Yesterday I received yet another email (I get a lot of them these days) from one of the thousands of hard-left political campaign groups masquerading as a charity:

International consumer watchdog SumOfUs has filed a shareholder resolution proposing that Mastercard establish a committee on human rights, to address the threat posed by far-right extremists.

The resolution highlights that extremists like Tommy Robinson and known far-right hate groups use Mastercard, but none of the company’s existing board committees have responsibility for overseeing human rights issues. Shareholders argue that this leaves the company exposed to risk on human rights.

One would have thought a consumer watchdog looked out for the interests of consumers rather than attempt to silence political figures by forcing companies to withdraw services from them, but then Oxfam was supposed to help hungry people not organise gang-bangs with destitute teenagers in Haiti.

Eoin Dubsky, Campaign Manager at SumOfUs, said: “We know that Mastercard currently accepts credit card payments to several dangerous hate groups and extremists like Tommy Robinson. This proves that its executives cannot currently manage the human rights risks associated with the business.

“We were alarmed when the corporation mounted a legal challenge against our resolution. It would have done better to put the time and resources spent on fighting our proposal into addressing legitimate concerns that its consumers, employees and shareholders have about human rights. 

“As we’ve seen to such devastating effect in recent months, gone unchecked, hate speech has terrible consequences for innocent people. We look to all corporations to play their part in ensuring their services and products aren’t used to sow the seeds of discrimination, hatred and violence. It is essential that companies like Mastercard have the policies and processes in place to deal effectively with hate speech and human rights abuses.”

Under the guise of protecting human rights, this outfit wants to remove essential services from anyone who disagrees with their hard-left political viewpoint. Now Mastercard is one of the most woke corporations out there and, if the internet is to be believed, behind the deplatforming of several wrongthinkers from Patreon and PayPal. That they have swatted away the demands of this particular group of nutters suggests even they might be wondering where this is all heading. If Mastercard were to start withdrawing services from existing customers because of their political views, they might suddenly find 30,000 people maxing out their cards and refusing to pay their bills in an act of “political protest”. That’s going to be a bigger problem than a few edgelords complaining they’ve been kicked off PayPal.