GoFundMe plays with fire, gets burned

The crowdfunding site GoFundMe has been compromising neutrality for at least a year. Now they have compromised their professional standards. Over the weekend they tried to steal nine million dollars from donors trying to support the Freedom Convoy. Only after a State governor threatened to investigate and prosecute them did they relent. Conservatives should never darken their doors again. Happily, an alternative exists – and CNAV trusts their technical crew will soon respond to a crushing level of honest traffic.

What GoFundMe did

GoFundMe originally accepted the Freedom Convoy as a recipient for crowdfunding. As everyone knows, the Freedom Convoy consists of fifty thousand Big Rigs that have descended upon Ottawa, capital of Canada. By all accounts the drivers are behaving themselves, even to picking up litter – theirs and anyone else’s they see. But, not content merely to disband after making their point, they are staying put and have issued certain demands. Which are that:

1. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resign immediately,
2. “Snap” elections for Parliament take place as soon as practicable, and
3. All COVID vaccine and other mandates end.

GoFundMe was happy to take donors’ money – nine million dollars’ worth at last report. But then they officially questioned the use of the funds.

First they froze the account, not allowing Freedom Convoy members or organizers to take it. Naturally, the truckers and their friends demanded that GoFundMe release the funds. (But one Ottawa City Councillor demanded the city sue to get the money for itself.)

This morning, I have asked the city manager and city solicitor to immediately launch court proceedings targeting the millions of dollars in funds frozen by @GoFundMe so Ottawa taxpayers are not left holding the bag for these protests.By Mathieu Fleury, City Councillor of Ottawa, in a deleted tweet. Source: Fox News.

Evidence of violence? What evidence?

Still, as of early Friday, GoFundMe had been willing to “work with” the Freedom Convoy:

A GoFundMe spokesperson told Fox News Digital on Monday that the organizers had provided a detailed plan on how the funds would be spent, and that $1 million had been withdrawn for their effort. The spokesperson added that the company will continue working with organizers regarding the release of remaining funds.

But later that day, GoFundMe reversed themselves. Why? Because they said they had “evidence” of an “occupation” of the city, with “police reports of violence.”

Note: never once has anyone produced any such police report. As The Epoch Times noted. (That article lies behind a pay wall, but the URL includes parameters that let a subscriber see it.) In fact, witnesses say crime in Ottawa has fallen, not risen.

But not only would GoFundMe shut down the Freedom Convoy campaign. They would disburse the funds in the pot as they saw fit, to charities of their choice. Technically, they would ask the Freedom Convoy organizers to nominate the charities, but GoFundMe would pick them.

Statement by GoFundMe

To ensure GoFundMe remains a trusted platform, we work with local authorities to ensure we have a detailed, factual understanding of events taking place on the ground. Following a review of relevant facts and multiple discussions with local law enforcement and city officials, this fundraiser is now in violation of our Terms of Service (Term 8, which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment) and has been removed from the platform.

Organizers provided a clear distribution plan for the initial $1M that was released earlier this week and confirmed funds would be used only for participants who traveled to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest. Given how this situation has evolved, no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organizers — we will work with organizers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers and verified by GoFundMe.

The only way any donor could avoid that was to request pro-actively a refund, by 19 February.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!? We’ll see about that!

Reaction to this statement was swift, sure, angry – and ultimately threatening. J. D. Rucker called GoFundMe’s actions what they were: theft.

Ezra Levant tweeted his image of the statement and accused GoFundMe of stealing the money.

What a windfall for Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood!

Or it would have been. In fact GoFundMe has supported those three groups, and others like them, in the past.

Jack Prosobiec shared instructions to go to GiveSendGo instead. (More on that below.)

Elon Musk put the matter more bluntly. “Professional thieves!” he called them – and compared them to the looters of the Union Pacific trains in Los Angeles.

Tucker Carlson questioned the legality of the move.

Tim Pool urged all donors to contact their credit-card issuers and issue “charge backs.”

That, according to your editor’s previous experience, would likely involve canceling the credit card completely. But GoFundMe would have lost $10 to $15 per transaction in that event.

Worse than that came this notice from Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.). He described it with one word: fraud. Coming from a State governor, that’s a fighting word. He then said he would task Florida’s Attorney General with investigating.

That’s when GoFundMe relented – sort of. They won’t give the money to the truckers. But they will automatically refund the money to all original donors. Those donors in turn must each wait seven to ten business days.

Which is typical, but definitely non-ideal.

GiveSendGo to the rescue

Happily, CNAV has found the alternative site. Any donor who still wants to support the Freedom Convoy can go to GiveSendGo. They are the Christian crowdfunding site.

The bad news is that interest in GiveSendGo, and their specific Freedom Convoy campaign, has crashed their site. At about 2:00 p.m. EST, GiveSendGo had raised seven percent of a sixteen million dollar goal for the Freedom Convoy. But now the site simply cannot respond to traffic. CNAV can only hope their technical crews know about the problem and are working, no doubt frantically, to switch on or purchase more server capacity. (Jack Prosobiec said GiveSendGo came under DdoS attack.)

Later he sent this tweet to let people know what was happening.

The good news is that reviews for GiveSendGo are generally favorable. The only unfavorable reviews they are getting, are from ideological opponents of GiveSendGo and their usual rercipients. They support and have supported a number of right-wing sympathetic campaigns, including:

1. Kyle Rittenhouse’ legal and other expenses,
2. A Legal Defense Fund for some of President Trump’s associates, and lately:
3. The Freedom Convoy.

This has led those same ideological opponents to denounce them as “GiveSendGrift.” But a DuckDuckGo search found no reviews that took them to task for the handling of donor’s money.

So what do we have? We’ve got ourselves a new place to go

CNAV draws exactly two conclusions. First, GoFundMe is definitely a creature of the enemies of freedom. Their conduct is as unprecedented as it is disgraceful. In the past, if a crowdfunding company didn’t want to fund the charity of your choice, you got your money back. Not this time! That is, not until a State governor threatened an official investigation for fraud.

Second, a Parallel Political crowdfunding site does exist. Its name is GiveSendGo. CNAV urges its technical crews, if they see this, to respond immediately to crash-level traffic. Likewise, we urge any other person of like mind to take his crowdfunding needs to GiveSendGo. Not only are they explicitly friendly to freedom-loving populists, but they also have shown themselves more reliable.

By the way, another user reported a similar convoy headed into Quebec.

Update 6 February 2022

GiveSendGo seems to have solved their technical problems. They can handle the traffic, though information on the DDoS attack is lacking. What is not lacking, are the funds they have raised thus far for the Freedom Convoy: $2,301,820 US, fourteen percent of a goal of $16 million US.

The following links will take you to GiveSendGo itself and two relevant campaigns:

• GiveSendGo home
• Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign
• Adopt a Trucker campaign

In addition to which, someone has already written new lyrics for C. W. McCall’s iconic Convoy song. Watch it here:

In case YouTube takes this down, here’s another one on Rumble. Different lyrics, but the same sentiment.

And last: two Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers sit for a press conference to talk about the GoFundMe scandal. They do not allow embeds of this video, but you can view it at this link.