Billionaire shocks Joe Rogan with stories of right-wingers being ‘debanked’ for their political views

Joe Rogan recently interviewed Marc Andreessen, and what the tech investing legend told him was enough to make Rogan audibly gasp.

Dave Rubin plays the clip of their conversation about right-wing tech entrepreneurs being “debanked” for their political views.

“Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a ‘politically exposed person’ — PEP. … You are required by financial regulators to kick [PEPs] out of your bank,” Andreessen said.

“What?!” Rogan gasped. “What if you’re politically on the left?”

“Well, that’s fine,” Andreessen explained.

“So no one on the left gets debanked?” Rogan asked in disbelief.

“I have not heard of a single instance of anyone on the left getting debanked,” said Andreessen.

He then pointed to David Horowitz as an example of someone who was debanked for being a conservative.

“He's pro-Trump. … He's been very anti-Islamic terrorism; he's been very worried about migration — all these things. And they debanked him for that,” said Andreessen, clarifying that being debanked means “you get kicked out of your bank account” and “you can’t do credit card transactions.”

“How is that legal?” Rogan asked next.

Andreessen explained that while there is an amendment that protects free speech, there isn’t one that prevents the government from pressuring banks to debank the people they don’t like.

“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,’ and JPMorgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, because they're a private company, and so it's this sleight of hand that happens,” Andreessen told Rogan. “It's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran.”

Andreessen went on to explain that during the Obama administration, certain legal businesses were debanked simply because of the industry they were in. The initiative was called “Operation Choke Point 1.0.”

“So if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, guess what? You're doing your business all in cash because you literally can't get a bank account; you can't get a Visa terminal; you can't process transactions; you can't do payroll; you can't do direct deposit; you can't get insurance,” he said. “You’ve been sanctioned.”

“And then [the Biden] administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents,” he added, noting that this initiative is called “Operation Choke Point 2.0.”

“We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years,” he told Rogan, who was flabbergasted, adding that this is why he supported Trump.

To hear Dave’s commentary on the debanking scandal, watch the clip above.

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