Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles faces de-banking over alleged ‘legally binding order’

A major payment processing platform revealed that it halted payouts to a Daily Wire political commentator due to “a legally binding order.”

On Monday, Michael Knowles accused payment platform Stripe of possibly “de-banking” him. He speculated that the suspension was a reaction to his political opinions.

‘Looking forward to resolving this issue with Tennessee.’

“Hi, @Stripe. Are we still doing this de-banking thing? Was it something I said?” Knowles wrote. “If we say that men can’t be women, if we donate to pro-life charities, if we oppose two men buying eggs, renting wombs, and commoditizing babies.”

“Does that come at the cost of de-banking?” he questioned.

In a multi-post thread, the Daily Wire host explained that payments from his monetized X account “abruptly stopped” six months ago. Assuming it was “an innocent mistake,” he reached out to Stripe’s user support to rectify the issue.

Stripe’s support team confirmed that it had “temporarily disabled” his payouts, stating that it sent a message to X in October with more details about the pause, according to screenshots uploaded by Knowles.

The payment platform reportedly instructed him to contact X directly to obtain more information.

“I would recommend contacting your platform for more information, as we can’t provide any further information on this account hold,” a screenshot of a support email reads.

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  Photo Illustration by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Knowles said that he then asked X for assistance on the matter, but its team referred him back to Stripe.

“We have confirmed this issue is not on our end — and you will need to login [sic] to Stripe and contact them to sort this out,” an X team member reportedly wrote.

Knowles concluded that Stripe’s decision to suspend his account was likely a retaliatory act due to his political views, emphasizing that he had not violated any of the platform’s stated “prohibited businesses” rules.

“Since I haven’t been distributing fake IDs, selling drugs, or jamming telecommunications equipment, it seems Stripe concluded that my political opinions had somehow violated their policy against encouraging ‘unlawful violence’ against certain demographics,” Knowles stated. “Of course, I’ve never encouraged ‘unlawful violence’ against anyone. But in the absence of any real explanation from Stripe, I can only conclude that they’ve now decided that certain conservative opinions amount to ‘illegal’ activity.”

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  Michael Knowles. Photo by Jason Davis/Getty Images for The Daily Wire

Stripe responded to Knowles, requesting that he contact them directly to resolve the issue.

A few hours later, Stripe reached out again, offering additional information about the circumstances surrounding the pause. Yet its second post raised more questions than it answered.

“By way of follow-up, we can confirm that the restrictions placed on your account were not taken unilaterally by Stripe, but were the result of a legally binding order that was issued to us. Our support team previously reached out to X regarding this matter. In order to maintain your privacy, we are following up with you in a separate email with additional information,” Stripe wrote.

While it remains unclear what the order pertains to, Knowles provided an update on the issue on Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m pleased to say Stripe has reached out to resolve this strange issue, which appears to have begun with a government administrative error rather than intentional de-banking,” Knowles wrote. “As we investigate, I’m even more pleased to say that we’re also exploring legislative solutions to the lack of transparency that often makes these issues unresolvable for countless Americans. Will discuss more on the show and keep everyone posted as this develops.”

Stripe responded, stating, “Thanks for working with us. Looking forward to resolving this issue with Tennessee. At Stripe, our role is to process payments — we do not take action on accounts based on political speech.”

When reached for comment, Stripe referred Blaze News to its response to Knowles on X.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

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