Stripe first suspends, then desuspends, Dr. Malone’s Substack. His lawyers issued a press release describing the situation:
Stripe, a global payment processing company, has retracted its request for comprehensive financial data from Dr. Robert Malone following legal intervention by the Dhillon Law Group.
The initial request, which deviated from Stripe’s standard operating procedures, would have compelled Dr. Malone to provide extensive financial information from his business banking activities, including transactions and account balances spanning the entire history of his business bank account.
Dr. Malone, a medical researcher with a significant subscriber base on Substack, was faced with an abrupt policy change that threatened his business’s revenue stream. The payment processor’s demand for detailed financial records was not in line with the regular scope of information typically required by financial institutions, raising concerns about privacy and operational overreach.
“Stripe previously notified us that the firm required that we share details and activity relating to my business bank account with Stripe, including my current account balance, transactions, and all historical transactions, or else Stripe would stop processing payments from our Substack subscribers,” Dr. Malone said. “We were provided approximately one week to comply with this requirement. This was not a general policy, and appears to have been selectively deployed by Stripe in response to a U.S. Government request. As Substack only allows the use of credit card processing via Stripe, we saw this as a direct threat to the revenue from the business we have built up over the last two years using the Substack social media authorship toolkit. We immediately contacted the Dhillon Law Group, which has been able to promptly and favorably resolve this so that our business was not impacted by this new Stripe policy.”
The Dhillon Law Group challenged Stripe’s requirement on behalf of Dr. Malone, emphasizing the need to protect sensitive financial data while still ensuring the client’s business remained unaffected.
“Financial service providers must tread carefully when requesting client data. It is critical to uphold the delicate balance between regulatory requirements and an individual’s right to financial privacy,” said Mark Meuser, an attorney with the Dhillon Law Group. “We are satisfied with Stripe’s decision to withdraw its request, allowing Dr. Malone to continue his valuable work without unnecessary intrusion into his business affairs.”
If conservatives had any political utility whatsoever, they would immediately pass a law denying the right of every federally-regulated corporation providing any payment or banking service to deny those services to any citizen for any reason. Loans, of course, would be excepted from these guaranteed services. It’s not as if there isn’t ample precedent for this, as Congress passes laws requiring access for everything from college to restaurants. The idea that corporations should be granted Constitutional rights so they can act as a form of shadow thought police is fundamentally flawed.
The fact that conservatives won’t defend the right of citizens and nationals to participate in the economy, and instead are signing off on anti-constitutional antisemitism laws, is all one needs to know in order to grasp the fundamental uselessness of conservatives and the Republican establishment alike. Which means both conservatism and the Republican Party are going to eventually go the way of the equally useless Conservative Party in Great Britain, which is presently on track to be comprehensively wiped out by the Labour Party.
It’s bad enough that an evil party is evil. But that is its purpose. There is absolutely no reason for a party that is supposed to be good, but instead reliably supports that which is evil, to even exist.