Everyone in GoFundMe's upper management deserves to be robbed at gunpoint and invited to negotiate in hysterical falsetto voices for their craven, felonious lives
Companies allowed to commit warrantless seizures is bad enough without the smugness of these broken organizations' principals
While it appears that GoFundMe has yet to release the $90,808 that around 1,100 supporters of The Grayzone had contributed to its fundraising campaign after the company “froze” those funds on Monday, good news has emerged on this front, not just for The Grayzone and its followers but for anyone who still cares about basic laws concerning theft and legal possession: The Grayzone’s founder, Max Blumenthal, quickly found an alternative, *spotfund. That campaign, which *spotfund’s founded has assured Blumenthal will actually reach The Grayzone, has already accrued over $110,000.
The only explanation Blumenthal received from GoFundMe came from “Sabrina,” and consisted of the following (oomphases mine):
“Our number one goal here is ensuring that the money from GoFundMe fundraisers always gets to the right place, so we really appreciate you helping us to make sure GoFundMe is a safe place to give.
Due to some external concerns, we need to review your fundraiser to make sure it complies with our Terms of Service. Please keep in mind that our processes are followed to ensure your own safety.
I’ll keep you updated as soon as possible.”
Whatever “explanation” given to Blumenthal was assured of being a lie no matter its content, as anyone paying attention knows this this is an effort to silence The Grayzone and nothing more. Google hiding search results for the site and the detainment and harassment of one of its reporters by British security personnel at Heathrow Luton Airport hasn’t been enough, and anyone familiar with Blumenthal is aware he has no plans to curb the things he’s been doing and saying for many years unless he is shot, slipped a polonium-enhanced milkshake, or starved to death.
But this weird focus on “safety” had me reconsidering a GoFundMe a reader made me aware of weeks ago.
This is clearly a tragedy, and these bereaved women have every right to use GoFundMe to raise money for the boy’s funeral, even if they fudged the victim’s background a little.
The funeral was able to proceed even if the fundraiser only drew about 58 percent of its goal in contributions.
The mother was unhappy in advance of the funeral with the level of help, attributing this to both standing anti-black racism and the (presumably) black people in her own life who had money to spare but had reserved this cash for other commodities.
I hope everyone involved is recovering; I saw a news report that two suspects had been arrested, but dropped the thread there because this real-life drama is already depressing enough. And I didn’t start a tally of the number of similarly morbid GoFundMe campaigns for people who are no longer alive and died with fifty or more potential years in front of them.
I already knew that GoFundMe was laughably broken, and that the political establishment’s pro-social-justice positions are insincere at every stop—just like those of prominent distance-running influencers and figures in the running media [sic[. But to see these two insults intersect makes both shams even more despicable. At the very least, if GoFundMe is committed to making the lives of black Americans better, it could at least take note of the number of campaigns on its platform devoted to gun-murder victims and the proportion of the victims who were “of color.”
The problem with this angle is that practically all murders are committed by people within the same ethnic category. Because the rate at which young black men commit gun violence in the United States is astronomical compared to the rates other groups do, the number of black murder victims exceeds the number of murder victims of all other groups combined. At least this was true in 2019, the last year the Federal Bureau of Investigation published its expanded homicide data:
In 2019, most (78.3 percent) of the 13,927 murder victims for whom supplemental data were received were male.
Of the murder victims for whom race was known, 54.7 percent were Black or African American, 42.3 percent were White, and 3.1 percent were of other races. Race was unknown for 234 victims.
This means that over 40 percent of American murder victims are black males, and while I didn’t look at the age breakdown, the vast majority of these are surely under 30.
This seems worse than “the coronavirus crisis” or even “the climate crisis,” but well-off white people choose their public battles judiciously. Why? Because they’re ignorant, evil, or some combination of all two.
