Tag: wrongthink

OCC Says 9 Big Banks Took Part In ‘Inappropriate’ Debanking Practices

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has released a report saying that the nine largest lenders in the U.S. made “inappropriate distinctions” that it used to restrict services among certain customers.

Following the signing of an executive order by President Donald Trump in August of this year, the OCC began reviewing all banks for any current or past practices that effectively barred customers on the basis of political or religious belief.

Wednesday, the OCC released its report, saying that it had found conclusive proof that nine large banks had policies that either refused services to some industries or required higher levels of scrutiny that exceeded the actual financial risks between 2020 and 2023.

According to Bloomberg, the banks involved are accused of restricting access to firms in numerous sectors, including oil and gas exploration, coal mining, firearms, private prisons, payday lending, tobacco and e-cigarette manufacturers, adult entertainment, political action committees and digital assets.

The OCC said that many of the banks had publicly disclosed their policies, which were often tied to environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said in a statement:

“It is unfortunate that the nation’s largest banks thought these harmful debanking policies were an appropriate use of their government-granted charter and market power. While many of these policies were undertaken in plain sight and even announced publicly, certain banks have continued to insist that they did not engage in debanking.”

The Bank Policy Institute, which advocates for many of the lenders named in the OCC report, issued a statement saying, “It’s in banks’ best interest to take deposits, lend to and support as many consumers and businesses as possible to drive economic growth. The industry supports fair access to banking and is already working together with Congress and the administration to ensure banks are able to serve law-abiding customers.”

Earlier in the week, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon was dismissive of concerns about debanking, telling Fox News that the issue was mostly made up and that the people concerned about it needed to “grow up”

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A Visit by the German Thought Police

Three armed Berlin police officers arrived at my door this morning with a warrant to search my apartment. They conducted the search, interrogated me and my wife, and confiscated my computer.

The search warrant was issued in connection with a new criminal investigation of me by the Berlin State Prosecutor. Once again, as in 2023, I am accused of disseminating pro-Nazi material, the pro-Nazi “material” in question being my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

Unlike the previous charges against me, which were based on two Tweets featuring the cover artwork of the book and opposing the so-called Covid measures, this new criminal investigation is based on my publication and distribution of the book.

The book was banned by Amazon in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands in 2022. Until today, there was never any proof that it had been officially banned in Germany by the German authorities, although it was removed from distribution in Germany at the same time that Amazon banned it. It remains available in all other countries, and is distributed globally by Amazon and Ingram Content Group.

Today’s visit puts any doubt about whether the book is officially banned in Germany to rest. It is officially banned. And I am being criminally investigated and intimidated by the German authorities for the “crime” of writing, publishing, and distributing it.

This new investigation, the search of my home, and confiscation of my computer are blatantly unconstitutional, a brazen violation of my rights as an author and publisher under Germany’s Basic Law (Grundgesetz).

I will of course be taking legal action to defend those rights.

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Portland faces a $10 million federal lawsuit for alleged ideological persecution against conservatives and abuse of authority during Antifa-linked riots

The announcement landed with the force of a public alarm: journalist and activist Andy Ngo announced that his legal team has officially notified the City of Portland of the filing of a $10 million federal civil-rights lawsuit, arguing that local authorities acted repeatedly and selectively against citizens identified as conservatives.

The case, which once again exposes Oregon’s deep political wounds, erupts after years of tensions between City Hall, the Police Department, and groups like Antifa, whose violent track record has been documented on multiple occasions by outlets such as Gateway Hispanic and national publications.

According to Ngo himself, his 2021 arrest —an episode widely publicized but never fully clarified— occurred in a context of institutional hostility toward voices critical of the local left, an environment that intensified during the protests that kept the city paralyzed between 2020 and 2022.

The judicial notice, according to sources consulted, is based on allegations of violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, arguing that the police action lacked probable cause and was motivated by ideology.

The municipal administration avoided making an immediate statement and referred to a press release expected in the coming hours, while progressive organizations limited themselves to questioning the credibility of the plaintiff without providing additional data.

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British Soccer Star Joey Barton Given Six Months Suspended Prison Sentence For ‘Grossly Offensive’ Posts on X

Former British soccer star Joey Barton has been given a six-month suspended sentence for making “grossly offensive” posts on the X platform.

In the latest escalation in the British state’s war on freedom of expression, 43-year-old Barton was found guilty last month at Liverpool Crown Court of six counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety.

The conviction related to posts he made targeting the football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko, as well as the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Vine.

Sentencing Barton on Monday, Judge Andrew Menary KC said that “robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.”

”But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.”

