had food queues. It is unbelievable to say in this day and age, but I think Romanians had a better life under communism than they have today. Back then, they’d find you a home if you didn’t have one. Sure, it would be small, cramped, and you’d have to share. And you couldn’t own a large home by yourself, the government would send in tenants to live with you. But at least you had a home. These days the streets are filled with people freezing to death and starving. People living in all sorts of hovels, trying to stay warm, and either suffocating to death over night from improvised fireplaces, or setting their homes on fire. Bucharest is suffering from widespread heating outages. Elderly people can barely basic food with their pension, let alone medicine.
Why? In the name of globalism, of course. Klaus Iohannis is a well known globalist lackey. He once said of the country he is in charge of that “Romania is a failed state”. Before he won the presidential elections in 2014 in a 2020 US-style election he was mayor of Sibiu, where he used to be in the business of trafficking children to Western Europe and the US. These days there is nothing the EU says that Klaus Iohannis doesn’t embrace fully. Vaccinate everyone? Of course! Which is why Romania, a country with maybe 15m people eligible for vaccination, ordered 150m doses of vaccine.
Romania is an example of what globalism does to a country. Our country has everything you can possibly want in a country. Mountains, seaside, a bit of desert even, fields as far as the eye can see ready to grow food for half of Europe, Europe’s largest delta with untold natural potential, supplies of oil, gas, uranium, gold, vast touristic potential, a strong industrial potential, and yet, here we are, living in abject poverty. We are not allowed to finish out nuclear power plant, or to exploit our natural gas, because that would go against Germany’s dictate that everyone must switch to renewables. And as such we are forced to buy second hand wind turbines from Germany (isn’t it nice to have the power to force others to buy your garbage from you?) even though our country does not have favourable wind patterns for wind power. I wonder how long until we have to buy second hand tidal power plants from some other western country, even though the Black Sea has no discernible tide…? And our politicians don’t know what to do to sell our natural resources to foreign companies for peanuts…
Romania could be one of the richest countries in Europe. We have the resources. We have the people. Very smart people, very hard working. But we are not allowed to take ownership of our country. Yes, call out communism for the horrible hell that it was. But be cautious about what people would replace it with, because the alternative might be even worse.
“They are not opposed to vaccination; they just don’t get vaccinated.”
We are all Romanians now!