“A fool and his money are soon parted” – somebody
I’m not sure where this phrase originated, but whoever uttered it first must have seen GoFundMe coming from a mile away.
The site provides a good way for people who actually need assistance to get help with stuff like medical bills, but it’s also a great way for financially irresponsible weenies to blow their hard earned money by making already rich people even richer. I guess sometimes sticking it to the liberals/conservatives is far more important than paying one’s own bills, saving for the kid’s college, etc.
Below are some of the absolute worst GoFundMe campaigns that have shown up recently.
Michael Cohen
In the last month, people have donated $176,573 to Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen was formerly Trump’s lawyer, until Trump fired him in the wake of the Stormy Daniels fiasco, at which point the lefties suddenly started to (predictably) love him. Mr. Cohen isn’t the hero here however, despite the GoFundMe’s dubious claim that “Michael decided to put his family and his country first. Now Michael needs your financial help”.
Michael is exactly the type of scumbag that liberals usually rally against and insist that we either “eat” or hold to paying their “fair share”. My how quickly those values get pushed to the wayside when tribalism and partisan politics enter the picture.
Let us do a little research into Michael Cohen.
He has a net worth of somewhere between 20 and 100 million dollars, though it’s hard to pinpoint his actual net worth because of all the shady deals he’s been involved in. He flips real estate and has sold buildings for tens of millions of dollars at a time to unknown buyers. He also used to represent people who would rent vehicles and crash them to defraud insurance companies. Whoopsies.
Then there are the seven tax warrants filed against him in 2017 due to unpaid taxes to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. There are also the five counts of tax evasion from 2012 to 2016 he pleaded guilty to, totally 1.5 million that he will end up needing to pay the IRS. People are willing giving their money to help this guy out, by the way.
He’s the quintessential scumbag lawyer, which is probably why Trump was drawn to him. Trump himself has a long history of shady business dealings and tax evasion. Birds of a feather, after all.
Peter Strzok
Old Petey here was formerly an agent with the FBI. He’s notable for having worked on the high-profile investigations into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of private email servers, and whether or not Trump colluded with Russia leading up to the 2016 US Presidential election. He’s also the recipient of roughly $450,000 through crowdfunding.
Peter was fired over a supposed conflict of interest regarding how fit he was to perform his job. E-mail exchanges were released wherein he made statements like: “No he won’t. We’ll stop him”, in regards to Trump potentially winning the upcoming election. An election that involved both Clinton and Trump, one of whom he had investigated, and one whom he would go on to investigate.
It’s obviously fine to have personal political opinions, but this definitely represented a conflict of interest in his handling of his job. The FBI is supposed to be a non-partisan entity, free of affiliation with any political party. You can’t objectively investigate someone while simultaneous wanting to “stop them” in some manner. Any affiliation makes one unfit to work within this capacity for the FBI. Strzok was unfit to do the job he was being paid taxpayer money to perform.
But because he was fired by Trump, people were willing to start throwing their money at a guy whose salary they were already paying in tax dollars to the tune of 6 figures a year. Never mind the fact that had he professed to “stop” Obama, he most likely would have been fired during the last administration instead. Orange man bad, therefore I give my credit card info to GoFundMe.
He also just so happened to use his personal email account to send confidential FBI documents while investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for sending classified documents. The guy who was investigating a crime was guilty of that very same crime. Keep up the great work, FBI!
Andrew McCabe
Here we have another wealthy government worker racking in those big bucks from people looking to spite the Orange Emperor. He’s also another guy who worked for the non-partisan FBI, while having numerous conflicts of interest within his personal life. Glen Greenwald wrote a detailed article on theintercept.com chronicling many of them.
The biggest perhaps was his having been part of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server misuse a mere three months after his wife had actively run as a Democratic candidate for the Virginia State Senate. Evidently this wasn’t considered a conflict of interest because he was taken off the Clinton investigation while his wife ran for political office, only to resume oversight after his wife’s run was unsuccessful. How this wasn’t considered a conflict of interest is confounding.
This was like Dick Cheney stepping down as chairman and CEO of Halliburton prior to becoming Vice President, while still remaining a stock holder in the company as it raked in record profits from overseas contracts that resulted from decisions he made as Vice President. Technicalities and loopholes don’t exclude things from being obvious conflicts of interest.
