GoFundMe is such a great idea in principle. And such a trash company in practice.

Yet another example of their political meddling in what ought to be basic financial services popped up in my email today, via Matt Taibbi (if you don’t subscribe to Matt’s site Racket.news you are missing out).

Liberal Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté run an antiwar website called The Grayzone, and they have been running a fundraiser to bring on staff some independent reporters.

They raised $90,000 from over a thousand donors, but when they tried to access the donations GoFundMe balked at releasing the funds. They didn’t specify a reason other than “external concerns.” Given that the site has taken a lot of flak from the US and Ukrainian governments one has to wonder just what those external concerns might be.

By this point, we had raised over $90,000 from over 1100 contributors. The generous contributions from our audience were accompanied by hundreds of messages of effusive support for our factual journalism holding imperial power to account.

And now, Gofundme is holding the donations hostage, refusing to transfer them to us, while failing to inform donors that it has effectively seized their money. The for-profit site has similarly refused to explain its freezing of their donations, issuing nothing more than a vague allusion – “some external concerns” – to pressure from powerful outside forces.

Gofundme’s financial sabotage follows the de facto sanctions imposed by Venmo and Paypal on our managing editor, Wyatt Reed, after he reported on the Ukrainian military’s targeting of civilians from the separatist side of the Donbas region.

Orwellian. You have been punished for unspecified thought crimes

— redsynapse (@redsynapse) November 9, 2022

Taibbi rightly reminds us that this is hardly the first time GoFundMe has made such decisions for political reasons. And I would add that GoFundMe isn’t the only financial institution that has been withholding services for political reasons. Debanking has become a thing in the West, mirroring the totalitarian policies of China where social credit scores determine to what extent you can participate in society.

GoFundMe is now officially the poster child for politicization of economic services. They prevented a parents group from renting a billboard to publicize Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, froze nearly $8 million in donations to the “Freedom Convoy” Canadian Trucker movement, even wiped out two fundraisers for MintPress. This Grayzone incident is perhaps most loathsome, lacking even a patina of necessity or justification, while serving as a depressingly obvious preview of things to come.

In the case of The Grayzone it is pretty clear that there is an organized and planned intimidation campaign. While the site is left-leaning by my standards, its crime is that it deviates from the accepted Narrative. And as much as it is true that conservatives deviate from that accepted narrative more often and hence are more often targeted, the key goal of these intimidation campaigns is to narrow the Overton window entirely, and not just shut conservatives up.

British police detain journalist @KitKlarenberg, interrogate him about The Grayzone

Counter-terror police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival in London and subjected him to a 5 hour interrogation about his political views and reportinghttps://t.co/RmxZGY8efp pic.twitter.com/YftxSR1Cl0

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) May 31, 2023

Fighting these totalitarian efforts to shut down dissent shouldn’t be a Left or Right issue. It is a freedom issue.

Anybody who makes the argument that GoFundMe is a private company and can do as it likes is missing several points: 1) it has been collecting donations and has seized them without explanation; 2) financial services companies are among the most highly regulated in the world; 3) GoFundMe tried to take seized donations from the Canadian Truckers’ Convoy and redistribute the money to other charities without donors’ approval, and would have but for the intervention of lawmakers in the US. And lastly, financial services companies provide a necessary service without which life in the modern world is nearly impossible. Politicizing them opens the door to making banking services an ideological praetorian guard for the Establishment.

That may indeed be precisely the case here–if governments or their agents are pressuring GoFundMe to seize funds to prevent criticism of the war in Ukraine, as is likely, we are entering Chinese levels of political control.

I am not a fan of Blumenthal nor have I ever been, but I am appalled that his organization is being silenced. It happens often enough to conservatives, and should never happen to anybody.