Menary went on to describe Barton as “not a man of previous good character” and said he had carried out “a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful.”

While Barton’s comments could definitely be condemned as extremely unkind, most were intended as jokes or crass humor.

During an FA Cup tie in which Ward and Aluko were commentating, Barton described them as the “Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a reference to the notorious British serial killers.

In another post, he mocked Jeremy Vine as a “bike nonce” and asked if he had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.

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Germany’s Globalist Regime Bans AfD From Mayoral Elections in Rhineland-Palatinate 

Germany’s increasingly unpopular and authoritarian globalist regime has banned members of the conservative-nationalist party Alternative for Germany (AfD)—the most popular in the country—from running for local mayor in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The regime’s weapon of choice is a state blacklist, crafted by Germany’s highly politicized domestic intelligence service—an agency that persecutes patriotic citizens while branding the country’s true opposition as extremists.

A 2025 order from the state’s Interior Ministry, designed as a de-facto ban on the party, now forces candidates to vow no ties to listed organizations over the past five years, the Austrian news outlet Exxpress reported.

AfD members simply cannot sign without legally perjuring themselves. German-American Roberto Kiefer hoped to contest the mayoral seat in Nieder-Olm next March. The new rules render his bid impossible solely because of his party loyalty.

Kiefer rightly denounces it as a sneaky exclusion of a fully legal political movement and a party that’s the most popular in the country. He will file his candidacy regardless, bracing for the inevitable bureaucratic rejection.

This authoritarian tactic, employed by a government that’s quickly losing its democratic mandate, is nothing new—in Ludwigshafen, AfD’s Joachim Paul was booted from the race on flimsy loyalty grounds. Establishment courts, controlled by regime loyalists, rubber-stamped the decision, citing trumped up domestic intel rulings.

Voter turnout in Ludwigshafen plunged to embarrassing lows once Paul was removed. Disgusted citizens boycotted an election stripped of real alternatives.

Germany’s regime claims these bans safeguard democracy from supposed dangers. In reality, unelected officials are trampling the sovereign will of the people.

AfD leaders insist that only voters, not faceless ministries staffed with regime loyalists, should choose their representatives. The party remains completely lawful and is surging in polls nationwide.

The crackdown traces back to a July decree that already purges AfD supporters from all public-sector jobs. Small-town mayoral posts are conveniently classified as civil service to widen the net.

Legal scholars warn that letting bureaucrats revoke voting rights through vague lists threatens free elections. Such overreach exposes the regime’s fear of genuine competition.

Violent left-wing radicals are propped up in Germany and share space on the same voting list, while the AfD is singled out because it’s the only real alternative to the regime. It deliberately targets the country’s largest  party after its electoral breakthroughs.

With sustained, uncontrolled mass migration overwhelming towns and cities, emptying the country’s state welfare coffers and causing upticks in violent crime, AfD’s firm border policies have clearly struck a chord with fed-up Germans. Silencing their candidates muzzles the growing demand for national sovereignty.

The Nieder-Olm scandal reveals how the Brussels-aligned elite in Germany are desperately clinging to power. Real democrats demand AfD be allowed to contest elections without interference.

Germany desperately needs leaders who put German citizens and Western Civilization first, not ones who bend the knee to the EU’s anti-European dictates. These repressive measures only deepen public contempt for an increasingly authoritarian system.

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Portland jury clears black man of assault because white man he stabbed had said the n-word

A black man was acquitted of stabbing a white man in Oregon after he claimed the attack was self-defense because the victim called him a racial slur. 

Gary Edwards, 43, was charged with second-degree assault for stabbing a man in Portland near a light rail stop on July 8, KPTV reported.

However, he was found not guilty of the crime on October 31 after the jury learned the victim was using racial slurs in the aftermath of the altercation.

Edwards, who is homeless and has a previous assault conviction, admitted to knifing the victim, Gregory Howard Jr., but claimed it was in self-defense because the other man called him the n-word, according to Oregon Live.

Security cameras, with no audio, captured Edwards, with a fixed-blade knife in hand, approaching Howard as he sat on a beach.

Howard immediately jumped up and pushed Edwards, then the two scuffled until Edwards stabbed Howard in the shoulder.

Edwards defense attorney Daniel Small reportedly told the jury that his client was approaching Howard to see if he would trade his knife for cigarettes. 

‘What other than racism could explain why Mr. Howard perceived hatred, animosity and aggression from a complete stranger,’ Small said.

Moments later, body camera footage from security officers captured Howard shouting a racist slur at Edwards after he had been stabbed.

It is unclear if there is any evidence to suggest that Howard used the slur before he was stabbed.

