Liberty Counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom, Pacific Justice Institute, FAIR, Family Research Council, MassResistance, and the Center for Immigration Studies are all organizations known to AFN readers. All those groups and many others are cited in the “Bankrolling Bigotry” report. That call to action, published in 2020, calls for ending the groups’ access to financial services, dropping their IRS non-profit status, and blocking their online fund-raising capability, because their views are considered harmful to society.
The report also names the American Family Association, the Mississippi-based ministry that is the parent organization of American Family News.
The “Bankrolling Bigotry” report was created by a London-based think tank, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which states its mission is to reverse “extremism” and “disinformation.”
For its report, the Institute states it defined "hate" as "beliefs or practices that result in attacking, maligning, delegitimising or excluding an entire class of people on the basis of immutable characteristics, including their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability."
To accumulate its list of groups, 73 in all, the Institute relied heavily on the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. That Alabama-based group, which fought Jim Crow laws in the 1960s, is credited with inventing the “hate group” label for the Klan and Neo-Nazi groups scattered around the country. More recently, the SPLC began adding right-leaning groups such as ADF and AFA to its "hate list," too.
The “Bankrolling Bigotry” report follows a similar pattern. Under the label “Anti-LGBTQ+,” for example, ADF, Liberty Counsel, FRC, and AFA are listed with Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church.
The report also makes no distinction between Westboro and groups such as AFA and FRC, whose views reflect orthodox Christianity. The report ominously concludes that all "anti-LGBTQ" groups are "masked behind the banner of Christian and evangelical activism."
House subcommittee uncovered Treasury docs
With a copy of the “Bankrolling Bigotry” report in hand, a financial crimes agency at the U.S. Treasury Department sent the report in 2021 to top banking executives at major U.S. banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citibank, and JP Morgan Chase.
The secretive plan by the Biden administration to punish its political enemies now dates back three years ago. It was only made public last week when Treasury Department documents were released by the appropriately-named House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The government culprit behind the bank lobbying is a Treasury agency called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. That agency was also named by the House weaponization subcommittee, which learned FinCEN used the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol to ask banks to filter customer transactions for words such as “MAGA” and “Trump,” and to flag purchases at stores known for gun sales such as Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shop.
On his “Today’s Issues” show this week, AFA president Tim Wildmon summarized the issue for the radio audience. “The Treasury Department,” Wildmon said, “puts out a memo to banks all across America, 'Hey, these are groups you need to avoid doing business with because they're hate groups.'”
The public now knows, Wildmon added, that a “far-left” special interest group defined what “hate” means and then that definition was willingly adopted by our own federal government to target its political enemies.
