Billionaire Silicone Tech investor, Marc Andreessen accused the Democrats and the Biden administration of weaponizing federal agencies to put pressure on financial companies to debank people and companies who disagreed with them and that is a large reason so many Silicone Valley billionaires jumped onto the Trump bandwagon. “Debanking” a person or business means being kicked out of the financial system.
Andreessen said:
“The First Amendment says the government cannot censor American citizens. And so, what they do is if you want to censor American citizens in the government, if you’re smart, you don’t do that. What you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.”
“We have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which was the – it’s sort of Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency that she gets to control. And it’s an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the Constitution, like, there is no such thing as an independent agency. And yet there it is.”
“Basically, it terrorizes financial institutions. Prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks … just by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.”
When Rogan asked for an example, Andressen answered:
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELDebanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies. So, debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system. … My partner, Ben’s father, has been debanked. … for having the wrong politics. For saying, “unacceptable things” under current banking regulations.”
“Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a ‘politically exposed person,’” he said. “PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank. You’re not allowed to have them. “
Rogan then asked what happened with far leftist institution to which Andreessen replied that they were safe from debanking. Rogan then followed up with “So, no one on the Left gets debanked?”
Andreessen answered:
“I haven’t heard of a single instance of anyone on the Left getting debanked. You get kicked out of your bank account. You get kicked out of the — you can’t do credit card transactions.”
“This is where the government and the companies get intertwined. And back to your fascism point, which is there’s a constitutional amendment that says the government can’t restrict your speech, but there’s no constitutional amendment that says the government can’t debank you, right? And so, if they can’t do the one thing, they do the other thing. And then they don’t have to debank you. They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they’re expected to. But the government gets to say, ‘We didn’t do it. It was the private company that did it.’”
“It’s this sleight of hand that happens … it’s a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran, just kick you out of the financial system. And so, this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they’re trying to protect the big banks.”
“And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don’t like. And so, a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there’s always a fight about, under the Obama administration, they started to debank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers. And just like you’re done, you’re out of the banking system. And so, if you’re running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, guess what? You’re doing your business all in cash because you literally can’t get a bank account. You can’t get a Visa terminal. You can’t process transactions. You can’t do payroll. You can’t do direct deposit. You can’t get insurance. You’ve been sanctioned, right? None of that stuff is available.”
He turned to the Biden-Harris administration. “And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents. … Operation Truck Point 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns. Truck Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it’s hit the tech world. We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years. This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It’s like we just can’t live in this world.”
“We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing and then they literally like get sanctioned, right, and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable – by the way, no due process,” he said. “None of this is written down. There’s no rules. There’s no court. There’s no decision process. There’s no appeal. Who do you appeal to, right? Like who do you go to to get your bank account back, right? And then there’s also the civil asset forfeiture side of it … that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden the state takes their money. … There will be some investigation into safe deposit boxes, and the next thing you know, the feds have seized all the contents of the safe deposit boxes, and that stuff never gets returned.”
“When Trump says the ‘deep state,’ the way we would describe it is, it’s administrative power. It’s political power being administered not through legislation. So there’s no defined law that covers this. It’s not through regulation. There’s nothing you can do– you can’t go see a regulator to fix this,” he said. “It’s not through any kind of court judgment. It’s just raw power. It’s just raw administrative power. It’s the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it.”
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