☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Sunday, February 6, 2022 ☙ THE GOOD SIDE 🦠

Today, a GoFundMe update plus a long-form discussion of the positive side of the pandemic, if you can believe it.

Happy Sunday, C&C supporters! Today, a GoFundMe update plus a long-form discussion of the positive side of the pandemic. Get ready.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 The governors of Florida and Texas have both announced investigations into how GoFundMe canceled the truckers. While I have reservations, this is good news.

Attorney General Ken Paxton @KenPaxtonTX

Patriotic Texans donated to Canadian truckers’ worthy cause using GoFundMe. This BLM-backing company went woke, froze the funds, & failed to deliver Texans’ money. Today I assembled a team to investigate their potential fraud & deception. Texas donors will get Justice! #GoFundMe

My office has been advising folks for over a year not to use GFM, but to use GiveSendGo (GSG) instead. We ran into the same problems as the truckers with GFM in 2020 during the early mask wars. The pattern that we saw was that GFM would let us create a fundraiser for parents to raise legal fees to fight mask mandates, would allow funds to be raised, then right before the first large payment was to be issued, GFM would “freeze” the account, saying it was under review. Then after we would push GFM to release or refund the money, GFM would announce the fundraisers somehow violated its term of service, and gave a complicated way to request glacier-slow refunds.

It was diabolical. The whole process set fundraising efforts back weeks or months and trapped donor money in a bureaucratic briar patch. People get reluctant to donate more money right after their first donation got snarled in GFM’s manufactured problems.

So when parent groups from counties around the state called our office, I started having my staff tell them — before anything else — DO NOT USE GOFUNDME.

I am just speculating, but I think GFM is a honeypot. It’s a trap, to capture and torpedo conservative fund raising efforts. That may be its primary purpose. The fact that some funders squeak through only convinces me that GFM is trying to “look” legitimate.

Back when I first heard that the truckers were using GFM, my heart sank, and I never published the link here on C&C — not until they recently switched to GSG. I was shocked and surprised to hear that GFM even released the first 10% of the money (a million dollars) and I was not shocked and not surprised when GFM announced the financial lock down.

I’m generally wary of the misuse of government investigatory powers against citizens for politics. But as I noted, this is a pattern with GFM, and it looks potentially fraudulent. If either state attorney general needs affidavits or documentation, my office can provide them.