Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: The Dimension Hatröss of the Left.
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
Operation Choke Point is a scheme by the Federal Government to destroy businesses by getting banks to unperson them financially. A brief explanation of Operation Choke Point:
While purportedly for illegal businesses, it has been used against perfectly legal businesses such as payday loan companies and gun shops. Now, it has now been used to take down a music label:
“A wide-sweeping initiative from the United States Department of Justice back in 2013 called Operation Choke Point was initially designed to curb payment processing for ‘terrorist’ activities, “fraudulent” purchases, and money laundering. However, according to one record label owner, the banks who have been in the news for demonetizing and deplatforming legitimate businesses over the last few months are doing so at the behest of those overseeing Operation Choke Point.
“It started with a Kotaku in Action thread, which notes that a death metal/black metal record label has shut down in the wake of PayPal pulling out support for processing purchases, along with the creditors at Visa and MasterCard because the company was labeled as ‘high risk’, ‘promoting hatred’, ‘promoting violence’, and ‘promoting hate speech’. In the case of Elegy Records, a label that hosted all sorts of death metal music since 1996, their closure comes from the inability to sign with a normal credit processor due to being “high-risk”. There are also high-risk credit processors, but it’s expensive, unreliable, and comes with no guarantees, which makes it untenable for most normal businesses.
“Elegy Records’ owner, Rob, told the outlet DeathMetal.org, in a piece published on December 17th, 2018, that PayPal simply said he could no longer use their services, following instigation from a website called MetalSucks, which is headed up by Matt Goldberg and Ben Umanov.”
In other words, they were financially deplatformed for thoughtcrimes. And banks would be punished if they did not comply:
“‘Accordingly, in late 2010 or early 2011, the FDIC’s senior Washington officials convened a meeting of all Regional Directors. The FDIC is divided into seven regions, each of which has a Director in charge of exercising the FDIC’s supervisory authority over each bank in his or her region. At this meeting in which all of these Regional Directors (or their designees) were gathered, the Senior Deputy Director for the Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection informed them that “if an institution in their region was facilitating payday lending, the Regional Director should require the institution to submit a plan for exiting the business.’
“‘These instructions, the Senior Deputy Director, conveyed, came from “the sixth floor”—the Chairman and senior leadership of the agency’
“‘At the meeting, the Senior Deputy Director conveyed the following message: “if a bank was found to be involved in payday lending, someone was going to be fired.”‘”
Freelance Journalist Nick Monroe covers this in depth, and his tweet thread is worth reading in full.
For a more in depth look, read the “Statement of Undisputed Material Facts Operation Choke Point” below:
Statement of Undisputed Mat… by on Scribd
Unsurprisingly, this assault on Heavy Metal has its modern day justification based on Academia, such as a peer-reviewed article from “Metal Music Studies”—clearly in the critical studies vein—that insists that the band Iron Maiden are pushing White male imperialistic hegemony, or something. From the Abstract:
” In the years following the end of the Second World War, the British Empire declined as a global, hegemonic power. In the years of this decline, British children were still taught stirring tales and myths of British military might and British fair-play. In this article, I argue that this mythic milieu served as source of inspiration for Iron Maiden’s songs from Iron Maiden (1980) to Somewhere in Time (1986). I show that themes on these albums deliberately reflect and construct this mythic version of Imperial British masculinity. I then explore how the band has continued to play with Britishness globally. I argue that Iron Maiden’s members and creators have constructed their creative art around imagined white, British imperial identities. They have been raised in the ways of the mythic milieu, and serve its hegemonic interest, whether they are conscious of that fact or not.”
In both the aforementioned examples, the assault came from those who held themselves out as insiders who were fighting oppression from within. Youtuber “Razorfist” provides yet another example, this time about SJW’s continuing to push the false narrative that Heavy Metal is sexist and stuff.
TTFN.
