One coalition of non-profit organizations ran an organized pressure campaign against industry, for years. It started in 2017, with the SPLC and another non-profit informally coordinating. It intensified and formalized in 2018, under SPLC co-leadership. It escalated sharply in 2020 and 2021.
The campaign had two main components. The first was public advocacy and communications work. The second, less visible but more consequential, was a series of meetings with industry. Hundreds of meetings. With a specific target set of companies.
The campaign’s declared aims were three. To convince those companies to censor more communications the coalition characterized as hate. To blacklist organizations and individuals the coalition characterized as promulgators of hate or violence. And to interdict the flow of funds to those blacklisted parties.
The coalition claimed to be non-partisan. Be on the lookout for mentions of “non-partisan,” because it is a word the coalition understands differently than I do.
The coalition calls its targets “Internet companies” and relies on government, media, and the public to not read the fine print. In it, they define Internet company mendaciously to include banks, credit card processors, and any other financial infrastructure their enemies could touch. The coalition was going after posts, but it was also and primarily going after money. I will use the language “industry participants” going forward to identify who they met with.
Industry participants included Facebook, Twitter, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard, and many other firms. Some were among the largest companies in the world. Others had fewer than 10 employees. (I estimate headcount based on published reporting and industry experience.)
Stripe was an industry participant. I was employed at Stripe continuously from late 2016 through early 2023, covering the entire period under discussion. I remain an active advisor to Stripe. Stripe does not necessarily endorse what I write in my personal spaces.
This series of hundreds of meetings involved hundreds of employees from industry participants. Those employees included C-suite executives and managers and individual contributors across a host of functions. Those functions included communications, legal, government affairs, Trust and Safety, and compliance professionals.
Meeting notes were frequently kept, and sometimes widely circulated, as is the routine practice in industry. The meetings were documented on calendar invites (often with full participant lists), shared docs, attachments, emails, and other contemporaneous records. In the ordinary practice of industry these primary documents distribute themselves promiscuously into secondary documents; think of an email being screenshot to paste into a PowerPoint to discuss the response in a meeting. Records exist on conservatively hundreds of systems and can be accessed by many more than 10,000 people.
No employee of an industry participant I have spoken to, familiar with the contents of the meetings, was willing to provide quotes for publication with their name and corporate affiliation attached.
Their reasoning included not being authorized to disclose private information, fear for their personal and corporate reputation, future career consequences for leaking, personal consequences for being identified adjacent to national political controversies, in some cases fear for their physical safety, and in some cases unwillingness to betray a cause they personally support.
Industry participants recount the tone of the meetings differently, and as varying over the meetings. Some meetings were strained-but-professional. Sometimes the coalition participants were described as demanding and “hectoring.” Industry participants report abusive remarks towards their companies and to the people in the meeting.
Industry participants were repeatedly told that if they did not accede to demands they would be profiting from evil, complicit in the death of innocents, or benefitting from white supremacy. The innocents claimed to be at risk were often specifically identified as black, including during a period of intense societal concern for the lives of black Americans specifically. Industry participants were told that they wanted this. That they were taking “blood money”. Industry participants repeatedly felt personally attacked, in ways and using language not normative in their professional experience.
On the account of multiple industry participants, coalition participants explicitly held individuals in the meeting personally responsible for the actions of their employers. This was aimed at individuals with substantial influence and authority in companies, and also at junior employees.
Industry participants describe the coalition participants as threatening their employers, openly and by implication.
The most commonly described threat was coordinated negative public messaging with the goal of causing reputational harm to the industry participants. Feared comms outcomes ran the gamut from heavy mainstream media coverage to a Twitter pile on. Twitter is real life, particularly when a large and vocal contingent of your employees use it and Slack simultaneously. Ever been pulled into a meeting over a single customer tweet then burn weeks on managing the fallout? Count yourself lucky.
Less commonly, the industry participants perceived they were being threatened with adverse legislative, executive, or regulatory action indirectly by coalition participants who are reasonably read as exercising substantial political influence. Industry participants sometimes report that coalition participants flaunted their political influence.