The “defund the police” movement everyone has heard about has become fiendishly coupled to developments fewer people are aware of, such as the state not aggressively prosecuting violent criminals or prosecuting them at all; the state not keeping these criminals in jail after they’re arrested even when it’s clear they should remain locked up; and judges handing down laughably lenient sentences. “Credit” for all of this can be heaped on George Soros and the longstanding mayhem he has perpetrated through his Open Societies Foundations—efforts that have ramped up as Soros nears the end of his dilapidated life.
If anyone in power of any political affiliation cared about the lives of the victims, something would changed. Locking up so many black men for murder might not be necessary if more murders could be prevented. But despite the path to this being clear, the entire country has adopted standards to ensure precisely the opposite. And when do you hear a peep even from black activists about this? Never—they’re all too busy grifting off “whiteness” and lining their pockets, as heedless and unconcerned about the black murder rate in America’s unseen-to-them inner cities as the most smirkingly dismissive Republican senator from the Deep South.
On the issue of caring-not caring, the same phenomenon is afoot in the realm of antisemitism. While this term has been classified as a catastrophic national bane and used as an undisguised weapon to silence criticism of Israel and U.S. foreign policy there, it’s true that assaults against Hasidic Jews in New York City have been on the rise (as has crime against everyone in that beleaguered metropolis, but still).
The issue of who is committing essentially all of these assaults, however, makes it problematic for the Wokeblown media in the same way the granular stats about gun violence makes it difficult for Democrats to discuss the underpinnings of gun violence at a granular level.
And bizarrely, even The New York Times—not just a thermowokelear propaganda-machine but also famously a huge discursive cruise-ship for Upper West Side Jews—is contributing to antisemitism by generating false stories about the shadiness of Orthodox, or otherwise seriously religious, Jews.
This is why The New York Times, say, fresh off its rabid and largely fabricated assault on Haredi education, continues to regale its readers with stories like this one, announcing that “growing segregation by sex in Israel raises fears for women’s rights.” It’s takes a pretty diligent and observant reader to scroll past the bloody headline, read down to the heart of the story, and learn that the segregation in question is almost entirely at the behest of religious communities where men and women alike wish to adhere to a way of life that requires the sexes to bathe at separate beaches, say, or study in separate schools. No one is robbed of any rights, and no one is compelled to live in a way that contradicts their values and the values of their community. But such nuance be damned: When it comes to religious Jews, the time is always five minutes to the Handmaid’s Tale in the “paper of record.”
Maybe I’ve met the wrong Orthodox Jews, but they seem among the least bellicose people around, especially compared to high-profile longtime bombing-fanatics such as David Frum, Anne Applebaum, Torie Nuland, Robert Kagen, Bill Kristol, and Jeffrey Goldberg. All Jews in title only, and all about as introspective as a parakeet.
If there is a coherent message here, it’s that no one in power cares at all about society decaying and they want everyone to realize it and get used to it. It doesn’t matter if a victim of targeted violence is a 17-year-old black kid in Los Angeles or a prosperous member of the Hasidim in New York. Anyone who goes too far in pointing out the contradictions in the bleating of ESG-fueled companies, universities, and other organizations—and that’s virtually all of the ones anyone has heard of now—is being denied voices, and when that proves unfeasible or literally impossible owing to a journalist’s or other critic’s popularity, the establishment can just take their money.
The greatest part? The greatest over-reaching stroke of this “EAT CAKE IF YOU CAN AFFORD IT, YOU SCURRYING RATS OF THE LOW-INCOME RABBLE!” messaging? The people in the strongest position to do anything about any of these terrible and worsening problems is not only giving all of these problems and the people most affected by them the finger, with a smile (and often a shart), but openly demanding votes from Democrats and illegal immigrants alike. I cannot imagine the sadomasochistic drive that would compel any sane person of any skin color, ethnicity, or religious to do this, especially given the absolute assurance of the country collapsing further into a hellhole thanks to the current regime’s purposeful push toward both national and international oblivion.
Stay safe, dear friends, mostly by giving any money you have left to share directly to people who need it.