Prosecutor Katherine Williams told the jury it did not matter what the victim said after he was stabbed.

‘The defendant is not scared for his life. He didn’t retreat, he sauntered up – and he sauntered away after he stabbed someone. The defendant created the situation,’ Williams said.

Despite the prosecutors pleas, the jury found Edwards not guilty.

Edwards lawyer insisted the case never should have gone to trial.

‘I laid my cards out on the table and told the state how the trial would go, but it didn’t matter,’ he told Oregon Live.

Edwards, who is homeless, spent about three months in custody before the trail after prosecutors argued he was a threat to the public due to his lengthy criminal record, according to the outlet.

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Enoch Burke: Irish School Teacher Jailed Following His Stance Against Transgender Ideology

Irish teacher Enoch Burke was arrested and jailed in November 2025. He was charged with contempt of court, and authorities insist this has nothing to do with his refusal to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.

Technically, they are correct that his imprisonment stems from repeated violations of a court order barring him from returning to the school during his suspension.

However, it is also true that the entire case began with his refusal to give in to transgender ideology, which led to his suspension in the first place. Burke was a teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in County Westmeath, Ireland.

In 2022 the school instructed staff to refer to a transgender student by a new name and the “they/them” pronoun, and Burke refused to comply.

After he publicly objected at a school event and confronted school leadership, he was suspended pending disciplinary proceedings.

The school then obtained a court injunction barring him from its premises for the duration of his suspension.

Despite that order, Burke repeatedly returned to the school, prompting officials to seek court enforcement. He has since been found in contempt of court multiple times.

In late November 2025, a High Court judge ordered his committal to prison again, describing his repeated attendance as trespass and noting that fines were no longer effective.

Along with jail time, Burke is now facing fines exceeding 225,000 euros.

Historically, Ireland was one of the strongest Catholic countries in the world.

For most of the twentieth century more than 90 percent of the population identified as Catholic, and weekly Mass attendance often exceeded 90 percent.

Religious vocations were high, with thousands of priests and more than a thousand seminarians in the mid-1960s.

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Democrats Would Like To Suppress Free Speech The Way Britain Does

It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population.

But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a place like Britain — the online censorship, the criminalization of disfavored opinions, the two-tiered system of justice — doesn’t stay confined to their shores but eventually makes its way to ours. Indeed, many Democrats here in America don’t see the tyranny of modern Britain as a cautionary tale but as a template to follow.

A startling case in point is a recent story from Drop Site News by Paul Holden, who chronicles how a secret campaign to elevate Kier Starmer to prime minister included a scheme to demonetize news outlets deemed unfriendly to the Starmer wing of the Labour Party. One of those news outlets was The Federalist.

In the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign, a shadowy UK-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) worked with NBC News and Google insiders to attempt to blacklist and demonetize The Federalist under false pretexts — an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. The Orwellian-named NBC News Verification Unit reported in June 2020 that Google had banned the website ZeroHedge from its advertising platform and had warned The Federalist that it too might be banned.

But this wasn’t just “reporting,” it was part of a larger political op. According to the NBC News report itself, Google’s actions came only after the company had been “notified of research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit that combats online hate and misinformation. They found that 10 U.S-based websites have published what they say are racist articles about the protests, and projected that the websites would make millions of dollars through Google Ads.”

And who notified Google about this CCDH report? NBC News did. This was a transparent effort by left-wing activists at NBC News, together with left-wing activists at the CCDH, to demonetize and silence The Federalist for the crime of noticing the hypocrisy surrounding BLM protests and strict Covid lockdowns.

But who or what was the CCDH, and why did it target The Federalist? At the time, the CCDH’s connection to the Starmer political machine and the Labour Party was unclear. But as Holden’s reporting reveals, the CCDH was part of a larger partisan political project that targeted The Federalist, Breitbart, ZeroHedge, and others. “As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart,” writes Holden. “The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation.”

At the center of this campaign was a man named Morgan McSweeney, who is now Prime Minster Starmer’s chief of staff. Between 2018 and 2020, McSweeney served as the company secretary and managing director for an organization called Labour Together that funded a think tank called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). At the time, SFFN claimed to be a grassroots effort organized and run by a group of anonymous concerned citizens inspired by the demonetizing campaigns run by Sleeping Giants, which had targeted Breitbart in the U.S. during the 2016 election.

In fact, SFFN was an astroturfing operation created and run by people in positions of real power inside the Labour Party, including not just McSweeney but Steve Reed, now a senior member of Starmer’s cabinet. The original purpose of SFFN, as Holden reports, was “to defeat the left-wing of the Labour Party and the media ecosystem that supported it.” The operations of SFFN, however, expanded to include right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Federalist, which it saw as impediments to Starmer’s rise.

