A hack of the GiveSendGo database has revealed details about 92,845 separate donations to the Canadian anti-Covid mandate trucker protests. Not all of the donors’ identifies are divulged even in this hack, but we already know some interesting facts. For one, well over half (56 percent) of the donations originate in the United States, while only 29 percent of them came from Canadians. For another, the donations come with comments rife with mentions of God and Jesus, as well as deranged and threatening messages targeting the left.

Vice identified Chicago software billionaire Thomas Siebel as a significant donor. He evidently plopped down a cool $90,000 for the cause.

GiveSendGo is the vehicle of choice here because GoFundMe decided it would not have anything to do with trucker protests. Actually, to be more precise, GiveSendGo is the vehicle of choice here because back in 2020, GoFundMe decided it would not take donations for Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense. The Daily Beast reported in December 2020 on “How a Christian Crowdfunding Site Became the Go-to Page for Trumpist Rage.”

GiveSendGo was launched in 2015 with a focus on Christian missionaries and other religious efforts, the site’s co-founder Jacob Wells told The Daily Beast. Before the site took off, the list featured fundraisers including medical expenses for sick children, for example, or buying children’s books for the foster care system.

But the site exploded into the broader right this summer after GoFundMe—GiveSendGo’s much better-known crowdfunding rival—banned fundraisers for Kenosha, Wisconsin, murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse. The Rittenhouse fundraiser moved to GiveSendGo, where it has raised more than $580,000.

Wells said the decision to host the Rittenhouse fundraiser “broke the floodgates” on GiveSendGo’s reputation as a place for fundraisers kicked off of other sites.

More recently, Talia Lavin of The Nation reported on GiveSendGo “Crowdsourcing Hate in the Name of Christ.”

When I ask Heather Wilson and Jacob Wells, the founders of GiveSendGo, the “#1 Free Christian Crowdfunding Site,” whether they would host a fundraising campaign for the Ku Klux Klan, the call goes dead for a few seconds.

“Some of these campaigns are situational,” Wells finally offered.

“It would depend on what they were raising money for,” Wilson said.

So, perhaps if the Klan wanted help with their laundry bills that would be okay, but raising funds for a lynching campaign would possibly cross a line?

I’m just trying to imagine the debate on these matters in the boardroom.

GiveSendGo offers a safe haven for far-right figures who have long struggled to find a stable place to raise money. GoFundMe, Patreon, Kickstarter, and other sites sporadically bar individual far-right figures. Tech companies purged many fascist-friendly fundraising efforts after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. In response, far-right groups set up alternative crowdfunding platforms, creating sites like Hatreon and GoyFundMe. (“Goy” is a Hebrew word for “gentile” that has been adopted as a frequent self-descriptor among the more rabidly anti-Semitic factions of the far right.) The sites were shoddy and short-lived, quickly banned by payment processors and credit card providers. But on GiveSendGo, hate groups can prosper amid fundraising campaigns for homeless nuns, a church that provides tube socks for the unhoused, or infants with spinal cord injuries. Any backlash by payment companies risks raising the ire of a grievance-drunk right-wing media ecosystem primed to detect the traces of anti-Christian prejudice.

I want to be careful here to note that we’re talking about a deplorable subset of Christians here. But these folks are dangerous, and I’m sure it will be a revelation to see which names crop up among the more than 92,000 donors to the trucker protests. Thomas Seibel is most famous, other than his remarkable entrepreneurial skill, for being badly trampled by an elephant during a 2009 safari in Tanzania. That required 19 reconstructive surgeries over nearly three years, but he eventually got back on the golf course.

“It stops 2½ feet from me for three seconds. One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand three. It’s an image I’ll never forget. Five or six tons standing there. I can smell it. I can see the hair follicles, the eye, the tusk, the trunk right in front of me. I don’t know what I was thinking. Most certainly I was terrified. After three seconds, the elephant knocks me to the ground and basically starts to dismantle me. Rolling me, stepping on me, kicking me, putting a tusk through my left thigh and pulling it out sideways, stomping me into the dust.
“It’s hard to describe how unimaginably painful the blows were. I was kind of curled up, trying to protect my head. I remember every moment of this experience. It was like being attacked by a Caterpillar tractor.

Being crushed by an elephant could have been taken as a sign that messing around with far-right Republican politics is a dangerous game, but Seibel obviously didn’t take the hint. Now the whole world knows that he’s sharing the GiveSendGo platform with supporters of the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and George Floyd murderer Derek Chauvin.

This hack will provide a blueprint of the real power behind the anti-Democratic fascist movement. That will make it easier to fight back because the enemy will no longer be anonymous. GiveSendGo’s pathetic security will also make people think twice before making donations, so it’s hard to be anything but happy about this digital breach.