I stopped giving to charity years ago but the final straw was, after donating $100 to the Red Cross for the Australian bushfires in 2020, learning that the charity decided to take its usual 10% for “administration fees”. In this case, those amounted to $10 million, in a country with good administration systems, of money that was intended to help people rebuild their lives and homes after the devastating fires. $10 million would have gone a long way towards helping the victims but instead it disappeared into the charity’s coffers, no doubt allocated to expenses and bonuses for the hardworking staff who had to press buttons on their computers to distribute the funds.
Lest we forget. But we still all want to make donations sometimes and often these are for smaller causes that do not attract the attention of the ‘charitable’ organisations.
That is what platforms like GoFundMe and Givealittle are for. Anyone can set up a fund, for any worthwhile cause, and the organisation collects the money, hands it over to the people in need and everyone is happy.
At least, that is what is supposed to happen… but it doesn’t always happen that way.
It seems that nowadays anyone can still set up a GoFundMe page but the organisers will decide if the fund is a ‘worthy’ one or not and will simply confiscate the money if they deem the cause to be “unworthy”.
Yes, you heard that right… because that is what almost happened to the GoFundMe page for the Canadian truckers.
GoFundMe took down the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser page on Friday, saying it violated its terms of service. At the time it said donors would have two weeks to request a refund, with any remaining funds distributed to “credible and established charities”.
Every time you think things can’t get any worse, someone sets out to prove you wrong.
Here is a quote from GoFundMe‘s Wikipedia page:
Freedom Convoy Canada 2022
In January 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that truck drivers crossing into Canada would have to be fully vaccinated.[55] In response, some truckers organized a convoy to Ottawa under the name Freedom Convoy 2022.[56] A GoFundMe project was then created with the claim of raising money for fuel and food for the convoy.[57] On February 4, 2022, GoFundMe announced the fundraiser had been removed from the platform for violating terms of service, specifically “violence and other unlawful activity”.[58] The company initially stated that $9 million in donations from the fundraiser would be redistributed to “credible and established charities” and would only be refunded upon application, subject to a two-week time limit. Following criticism, the company subsequently stated on Twitter that all donations would be refunded within 10 business days.[59][60]
Wikipedia
So you can no longer fund food and fuel for truck drivers conducting a peaceful protest across Canada. Such behaviour is now “violence and unlawful activity”. Except, of course, that there is nothing violent or unlawful about driving a truck and if others decide to join you along the way, so long as you observe the rules of the road, there is nothing unlawful about that either.
Justin Trudeau, from his bunker somewhere in the northern parts of the Yukon, has called the trucker protest an “insult to truth”, after referring to it as a “fringe minority” earlier in the week.
Of course – and thank the Lord – Gofundme cannot just confiscate the money and allocate it to whichever “credible and established charities” that they choose. That is theft. As soon as there were threats of legal action over fraud, Gofundme backed down and promised to refund the money donated.
West Virginia and Louisiana attorneys general were among those who called on constituents to let them know if they had been a donor.
“My office will be looking into whether or not #GoFundMe violated our state law. If you are a Louisiana donor to the #FreedomConvoy, please contact my #ConsumerProtection Section!” Jeff Landry, attorney general in Louisiana, said on Twitter on Saturday.
The Guardian
My guess is that a number of laws were breached here, along with an attempt to break the record in reaching for the moral low ground; Gofundme is nothing more than a bunch of fraudulent cowards with no principles. Incidentally, you might be interested to know the top few ’causes’ that Gofundme are running at the moment:
As you can see, you can still donate to the George Floyd Memorial Fund (the criminal who was apprehended by the police, unfortunately killed as a result of alleged police brutality, but a criminal nonetheless), or the Chelsea Manning legal fund, but not the Canadian truckers, because their activities constitute “violence and other unlawful activities”. I suppose George Floyd was ‘lawfully’ trying to escape police custody when he was apprehended, right?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The Canadian truckers found a new platform, and are now receiving donations on GiveSendGo. There were so many donors that the website crashed, and is now operating extremely slowly.
It warms my heart to see that the truckers and their supporters have not been vanquished.
The NZ Freedom Convoy has set up a bank account with Westpac, but knowing our authoritarian government, I have no confidence that the same thing won’t happen here. I will be happy to donate to the cause but will first wait and see what happens.
I have nothing but contempt for these organisations who like to play God and decide where money donated in good faith is allowed to go. They are no better than petty bureaucrats and politicians who give lip service to concepts such as free speech and freedom of association but then do everything in their power to shut it down. They make me sick.
In the meantime, there is a new entry on Gofundme‘s Wikipedia page:
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
