Why Kanye West and Free Speech Advocates Need Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine
Below is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent Issue #1272: “De-Banking as an Attack on Speech.” Sign up for the newsletter here.
On October 12, Candace Owens alerted the world to the fact that Ye West, better known as Kanye West, had his bank account closed by JPMorgan Chase. The move is apparently a reaction to comments Ye made over the weekend on social media. I have to agree with what Owens says in the second tweet above. I don’t care what you think about Ye, but I do care what you think about one of the biggest banks in the world suddenly pulling the bank account of his multi-billion dollar company.
All of this comes on the heels of PayPal attempting to implement a $2,500 fine on any user it deems to be misbehaving. PayPal was forced to quickly retract their policy and pretend it was an accident after they felt the wrath of their customer base who shouted the insanity of a fintech company trying to dictate what is and isn’t acceptable speech. Zooming out from the particular saga of Ye and what he said, I think it’s important to identify the accelerating trend of incumbents, with insane amounts of entrenchment and influence across the banking and payments sectors, trying to pick and choose who who can and cannot receive, hold and send money within their hyper-monitored systems based on political or personal beliefs.
Like it or not, free speech is a cornerstone of the republic here in the United States. Actions like the one made by JPMorgan Chase against Ye and attempted by PayPal before they were forced to save face are an attack on free speech. JPMorgan Chase and PayPal clearly did not prevent Ye or PayPal customers from speaking their minds. But moves like this attack free speech in a more insidious way by encouraging self-censorship by individuals who become afraid to speak their minds because they don’t want to be deplatformed and demonetized by the technocratic goliath they’ve come to depend on to operate throughout the world . finances on behalf of their companies and themselves.
This type of control is exactly what the incumbent power structure wants. Trying to eliminate free speech via the political process is an idea that is dead on arrival here in the United States. Those in power do not want dissent to spread throughout the population. Those same people are far more protected from the political backlash that would come with trying to legislate what can and cannot be said. The past few years have taught us that this is exactly the playbook the entrenched power structure runs to get what they want. This was made abundantly clear when people who exhibited perceived wrong thinking during the COVID-19 lockdowns and subsequent vaccine rollout were deplatformed and demonetized across the web.
Thanks to Alex Berenson suing Twitter after being kicked off the platform, we have cold, hard evidence that the White House actively pressured those responsible for the bird app to kick him off the platform because he provided facts that contradicted the controlled narrative they wanted the audience to believe. Again, whether you agree with Ye, Berenson, or any of the potential PayPal users who may have said things in opposition to the majority, you’d have to be an absolute moron not to see this trend as a direct attack on free speech. Do you really want the people who are so obviously completely detached from reality who sit at the top of the power structure in this country dictating to you what is and isn’t reality?
What has become abundantly clear in recent years is that the systems that exist today must be completely abandoned in favor of systems that make it impossible for those who said we needed “two weeks to flatten the curve” and “Iraq contains weapons of mass destruction,” and “this vaccine is safe, effective and will prevent spread,” and “crack cocaine should be prosecuted differently than powder cocaine,” (among many other falsehoods) in order to control every essential part of speech. and movement of money. I the realm of money—how people hold it, how they receive it, and how they send it—Bitcoin is the new system being built to prevent the power structure from pushing us into a future built on self-censorship as a means of self-preservation.
If JPMorgan Chase’s actions against Ye and PayPal’s attempted actions against its user base mean anything, it’s that bitcoin provides an extreme amount of value to a human race that desperately needs a solution to this growing problem. Bitcoin’s value is driven by the utility offered by its distributed peer-to-peer nature and the fact that any person so motivated can take full control of their money: How they receive it, how they hold it and how they send it . I hope this message reaches Ye and that he seriously thinks about ditching a banking system that has abandoned him in favor of a distributed system that has no idea who he is or what he has said. It only knows if he has valid UTXOs and the private keys necessary to move them throughout the timeline.