Eventually, SFFN was absorbed into a new entity, CCDH, whose CEO is a man named Imran Ahmed. Ahmed worked with McSweeney in the London office of Labour Together, which first launched the SFFN project. Ahmed has said that McSweeney gave him a “shell company” called Brixton Endeavors that later became CCDH and in early 2020 absorbed the entire SFFN project. McSweeney has tried to distance himself from all this but as Holden notes, McSweeney was the sole director of Brixton Endeavors between 2018 and September 2019, and remained a director of CCDH until April 2020.

During this time, a plan was developed to target disfavored news outlets by going after their advertisers. As Ahmed himself said in an October 2020 U.S. State Department conference on antisemitism, the CCDH “put together a program called stop funding fake news” designed to undermine ad revenue of certain news sites. He boasted that the weak points of news websites is that they’re expensive to run, so eliminating their ad revenue meant that “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.”

What Ahmed and his underlings at CCDH needed was a willing news outlet to “report” on its targeting of certain websites for being “hateful” or “racist.” This they found in the NBC News Verification Unit, which tried to goad Google into demonetizing The Federalist and others, and then “reported” it as news.

Take a step back and realize that this is the equivalent of people like Ron Klain or Jeff Zients, who served as chiefs of staff during the Biden administration, running secretive demonetization ops against conservative news outlets in America.

But even that isn’t very far-fetched. After all, the Biden administration’s State Department used its now-defunct Global Engagement Center to fund censorship operations by groups like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, which targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, among others. We here at The Federalist joined with The Daily Wire in a lawsuit against the State Department in 2023, claiming these groups, supported by the federal government, sought to defund and suppress our reporting and commentary in violation of our First Amendment rights.

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Canadian pastor arrested for refusing to write apology to librarian who hosted ‘drag queen story hour’

A Canadian pastor has been arrested for refusing to apologize to a librarian who hosted a “drag queen story hour” for children.

In the afternoon of December 3, Calgary police arrested Christian pastor Derek Reimer for refusing to comply with a court order mandating that he pen a formal apology to a Calgary Public Library manager who he criticized for promoting a children’s “drag queen story hour” in 2023.

“Do you know why you’re arresting him? He won’t say sorry for his beliefs,” an independent Canadian journalist under the handle Dacey Media asked police during the arrest.

Present at the arrest was pro-freedom pastor Artur Pawlowski and Reimer’s son. Videos of the arrest quickly circulated on social media, with many Canadian activists condemning it as targeting Christian and pro-family values.

“Canadian pastor arrested for refusing COURT ORDERED LGBTQ APOLOGY,” former Ontario teacher turned pro-family advocate Matt Alexander wrote on X.

“Derek Reimer is taken away,” he continued. “He protested a drag queen story hour and has faced legal repercussions for years. Religious freedom is gone.”

“Welcome to Canada, where freedom of religion and expression are no more,” another Canadian wrote. “A pastor who would not apologize for opposing drag queen story hour has been arrested and could receive up to 2 years in prison. Pray for pastor Derek Reimer.”

At the time of his arrest, Reimer was serving a one-year house arrest, which he had previously appealed, as reported by LifeSiteNews. Last Wednesday, he was in court to go over his sentence conditions.

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WEAPONIZATION EXPOSED: Justice Thomas Corners New Jersey AG’s Counsel — Confirms Subpoena for Pro-Life Donors Issued Even Though NO ONE Complained

Justice Clarence Thomas forced New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin’s chief counsel to admit that the state launched an intrusive investigation into a pro-life pregnancy center without receiving a single complaint about the organization.

During oral arguments in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, Justice Thomas methodically dismantled the state’s justification for issuing a donor-snooping subpoena targeting First Choice, a faith-based, pro-life pregnancy support network that has operated for over 40 years.

Justice Thomas drilled into a simple, devastating question: “You had no basis to think that they were deceiving any of their contributors?”

Sundeep Iyer, chief counsel to AG Platkin, conceded that New Jersey received zero complaints about First Choice Women’s Resource Centers.

Instead, he claimed the state merely “canvassed public information” before issuing a sweeping subpoena demanding years of internal records, including confidential donor information.

Iyer further admitted that the state did receive complaints about other pregnancy centers, but not First Choice.

First Choice, a faith-based pro-life nonprofit operating in New Jersey since 1985, provides free ultrasounds, pregnancy tests, counseling, and material support to women. It is fully upfront about its pro-life mission, stating on every page of its website that it does not provide or refer for abortion services.

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