On Tuesday, The Federalist posted an article about the actions of private corporations regarding the war in Ukraine. Private corporations are denying services or products to Russia or to entitles connected to Russia. They are conducting their own private boycotts. Some of these companies are major corporation such as American Express, Apple, and Microsoft. That may seem like a good thing, but the pattern is troubling.

The article reports:

It could be tempting to cheer the move for targeting Russia’s authoritarian regime and condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attacks on the people of Ukraine. But the actions by private companies against Russians are part of a larger swing by U.S. corporations to deny services to those whose opinions they deem unacceptable — and that’s exactly the kind of social credit system Russia is building to impose on its own people.

That’s what we saw in Canada when bank accounts and other assets of protesting truckers were frozen.

The article notes:

Punishment might include anything from slower internet speeds to being barred from flying or staying in certain hotels. There have also been reports of people being denied higher education and having their pets confiscated.

If you think comparisons between Russia and China’s authoritarian credit systems and the increasing dragnet in the United States are outlandish, just think about how Mastercard and American Express blocked donations to Americans whose beliefs about the 2020 election were found unacceptable, while Visa’s political action committee used the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 to “temporarily suspend[] all political donations.” Paypal, Venmo, and Shopify all went after people who were supposedly involved in the riot.

A friend of mine had her Paypal account terminated because she used a credit card to buy a hamburger in Washington on the weekend of January 6th. She did not go near the Capitol–she went back to her hotel room after the rally, but her Paypal account was still canceled because her credit card company reported that she had made a transaction in Washington that weekend. This is not the America I grew up in.

The article concludes:

We shouldn’t cheer U.S. firms for appointing themselves the arbiters of who deserves to participate in our economy (and by extension, our society). If they can do it to Russia, they can do it to you.

But we also shouldn’t cheer such actions because they move us one step closer to blurring the line between ourselves and the authoritarian tyrants we purport to denounce. If we defeat Russia or China by making our differences unrecognizable, we’ve already lost.