Over $5 million has been raised for Canada Freedom Convoy on the Christian-owned platform GiveSendGo after the notoriously liberal GoFundMe ...
Over $5 million has been raised for Canada Freedom Convoy on the Christian-owned platform GiveSendGo after the notoriously liberal GoFundMe announced last week it was shutting down the cause on its site.
Praise God!
It’s a win-win as far as Christians, conservatives and liberty-loving people are concerned.
GoFundMe was further outed as anti-conservative, while a pro-freedom alternative gained prominence.
Total donations to Canada Freedom Convoy stood at over $5 million as of Monday only three days after the campaign was launched on its GiveSendGo page.
The Canadian truckers and their supporters are protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
GoFundMe distributed only $1 million of the $10 million raised for the truckers before freezing the funds last week.
The San Francisco Bay-area company said the campaign was in violation of its terms, because “the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation,” with some reports of violence.
GoFundMe originally said that the remaining $9 million would be distributed to “credible and established charities verified by GoFundMe,” but after significant online backlash, announced that it would be returned to the original contributors.
The site has shut down other conservative causes, including a legal defense fund for Kyle Rittenhouse, who was found to have acted in self-defense when he shot and killed a man during the Kenosha, Wisconsin, riots last summer.
A convoy of thousands of trucks arrived in Ottawa, Canada, the nation’s capital, during the last weekend in January, blocking streets around Canada’s Parliament building, BBC reported.
“Ottawa’s Mayor Jim Watson said some protesters had harassed staff at a soup kitchen, demanding free meals after they were turned away by restaurants for their refusal to comply with indoor mask mandates,” according to the news outlet.
Canada Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich said on GiveSendGo’s page, “We plan on being here for the long haul — as long as it takes to ensure that your rights and freedoms are restored.”
“We are asking for Donations to help with the costs of fuel first, and hopefully food and lodgings to help ease the pressures of this arduous task.”
GiveSendGo’s new higher profile status has not come without growing pains.
Saturday the site reported having server errors after experiencing cyber attacks in the form of bots and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), a technique used by malicious actors to overwhelm a website with fake traffic.
In a Monday statement, GiveSendGo co-founder Jacob Wells said, “We’ve seen nearly 10 million bots trying to overwhelm our servers in just the past two hours. Though this has caused issues for the platform, we will not let it stand in the way of providing a safe and effective means of fundraising for our campaign owner across the globe.”
The Western Journal was able to access the donation page Monday on the first try, but server errors occurred when trying to return to the page soon thereafter.
With a few tries, the page did open again.
GiveSendGo said the FreedomConvoy campaign has been its largest ever.
Rumble — an alternative to YouTube that does not censor conservative viewpoints — offered to help GiveSendGo with technical support via a Saturday tweet and the fundraising site apparently took them up on the offer.
Rumble hash-tagged “#teamwork #Freedom” after the two organizations connected.
Christopher Bedford — a senior editor with the Washington Examiner — told Fox News on Monday that his organization Right Forge, founded last spring, was also helping GiveSendGo.
Right Forge worked with the platform over the weekend “to scale them up, to defeat hacker attacks against them, [and] to move them over to our servers,” Bedford said.
Another Big Tech tactic employed against conservatives has been to remove them from their servers, as Amazon did to Parler last year.
GiveSendGo sought direct donations to help it ramp up its services, as well as thwart cyber attackers.
The company acknowledged the reported incidences of violence, but said that was not a reason to shut down the entire fundraising campaign.
Here’s to Canada’s liberty-loving truckers and conservative platforms like GiveSendGo helping the cause of freedom to endure.
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