What's old is new again

What a wild and fast moving story.  

Bari Weiss is a journalist who started her career with the Wall Street Journal and then with The New York Times.  Like many Classical Liberals (Age of Enlightenment values), she has suffered from the totalitarian and toxic environments of academia and the increasingly woke mainstream media.  In fact, The New York Times rather neatly encapsulated the tensions.  They had a star reporter Bari Weiss.  They had a feted emo Woke basket case, Taylor Lorenz.  Bari Weiss resigned from the NYT in July 2020 owing to its increasingly toxic and repressive Woke culture.

Five months later, in January 2021, she launched the Substack newsletter Common Sense with a clear reach back to a period in our history when we did indeed care about natural rights.  

I received an email from Weiss on December 9th, 2022 announcing that Common Sense which had already expanded beyond a Bari Weiss newsletter into a platform with many contributors, was once again expanding and adding more people.  And would be morphing into a new Substack Free Press.  There was the invitation to subscribe.

I am very careful about my Substack subscribing.  At this point, I believe I have only three subscriptions.  Well, now four, including the Free Press.  A year's worth of  Common Sense has demonstrated her ability to generate old-style, high quality factual reporting on important stories no longer covered by the legacy media.

Hurray for Bari Weiss and the Free Press team.  I encourage anyone to consider subscribing to improve the journalistic gene pool.  

My enthusiasm was sparked by a story today, What the Hell Happened to PayPal? by Rupa Subramanya.  The subheading is In 1998, the payments app was created to empower individuals. Today, it’s a cornerstone of our emerging social-credit system.

One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”

There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy. 

They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”

Then, toward the bottom: “If you have funds in your PayPal balance, we’ll hold it for up to 180 days. After that period, we’ll email you with information on how to access your funds.”

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents—simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)

These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists—the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services,” was meant to empower. 

PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The people who founded PayPal—the so-called PayPal Mafia—include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.

Excellent piece, well worth a read.  It is content rich, pertinent, willing to interview sources that will speak on the record, balanced.  In other words, unlike almost anything you can find in the legacy media.