If you’ve ever bought something online, chances are you’ve used PayPal at some point in your life. For most of the existence of eBay, that was the only option a person had. And for most of that period, aside from complaints about fees, PayPal was pretty non-controversial. They were a payment processor that processed payments.

In the modern era of woke corporatism, though, things have changed dramatically, PayPal is helping lead the way with a new policy that could cost you money. According to The Daily Wire, up to $2,500 (per offense) could be deducted from your PayPal balance if you participate in the spreading of “misinformation.”

A new policy update from PayPal will permit the firm to sanction users who advance purported “misinformation” or present risks to user “wellbeing.”

The financial services company, which has repeatedly deplatformed organizations and individual commentators for their political views, will expand its “existing list of prohibited activities” on November 3. Among the changes are prohibitions on “the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials” that “promote misinformation” or “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing.” Users are also barred from “the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory.”…

…Deliberations will be made at the “sole discretion” of PayPal and may subject the user to “damages” — including the removal of $2,500 “debited directly from your PayPal account.” The company’s user agreement contains a provision in which account holders acknowledge that the figure is “presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages” due to the administrative cost of tracking violations and damage to the company’s reputation.

There are several ways to interpret this, which is par for the course when it comes to the legal mumbo-jumbo put into the Terms of Services of various companies.

First, it seems to allow exactly what it sounds like, i.e. that some corporate flunky can steal your money if they see you posted something they don’t like on YouTube or Twitter. If you read the actual legal language, there don’t appear to be any guardrails. The decision would be made by the company at its whim. There’s no mention of any appeals process either.

Secondly, while the policy is absolutely atrocious no matter what, it does appear this is more about stopping the processing of payments to influencers than punishing individual users for sending payments to those influencers. Examples include foundations and YouTube channels that use PayPal to process their membership dues (i.e. Patreon payments and such).

Regardless, it is an egregious attack on the principle of free speech for a payment processor to start fining its users because those users might disagree with the broader left politically. And don’t kid yourself, that’s exactly what this is about. Today’s “misinformation” is tomorrow’s confirmed fact, a dynamic that has played out many times during the COVID pandemic.

The scourage of woke-ness in corporate America is only getting worse, and we can reasonably look at this PayPal move as a test run for far worse sanctions to come. Major banks will be next in line to try this stuff (they already have when it comes to guns). The censorship regime is real, and Democrats have successfully gained influence via crony captialism over the last decade.

As I’ve written before, Republicans must make these companies pay or things will only continue to escalate. Sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option. The free market is great and all, but this is not the free market. It’s corporatism that sees the government favoring and rewarding the nation’s most powerful corporations in exchange for donations and political tyranny. It’s Orwellian, and it has to be stopped.