There is good reason that the Right—along with increasing numbers of Americans—is distrustful of our public institutions, some of which need to be razed and some of which need to be rejuvenated. For many Americans, bromides against the “tyrannical government” and talk of “creeping Marxism” is not simply a product of their own populist delusions but is an understandable reaction to the insanity they see every day on the news. Though the comprehensive solution to our current dilemma ventures beyond the political, a political response that is both far-reaching and prudential is absolutely essential.

Major financial institutions de-banking organizations or individuals for religious reasons probably strikes the average American as a conspiracy theory fit for a raving, right-wing lunatic. Last week, however, it was reported that there is good reason to think this has been happening for some time. 

Financial officials from 13 states wrote a letter to Bank of America, the second largest bank in the United States, calling them to task for a pattern of de-banking Christian ministries and individuals. They cited a handful of cases where this occurred without good cause. Bank accounts that were closed for vague and shifting reasons included those of Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Christian organization that cares for orphaned children in Uganda; a Memphis, Tennessee, church that donates to IAM; Indigenous Advance Customer Center, a separate business that also serves in Uganda; the Timothy Two Project International, which trains pastors in over 65 countries; and Christian author and podcaster Lance Wallnau. 

The bank closure letters claimed that BoA could no longer serve that “business type” and also that the organizations exceeded the “bank’s risk tolerance”; months later, BoA also maintained they don’t work with for-profit businesses that do debt collection. “Neither Indigenous Advance Ministries nor the church collect debts,” the letter notes, “nor was the bank able to point to any policy prohibiting account holders from engaging in such activities. In other words that rationale was a ruse, and even if legitimate, would only apply to one of the closed accounts.”

A similar letter sent in 2022, signed by 60 financial professionals, alleged that JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One, and Morgan Stanley have engaged in similar patterns of behavior against other Christian ministries and individuals.

Right-wing dissidents began using the term “regime” to describe this exact problem: private corporations targeting the political and cultural enemies of those who always seem to occupy the seats of power, and whose interests are never fundamentally threatened during the brief times they’re out of power. Using regime in this way is imprecise—why not simply describe present-day America as an oligarchy?—and it has been overused, just as any political term of art will be. But it became popular nonetheless because it describes how power at scale actually functions in America today.

The baleful effects of our current governing authorities go far beyond simply adding reams of regulatory red tape to public works projects or stifling the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual. Instead, public and private institutions and actors are regularly engaged in coordinated efforts to unperson those who fall out of line with the approved moral consensus. 

Probably the most famous of these cancellation attempts is Brendan Eich, who was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla for donating money to a campaign that opposed the imposition of same-sex marriage in California. As Andrew Beck noted in a recent profile of Eich at First Things, “A visionary technologist whose work had made the web a more accessible, free, and enjoyable experience for everyone was condemned as a hateful bigot and treated as a pariah by his company, the press, and on the internet that he was so instrumental in building.” 

Though Eich went on to found Brave, a search engine that’s been having recent success, not all have been so lucky. Remember Jack Phillips, the cake baker from Colorado who won his Supreme Court case against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission? He’s now caught up in yet another lawsuit for declining to make a cake for a gender transition—a lawsuit filed on the same day in 2017 when the Supreme Court announced it would hear the Masterpiece case.  

Defining the Regime

In the Politics, Aristotle described the regime as having four constituent elements—the ruling body, the ruling institutions, the way of life, and the ends at which the regime aims. But of these features, he reasoned that “the governing body is the regime,” because it “has authority in the city.” Continuing on, Aristotle noted that “whatever the authoritative element conceives to be honorable will necessarily be followed by the opinion of the other citizens.” 

In a two-part series on this topic, American Reformer’s Josh Abbotoy defined the modern use of regime thusly: “A set of public, quasi-public and private actors exercising coordinated power for the purposes of advancing a shared agenda for social and political control.” What Abbotoy summarizes is the governing body in modern America, which goes beyond merely political offices. As he notes, it is composed of a dense web of elected officials, the intelligence community, boards of Fortune 100 companies, hedge fund managers, non-profits, and NGOs. And what these institutions and individuals think is honorable (or what they need to say to do business), from LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter pieties to abortion and feminism, is what is in fact honored in every major public and private institution today.

Abbotoy discusses how through the imposition of regulations, the administrative state “commandeers quasi-public actors in order to further policy goals through expansive uses of existing statutory authority (e.g., higher education and Title IX, or DEI requirements amongst government contractors).” Even worse is the coordination between the national security sector and social media giants. The Twitter Files uncovered a vast operation between pre-Elon Twitter and the intelligence community, which worked in concert to deplatform unruly individuals and prevent stories from being shared that would have damaged Joe Biden’s electoral prospects in 2020.

With that being said, there are critics of using regime as a pejorative, catch-all term to describe who rules in America currently.

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