The GoFundMe Border Wall Campaign Has Raised Nearly $19 Million
Nearly $19 million had been raised, as of January 2nd, by a GoFundMe border wall campaign targeted at contributing towards the building the wall at the Mexican border that US President, Donald Trump’s has been yearning to build.
Brian Kolfage, a triple amputee Air Force veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart award, who pioneered the GoFundMe border wall campaign has said that the money will be handed over to the government for the building of the wall.
On Thursday evening, Kolfage was featured on Fox News, hosted by Laura Ingraham. He said that all those who claim that the GoFumdMe build the wall money will be of no effect are very wrong.
According to him, “This is the United States, and we can do anything we want. If people want to donate to that wall and give their money, they can do it. What’s 80 bucks for 60 million people? The common person can give that kind of money.”
He asserted that Republicans and Democrats alike are “putting their money where their mouth is” and contributing towards putting up of a wall along the US-Mexico border.
NBC News published a news report on Thursday evening stating that managing online sites and pages that promote conspiracy theories and racially sensitive content is one thing that Kolfage is known for.
His latest undertaking, Right Wing News, was reported to have been taken off Facebook a couple of months ago, after it scored 500 pages that it claimed used fake accounts to increase website traffic, or were “ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”
There are also reports stating that Kolfage also ran other sites linked to Right Wing News to put forward fake conspiracies. For example, one alleged that the 2016 presidential candidate of the Democratic Party was privately nursing a terminal disease.
These Facebook incidents made up one of the questions that Ingraham asked Kolfage. She asked why the social media platform was hostile to him, to which Kolfage replied, “Well, I’m not allowed on Facebook anymore. “My company, Military Grade Coffee Company, was outright banned, and Facebook executives told me I’m not allowed to use it. And they threatened my wife, they’d delete her account if they catch me on Facebook.”
He added that he found the way people are dealt with by social media corporations rather “ridiculous.” He went on to say that Americans are mad at them.
The wildfire GoFundMe border wall account rapidly gained a following, and has earned almost $13 from less than 200,000 people by only the fourth day.
Hilariously, a rival fundraiser has been set up for contributions towards getting “ladders to get over Trump’s wall,” although it has clarified that the money is actually for a non-profit organization based in Texas – the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services – to grant legal services to immigrants.
An Army veteran and Human Rights Campaign communications expert, Charlotte Clymer, began this effort in response to the border wall GoFundMe on Thursday, which had earned almost $159,000 as of this morning.