Industry participants were repeatedly told that if they did not accede to specific demands, they would share the blame for future deaths. Bits about Money has reviewed contemporaneous records which unequivocally make this claim, authored by coalition participants. We note that this echoes language the coalition routinely puts in press releases, Medium posts, and similar artifacts after presumptively careful review of the phrasing. The coalition was inconsistently disciplined in phrasing in documents we have reviewed, and we decline to quote their phrasing, in part, out of charity.
You will share the blame. We will hold you responsible.
Patrick McKenzie has done what the institutional press will not. He names a coalition of tax-exempt charities operating a private intelligence service, documents the conduct in the coalition’s own voice, and publishes with archived primary sources any reader can verify. The piece does not depend on whistleblowers. It depends on the coalition’s annual reports, sworn Congressional testimony, podcast interviews with friendly hosts, and demand letters posted on coalition WordPress sites. The architects narrated their own conduct in venues where they expected applause. McKenzie listened.
The piece reports on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and the Change the Terms (CTT) coalition it co-founded with the Center for American Progress in 2018. CTT included Color of Change, Common Cause, Free Press, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Muslim Advocates, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and others. From 2017 through 2023, the coalition ran hundreds of meetings with tech and finance companies, secured policy changes, nominated accounts for termination, and intervened against a declared candidate for the presidency in January 2023.
The story is real and the documentation is solid. Reading the piece against the analytical frameworks I use, several things come into focus.
The financial infrastructure point is the load
Most readers will encounter this as a censorship story. That reading misses the move that makes the operation novel. The coalition’s primary artifact, the Terms, redefines “Internet Companies” to include banks, credit card brands, and any business that moves money through a web or mobile interface. Mastercard predates the commercial Internet by decades. The coalition needed Mastercard inside the tent because the campaign was always primarily about money, not posts.
McKenzie sees this and he is right to lead with the SPLC’s own Congressional testimony from January 2020, in which Lecia Brooks tells the House Financial Services Committee: “A key part of this strategy has been to target these organizations’ funding.”
The shift from speech moderation to payment interdiction is the political innovation of the period. Criminal prosecution requires a state, courts, and constitutional limits. Infrastructural exclusion requires only a coalition with enough moral authority to pressure private gatekeepers. If you can cut someone’s banking, payment processing, hosting, fundraising rails, and discoverability, you do not need to imprison him. He cannot operate. He cannot scale. He cannot reach an audience.
The First Amendment binds the state. Nothing of comparable force binds a coalition of charities pressuring a payment processor. The constitutional novelty is exactly here. Government cannot debank you for protected speech. A coalition that pressures your bank to debank you faces no such limit. The coalition is not the state. The bank is not the state. The constitutional architecture of free expression in the United States assumes that the threat to speech comes from government. The coalition routed around the architecture.
That is the deeper harm. The coalition normalized a regime in which private actors with state-adjacent moral authority decide who gets banking, payment processing, and platform access. The regime persists after CTT has scaled back. The plumbing remains. Donors who funded CTT migrated to adjacent vehicles. Personnel rotate. The map of who gets debanked has not contracted.
The coalition’s sincerity is part of how it worked
A surface reading treats the coalition as cynical operators using “hate” as a pretext for partisan power. That reading is wrong, and being wrong about it leads to bad analysis.
The coalition genuinely felt frightened after Charlottesville and January 6. Many participants believed they were preventing political violence. The fear was real. Stephen Turner’s framework on convenient beliefs explains this. A belief can be both sincere and convenient. The conviction that “speech is inseparable from conduct” is convenient because it licenses censorship as harm prevention. It is also held with felt certainty by the people who articulate it. The convenience does not require dishonesty. The hero system makes the convenience invisible to the believer.
Ernest Becker’s account of hero systems explains why intelligent people inside the coalition could not see what McKenzie sees from outside. When your hero system defines the enemy as cosmic threat to democracy, racial justice, or human dignity, election filings do not transmute the enemy into a candidate. They make him a candidate-shaped threat. Trump was not a candidate to the coalition. He was a hate actor who happened to file FEC paperwork. The coalition’s claim of non-partisanship was not strategic dissembling. It was the natural self-understanding of people whose hero system had defined one half of American politics as outside the bounds of legitimate democratic contest.
This matters because it predicts the durability of the structure. Cynical operators can be dislodged by exposure. Sincere believers cannot. The coalition will reform under new names with new personnel and the same self-understanding. The exposure McKenzie has produced will register inside the coalition as further evidence of attack by the hate actors. Becker calls this the immune logic of hero systems. Threats from outside confirm the heroism of the inside.
