Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told Joe Rogan that the Biden administration has weaponized financial institutions to “debank” entities politically opposed to the White House’s agenda.
“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,” Andreessen said. “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,” he explained. “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, Andreessen said, “Debanking. 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 continued. “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.”
He noted that he has not “heard of a single instance of anyone on the Left getting debanked,” adding, “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,” Andreessen further explained. “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, so basically, 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,” he added. “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.”
Andreessen went on to explain that process began under “Operation Truck Point,” where the Obama administration “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.”
Under the Biden administration, Andreessen said, debanking extended to “tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents.”
“We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years,” he stated. “This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It’s like we just can’t live in this world.”
