A PNC Bank employee, reviewing whether to continue doing business with a conservative client, wrote in an internal communication that it was "really difficult to justify aligning ourselves with a company whose owners have built very public personas around opinions very contrary to PNC's beliefs/values." Not the client's credit risk. Not their payment history. Their opinions.
That employee had help deciding which opinions were unacceptable. The Southern Poverty Law Center provided the list.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — the Treasury Department regulator that oversees national banks — released a report last week documenting what many conservatives suspected but couldn't prove: America's largest banks systematically cut off customers over their political and religious views between 2020 and September 2025, and four of them — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, and TD Bank — used the SPLC's "hate group" designations as a basis for those decisions.
The numbers are staggering. The OCC reviewed nine national banks, examined nearly 100,000 complaints, and combed through approximately 420,000 pages of internal bank documents. What they found was a financial system that had been quietly weaponized. Comptroller Jonathan Gould put it plainly: "Today's report provides irrefutable evidence that the nation's largest banks have denied, debanked and discriminated against customers and lawful businesses."
The examples read like a political enemies list. In February 2021, WePay — a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary — closed the account of a merchant selling Trump merchandise. The screening system flagged terms like "MAGA," "Make America Great," and "America First." A religious nonprofit had its banking services terminated after an employee described the organization as a "right wing religious conservative" group. A conservative media company had its credit line rejected in late 2021. An event organizer lost their account over social media posts criticizing President Biden and Dr. Fauci.
Wells Fargo employees noted internally that "under the Biden administration, banks could face greater supervisory pressure to move away from lending to the firearms industry."
The SPLC — which was indicted on fraud charges earlier this year — has operated for decades as a left-wing labeling machine, slapping "hate group" tags on organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, a mainstream legal nonprofit that has won cases before the Supreme Court. Matt Sharp of Alliance Defending Freedom called the Treasury findings "a huge win for every single American," adding that Americans "will never worry about their credit card or loan being canceled because of their religious or political beliefs."
JPMorgan's response was revealing. A spokesperson told reporters the bank "identified it, corrected it, and the business no longer operates." But in a separate statement to Bloomberg, the bank admitted that "years of operating in a regulatory environment that often second-guessed decisions contributed to a culture of caution across the banking industry." Translation: the government made us do it, and also we did it on our own, and also it's fixed now.
The SPLC issued its own statement claiming "the charges against the SPLC are provably wrong" and "based on inaccurate facts." An organization currently under federal indictment for fraud is lecturing a federal regulator about inaccurate facts. The irony writes itself, but the consequences don't.
Banks didn't just restrict industries with arguable risk profiles — Arctic drilling, coal, private prisons. They restricted customers for wearing the wrong hat. The OCC found that decisions that should have rested on "measurable, impartial, risk-based standards" were instead driven by subjective judgments about public opinion. An unelected activist organization with a 501(c)(3) was functioning as an unofficial credit bureau for political ideology.
The regulatory apparatus has since started moving. The OCC and FDIC finalized a rule on reputation risk in April 2025. The Federal Reserve removed reputation risk from its examination framework in June 2025. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's department is now considering additional rules, including allowing confidential supervisory information to be used in private litigation — meaning the people who got debanked might finally get to see the internal documents that explain why.
Four hundred twenty thousand pages of evidence. Nine banks. Five years of political discrimination, outsourced to an activist group the federal government is currently prosecuting for fraud.