The internal-external speech split is interaction ritual product
McKenzie has both the public statements of the coalition and accounts from industry participants of what happened in closed meetings. The two do not match. In meetings, coalition participants told industry employees that they would share blame for future deaths, called industry compensation “blood money,” and identified individuals in the room as personally responsible for the actions of their employers. In published statements, the coalition adopted disciplined language locating agency in industry: the coalition “recommends,” industry adopts the policy, industry enforces what is now industry’s policy.
Randall Collins’s account of interaction ritual chains explains the split. Closed meetings produce emotional energy that bonds coalition participants and licenses moral speech that would embarrass the coalition if printed. The energy is real. The bonds are real. The moral certainty generated by the rituals carries into the next meeting and the next, accumulating across hundreds of encounters. Each meeting reinforces the cosmic stakes. Each meeting raises the threshold for what counts as acceptable industry response. The discipline collapses inside the room because the room is the engine that produces the discipline outside the room.
Industry participants who endured the meetings describe the experience as professionally novel. The tone of moral accusation aimed at junior employees doing compliance work is not how interagency or industry meetings normally proceed. It is how religious confrontation proceeds. The coalition treated the meetings as confrontations with sin. Industry treated them as work. The asymmetry favors the side that thinks the stakes are cosmic.
McKenzie has caught the divergence between internal and external speech. He does not theorize it as ritual product, but the data are there for the reading. The internal speech is the truth of the coalition. The external speech is the cover that makes the internal speech sustainable across the institutional layer between the meetings and the public.
CAP responded because CAP can. The silence of the others is information.
McKenzie reached out fifteen times to ten organizations. One responded. The Center for American Progress provided a statement that minimized its involvement, did not deny signing the letters, did not deny the content of the demands, and reframed the motive as concern for Meta’s “confusing application of its own standards.”
Coalition arithmetic explains the asymmetry. CAP under Neera Tanden (b. 1970) has spent two decades building durable Beltway position. Its alliance network reaches deep into Democratic Party staff infrastructure, the donor class, and friendly press. CAP can afford the cost of engagement because CAP knows its allies will absorb the engagement and recirculate the framing. The smaller members of the coalition cannot. GPAHE is post-SPLC and small. Color of Change is mid-size and exposed. Free Press has a niche policy audience. For these organizations, silence is cheaper than reply. Any reply opens the door to follow-up questions, follow-up reporting, and the kind of accumulating record that produces an indictment.
CAP’s non-denial is itself confirmation of the structure. The letters exist. The signatures exist. The demands exist. CAP cannot deny these things because the documents are public. CAP can only reframe the motive. The reframing concedes the conduct.
Alliance Theory predicts this pattern. Coalition members protect each other through silence and through coordinated reframing when silence is not an option. The defection that would produce real information—a former coalition member explaining the meeting structure on the record—does not occur because the cost of defection is total exclusion from the alliance network. People who work in this sector do not have careers outside it. The coalition is a labor market.
CTT is the artifact. The complex is the structure.
The piece’s analytical limit is that it treats Change the Terms as the story. CTT is downstream of a longer pattern. The Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and a small number of other funders built the donor pipeline that sustains the coalition. The donors fund the NGOs. The NGOs run the meetings with the platforms. The platforms employ trust-and-safety professionals who came up through the same NGO pipeline. The Hill staffers who hold the hearings overlap with NGO alumni. Press coverage of the coalition runs through reporters whose Rolodex is the coalition’s communications team.
Cutting CTT does not cut the coalition’s successors. The donors will fund the next vehicle. The personnel will rotate. The function persists. The relevant unit of analysis is the donor-NGO-platform-press-Hill complex, not any one coalition. The coalition is the visible artifact. The complex is the persistent structure.
This is why the indictment of the SPLC on bank fraud, while legally significant, will not end the regime. The bank fraud charge focuses on whether SPLC misrepresented payment purposes to its bank, which is paperwork rather than policy. The complex that produced SPLC will produce its replacement. The Intelligence Project will be reconstituted under different letterhead. The donor relationships will reattach. The Hill access will resume. McKenzie sees the legal exposure clearly. The structural problem is upstream of any legal exposure.
