By Over the past few years, liberals with connections to Wall Street have been using the banking system to attack conservatives and conservative institutions.
The first target was, of course, guns and the Second Amendment. In 2020, Fox News noted, “It is a slow and steady form of gun control gradually gaining momentum with limited public fanfare: If guns cannot be directly taken from the hands of citizens, the next best target is the banks and financial institutions that enable transactions or loans for the industry.
‘Financial activism by banks is by far one of the largest emerging threats against Second Amendment rights,” Philip Watson, founder of Washington Public Relations and a Second Amendment advocate, told Fox News. “The federal government allows the financial industry to receive vast amounts of federal funds; however, those exact same funds free up their balance sheets enough to discriminate and play politics.'”
Next came the other liberal obsession: fossil fuels.
In 2021, Bank of America committed itself to “terminate its direct funding of coal mines, coal-fired power plants and arctic drilling.”
The policy, reported the Daily Caller, “committed to not directly fund ‘new thermal coal mines or the expansion of existing mines,’ ‘construction or expansion of new coal-fired power plants,’ or ‘petroleum exploration or production activities in the Arctic.'”
Now, after conservative pushback and some state action, the bank is backing off its plan.
Two years ago, Bank of America won kudos from climate activists for saying it would no longer finance new coal mines, coal-burning power plants or Arctic drilling projects because of the toll they take on the environment, according to The New York Times.
The bank’s latest environment and social-risk policy reneged on those commitments. The policy, updated in December, says that such projects will instead be subject to “enhanced due diligence.”
Bank of America’s change follows intensifying backlash from Republican lawmakers against corporations that consider environmental and social factors in their operations. Wall Street in particular has come under fire for what some Republicans have called “woke capitalism,” a campaign that has pulled banks into the wider culture wars.
States including Texas and West Virginia have passed financial regulations designed to ward off efforts to deny fossil-fuel companies access to banking services. In New Hampshire, state lawmakers have sought to criminalize the business principle known as E.S.G., shorthand for environmental, social and governance.
Conservatives have rightly been on top of the way the far left has begun attacking those they disagree with through financial means. For example, following his victory in New Hampshire, Donald Trump promised to prevent “debanking,” a term that means that a bank has refused to allow you to open an account based on “reputational risk.”
Trump: We’re going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your— your political beliefs what they do. They want to debank you. We’re going to debank— think of this. They want to take away your country. Electric cars pic.twitter.com/eJpPyuosG8
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 18, 2024
Trumps use of the term, however, did more than just serve as tough talk on the campaign trail. It also revealed that liberals, either accidentally or on purpose, have begun pretending that the more totalitarian tendencies of their activist allies do not exist. Instead of acknowledging that places like Bank of America had quite literally made debanking announcements or that companies like PayPal had begun monitoring the speech of their customers, they mocked the term.
Fox News explained that “NBC’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ was mocked after suggesting the term “de-banking” was a made-up word by former President Trump.
During the ‘Weekend Update’ segment, cast member Colin Jost insisted he didn’t know ‘what the hell ‘de-bank’ means’ while commenting on one of Trump’s recent speeches.
‘Trump did have a slight stumble this week while talking about banks, and he introduced an interesting new term called de-bank,’ Jost said. ‘I don’t know what the hell de-bank means, but you might have to take ‘de-ambulance’ to see ‘de-doctor.’”
The show got roasted online for being both clueless and smug.
SNL’s in such a hurry to dunk on Trump that they made themselves look like idiots again. https://t.co/4nu4OpSWL1 pic.twitter.com/KY4hk9F33I
— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe) January 28, 2024
This is similar to when Dennis Prager said they are putting tampons in men’s bathrooms, and Bill Maher‘s entire audience laughed at him.
The left doesn’t realize what’s happening, until it’s too late.
Then their cognitive dissonance forces them to justify why it’s a good thing. https://t.co/240vBF5K15
— Michael Oxford – Santa Cruz Mountain Goat (@SCMountainGoat) January 28, 2024
One Republican who had no problem with the mockery from SNL, however, was Nikki Haley. On Saturday evening, the former UN Ambassador made a “surprise appearance” on the show.
“The roughly two-minute appearance during a parody of a CNN town hall culminated with actress and comedian Ayo Edebiri, the episode’s host, zinging Haley for her past comments in which she initially failed to name slavery as a main cause of the Civil War,” wrote ABC News.
“Introduced in the sketch as a “concerned South Carolina voter,” Haley delivered several quips as she went back and forth with Johnson’s version of Trump.
She began by asking the caricature of the former president, “Why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?” — jabbing at the real-life Trump’s decision not to debate because of his large lead in the GOP primary race over her.
“Trump” then exclaimed, ‘Oh my god, it’s her, the woman who was in charge of security on Jan. 6, it’s Nancy Pelosi.’ It was a callback to a recent gaffe by Trump in which he appeared to confuse Haley for the former speaker of the House at a campaign event.”
The skit can be seen below:
Of course, some liberals couldn’t handle the fact that a Republican would be welcomed on the NBC skit show and immediately started complaining about it online.
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