GoFundMe should come under investigation from the Federal Trade Commission for how it treated the funds that were gathered for the Canadian truck convoy protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, Rep. Vicky Hartzler said Wednesday.
"I think the FTC needs to do an investigation of this funding platform and see if they committed fraud, but then also to force them to answer those questions about how they operate and about why they consider one group to be okay and another group not," the Missouri Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "They're picking and choosing which organizations they're going to support, and basically, they're discriminating against conservative groups."
GoFundMe came under fire last week after it took down the fundraising page for Freedom Convoy 2022, saying it violated its terms of service. At first it said donors would have two weeks to request a refund and that any remaining funds were distributed to "credible and established charities." After outcry arose from several Republicans, in particular, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the company said it would refund all donors' money.
The convoy's organizers have since shifted the fundraising efforts to another platform, GiveSendGo, where millions of dollars have poured in.
GoFundMe, meanwhile, is "supporting their liberal groups," Hartzler said. "They continue to allow fundraising for Antifa and Black Lives Matter that have had massive protest violence."
The protesting truckers, however, are objecting to vaccine mandates and "maybe honking their horns occasionally," but GoFundMe "thinks they need to be pulled and not supported because they say they're committing violence and yet BLM and Antifa are not," she added.
The decision, though, is another attempt to "silence conservatives," Hartzler continued. "I believe they were committing fraud when they accepted this money from individuals who paid fees."
She further accused big tech companies like GoFundMe, Facebook, Twitter, and more of "working in collusion" to silence the nation's conservatives.
"I mean, GoFundMe earlier silenced and took away the funding for Kyle Rittenhouse," said Hartzler. "They have stripped funding for individuals who have been silenced, like students at Arizona University and a nurse who was filing a lawsuit when she was fired, because she wouldn't take a vaccine."
The congresswoman also commented on the news that several Democrat-led states are reversing their course on mask mandates, including New York and Illinois, calling it "Johnny come lately" behavior in places that should have stopped with the mandates long ago.
"I'm a former schoolteacher, and this is just horrific what has happened to our children, the mental health strain, the lack of education, even increased suicides that we see, the overdoses, because of these mandates that have been inflicted upon them across our country," said Hartzler. "It's time for this to stop and the American people realize that and so now Democrats are coming on board."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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