Missouri Treasurer Makes a Banking Deposit

It didn’t make a lot of headlines last month when financial officers of 16 states, including Missouri, fired a warning shot over the bow of the nation’s biggest banks. But it should have been very big news, for they delivered a message that goes right to the heart of where the nation’s culture wars are taking us.

To wit: Wall Street banks need to step away from policies designed to make it tougher for oil producers to do business. Otherwise, they risk losing any investment or business transactions with the billions of dollars of public funds those states administer.

There are good reasons why Scott Fitzpatrick, Missouri’s treasurer, was on board with that effort. It’s bad enough that we have an administration committed to killing off an entire sector and hundreds of thousands of jobs—with predictable results on energy pricing. Having the banks pile onto that is only going to hurt consumers, the poorest of whom will bear a disproportionately high burden.

It’s not like Fitzpatrick is motivated by the best interests of Big Oil: Missouri harvested a whopping 62,000 barrels of oil in 2020. That’s about 20 minutes’ worth of production down in Texas, where they pump out nearly 1.8 billion barrels a year.

“Missouri is not a huge producer, but obviously, fossil fuels power our economy,” Fitzpatrick told us. “Let me preface this: I support the idea
of the private sector pushing toward more renewable energy, clearing the way to a future where it’s going to be clean and more renewable. But we can’t just flip a switch and make that happen.”

Denying capital to companies providing current sources of energy is not going to make that any better, he says, and it will only increase costs for consumers in the near-term.

“To me, this is more about the states and whether they should be doing business with institutions making decisions to discriminate against the fossil fuels, firearms or any other industry,” Fitzpatrick says. “This is more about banks making decisions that are not in the best interest of their shareholders, about damaging our economy and about damaging other businesses. I just don’t think that, as a state, we should be doing business with financial institutions choosing to discriminate against companies in perfectly legal lines of business.”

Fitzpatrick is right when he says there’s more to this issue than the role that fossil fuels play in the economy. Something much bigger is at stake, and to that end, I defy anyone to show me the Soviet Union on any map of the world printed in the past 30 years. Or Czechoslovakia. Or Yugoslavia.

Don’t think for a second that there’s anything special about the United States that will hold it together in perpetuity if the right match is struck to the fuse. People who think we’re insulated from the recent histories of other nations are guilty of the worst form of presentism—the thinking that because something has never happened here (at least in their lifetimes), it simply can’t happen here. Good grief, it already did, once: We couldn’t even make to our 100th birthday as a nation without going to war with ourselves over our cultural, economic and social divisions.

That’s exactly what the big banks flirt with when they embrace the dark side of corporate woke-ist value sets. It’s part and parcel of what the tech platforms are doing as they go full Winston Smith on, oh, let’s see: criticism of the 2020 presidential election integrity, medical research papers that question COVID-19 lockdown and vaccination policies, or donations to Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense. Now some are talking about the next step: silencing those who don’t have their minds right on global warming. The list of taboos grows longer by the day.

“For better or worse, the loudest population out there has been on the left,” says Fitzpatrick. “They’ve been the most aggressive, willing to say that if you don’t see things our way, we’re going to doxx you or cancel you. A lot of large companies have kind of caved to that threat, and there’s a lot of Groupthink going on in larger financial institutions.”

Lost amid the skyscrapers of New York, he says, is the perspective that there’s more to the country than the chatter of Upper East Side dinner parties. “Unless they hear from people like us, saying this is unacceptable, they’re just going with the path of least resistance, which has been to cave in,” Fitzpatrick says of the big banks.

In a very real sense, Fitzpatrick and his colleagues are, to borrow William F. Buckley’s formulation, attempting to stand athwart history, yelling “Stop!”

Probably a good thing, too, before America arrives at its next Fort Sumpter Moment.