Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton has spoken at a Turning Point USA event to detail a series of unjust obstacles he has been facing since taking office, one of those being debanking.
According to Paxton, as many as four different banks denied him their services, which was followed by a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit, attempts to revoke his law license, and an FBI investigation.
This was happening during the last four years of the Biden-Harris Democrat administration, suggesting that the reasons were political, but it went all the way to “a Republican split”: while the state House tried to impeach Paxton – the Senate later acquitted him in the impeachment trial.
The takeaway here is that democratic norms and the principle of due process are at this point considerably compromised and highly vulnerable to political influence.
And Paxton is by no means the only high-profile individual to become the target of debanking. When the new administration took over after President Trump’s first term in office, his wife Melania, and son Barron were denied banking services.
According to a memoir the first lady published earlier in the year, her account was terminated, while her son was not allowed to open his own.
“This decision appeared to be rooted in political discrimination, raising serious concerns about civil rights violations,” Melania Trump wrote, describing this as actions of the “cancel mob” made up not only of financial institutions but also legacy media, corporations, and even cultural institutions.
Debanking is used as a form of political pressure against individuals, but also businesses. Even though the goal over the past four years was to discourage them from supporting Trump – in some cases it had the opposite effect.
One of the top venture capitalists, Marc Andreessen, addressed this when he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying that the Biden administration’s choice of going after political opponents by exuding them from the financial system was “one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump.”
Andreessen also said that he is unaware of anyone on the Left getting debanked – having their bank account closed and cut off from credit card transactions for being a “politically exposed person.”
