In 2018 we entered into an era of new McCarthy-era blacklisting where MasterCard, Patreon, PayPal, Stripe, and others have engaged in  financially blacklisting individuals based on ideological grounds.

I understand that the decision makers at these companies probably made these decisions in an attempt to be good corporate citizens. But these decisions represent a moral panic and their good intentions are comparable to the good intentions of any other inquisition or witch-hunt in history. 

The decisions about who should be blacklisted are being made or heavily influenced by third parties, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center(SPLC), which possess an extreme ideological bias and these decisions reach far beyond extremists groups and into the realm of simple partisan opposition to certain individuals.

We do not trust these organizations to have such moral authority over anyone and depriving someone of their livelihood due to political differences of opinion is unacceptable.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, in particular, has demonstrated repeatedly that they are incapable of sound judgement. While they do, indeed, recognize a number of genuine hate groups that advocate for violence, they also misidentify a very large number of individuals such as Maajid Naawaz, to whom they were forced to issue a public apology after a lawsuit for their flagrant defamation of him.

This should be a huge red flag about the nature of these organizations. They are careless in their proclamations and seem to be driven far more partisan social ideology than by a desire to stop hate. Perhaps they cannot tell the difference.

The purpose of this petition is to urge the payment processors and credit card companies, particularly MasterCard to cease all financial blacklisting at the behest of third party partisan groups such as the SPLC or changetheterms.org(A group advocacy effort of which the SPLC is a part)

These groups do NOT represent majority opinion about 'hate' and instead use activism to silence people that disagree with their ideology. They represent a tyranny of a small minority who claim to possess moral authority over the rest of us.

This kind of corporate aggression, particularly removing someone's livelihood, can only result in increased social unrest and tribal partisanship.