McKenzie can publish this because his audience can read it
The piece’s commercial position is part of how it became possible. McKenzie writes from inside the fintech and payments world. His readership skews technical, financially literate, libertarian-adjacent, and skeptical of both progressive coalition power and right-wing populism. He has Stripe equity, an advisory relationship with Stripe, and sponsorship revenue from Mercury, Meter, and Granola. His core audience does not overlap the coalition’s donor and staff base.
The institutional press cannot run this story because the institutional press’s core audience does overlap the coalition’s base. The reporters who cover platforms come from beats where the NGOs are sources. The editors who would assign the piece socialize with coalition staff. The advertisers who fund the institutional outlets share boards with coalition donors. The story exists where it does because the audience exists where it does.
This is the deeper story about the contemporary press. Independent operators with their own readership and their own sponsors can do reporting that institutional outlets cannot do, on subjects where the institutional outlet’s alliance network includes the subject of the reporting. McKenzie has independence in part because he never depended on the institutions he is reporting on. The institutional press depends on those institutions for access, sources, advertising, and social standing. The independence McKenzie has is itself a kind of capital.
Whether the piece reaches beyond its existing audience depends on whether mainstream outlets pick it up. Early signs suggest they will not. That outcome itself confirms part of what McKenzie has documented.
What McKenzie does not say but the documents support
The coalition’s redefinition of “Internet Companies” to include banks and credit card brands was not a drafting accident. It was the move that gave the operation its reach. Without the banks and the card networks, the coalition has only platforms. With the banks, the coalition has the entire material substrate of organized political activity. Money is more fundamental than messaging. You can lose your Twitter account and still raise money. You cannot lose your merchant processor and still raise money.
The coalition understood this. Color of Change’s executive director Rashad Robinson described it directly on Hillary Clinton’s (b. 1947) podcast in March 2021: the campaign began with credit card companies and payment processors, then moved to banks, then back. The financial layer was the target from the beginning. The platforms were the leverage to reach the financial layer.
This is why the SPLC indictment matters more than the political content of the SPLC’s advocacy. The Bank Secrecy Act regime makes it difficult for any organization to run a covert payment scheme without misrepresenting the purpose of the payments to its bank. The same financial surveillance regime the coalition expanded to target its enemies caught the coalition itself. The Intelligence Project paid informants through arrangements that, on the indictment’s account, required false statements to the SPLC’s bank. The privatization of intelligence work bumps against banking compliance because intelligence work requires opacity and banking compliance requires transparency. You cannot have both.
The coalition built a regime in which financial gatekeepers police political speech. The regime then policed the coalition. Whether this is irony or justice depends on whether the regime survives. Either outcome confirms that the financial layer is now the live political layer.
Where the piece points without arriving
McKenzie ends on the moral authority of charities as a commons. The frame is correct but does not go far enough. The 501(c)(3) tax exemption is not a privilege extended in trade for forsaking flackery. It is a privilege extended in trade for serving a public purpose held in common. The coalition did not just become flacks. The coalition became a private adjunct to state power, exercising functions a constitutional state cannot exercise, while claiming the moral premium of charitable service.
This is the constitutional novelty and McKenzie does not name it. American free expression doctrine assumes the state is the threat. The coalition is not the state. The platforms and banks the coalition pressures are not the state. None of the actors in the chain trip the constitutional wires. The result is a censorship regime that operates through entirely private parties using entirely lawful pressure to produce outcomes that, if the state attempted them directly, would be struck down on First Amendment grounds within a fortnight.
The fix for this is not a new statute. The fix is a shift in how the public reads the coalition. Once readers understand that “civil society” can become a parallel power center with intelligence, lobbying, and enforcement functions, the moral authority of the coalition begins to deflate. McKenzie’s piece accelerates the deflation. The piece works by showing the coalition’s conduct in the coalition’s own voice and letting readers reach the obvious conclusion. That is the right method for the moment. Argument loses to artifact when artifact is available.
The coalition will reform. The donors will fund the successor. The personnel will rotate. The function will persist. The question for the next decade is whether enough of the public develops the analytical equipment to see the function through the cycling of names. McKenzie has contributed equipment. Whether the equipment finds users is the open question.