Even though McCabe was legally in the right, and was more than likely at least partially fired due to some spite on Trumps part, the fact remains that he made over $500,000 in donations. This despite the fact that had made over $150,000 a year in taxpayer-funded salary as an FBI agent, and had a net worth of over 10 million dollars.
People that complain about how much money CEOs make and constantly rage against the 1%, who then turn around and willingly donate money to millionaires, are operating on a level of buffoonery that I can’t even comprehend.
Stormy Daniels
Of all the GoFundMe campaigns listed here, this is perhaps the scummiest one yet.
Stormy Daniels is a porn star who had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006. In 2016, just prior to the Presidential election, she was offered $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement pertaining to the affair. She signed the NDA and took the $130,000.
She literally hadn’t even made it a month after signing the NDA before she started telling third parties about the affair and subsequently attempting to capitalize on this hot gossip by selling her story to numerous publications. Ultimately, she couldn’t profit off these opportunities due to that pesky NDA she has signed.
Fast forward to early 2018. By this point, Stormy Daniels had no doubt realized just how lucrative a business venture sticking it to Trump could be (see the above GoFundMe campaigns). She decided to violate the NDA she willingly signed yet again, and proceeded to file a lawsuit claiming that the NDA wasn’t valid because Trump hadn’t signed it. The problem is, she had taken the $130k (which she could have turned down), and both parties signatures aren’t always needed in certain cases and jurisdictions. Regardless, her acceptance of the money implied that she had agreed to a contract that she was now breaking.
Unfortunately, Mrs Daniels didn’t exactly have great council on the matter, otherwise she would have had it explained to her that the risk of litigation didn’t exactly work out in her favor here. Turns out she had managed to bag Michael Avenatti as a lawyer, who is such a comically over-the-top narcissist and opportunist, that he makes Trump look like a rather humble, down-to-Earth guy by comparison. The guy spent most of his tenure as her lawyer making countless t.v. appearances, grandstanding, and getting into arguments with people on twitter. It’s not surprising that he wasn’t a competent enough lawyer to actually win this dubious case, and Trump ultimately won out.
It all worked out well for Stormy though, as she bagged roughly $600,000 from well-intentioned simpletons, and now gets to gleefully disregard that irksome NDA, as she peddles her upcoming book and becomes a media darling for the remainder of her 15 minutes. She’ll end up needing to pay Trump to the tune of $250k-300k however, but her net gain from this whole stunt will be more than that initial $130,000, so I’m sure she’ll sleep well at night.
Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford
I’ll avoid going into the specifics of this train-wreck of a legal case, but on the surface what it represented was just another case like countless others involving an accusation/denial of assault/harassment between two parties.
What it turned into however, was an opportunity for the narcissists of the world to showboat all over social media, pontificating on a trial that very few of them actively followed, let alone knew a fraction of the details to. It became yet another platform for people to grandstand about how virtuous they were, in all their partisan-driven, tribalistic glory.
The fact of the matter is that neither of the individuals involved in this case gave a particularly water-tight case. Perhaps this was to be expected, given that the events had transpired over 30 years ago. Testimonies were full of contradictions and many of the accusations turned out to be categorically false. A few of the witnesses were deemed to be outright unreliable, or admitted to complete fabrications. In any other non-politicized case, no rational individual would have continued to back such a flimsy court case, and we all would have moved on.
Nobody fielding their opinions about this case on facebook has any inkling about what events transpired between these two. It’s beyond arrogant to think you could possibly know. If you had a strong opinion either way, it’s more than likely because you were merely wrapped up in your own politically-driven bias, fueled on by those around you. The facts didn’t provide a conclusive answer in either direction.
Regardless of how the hearing started, it eventually devolved into a politically motivated dog and pony show, because this is evidently the state of U.S. politics now. This was evidenced by that fact that as the case rapidly fell apart, the goalpost was moved to questioning Kavanaugh’s temperament and fitness to be a judge, neither of which seemed to be an issue for most prior to this circus of a hearing, and neither of which were relevant to the actual trial. I don’t care whether Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court judge or not, but politically motivated, agenda driven hit jobs are gross, regardless of who they target. Mob mentality is disgusting and destructive.
So of course two GoFundMe campaigns were created. The Kavanaugh fundraiser bringing in nearly $550,000, and the Ford fundraisers (there were two) brought in about $210,000 and $630,000.
As you can probably guess, neither of the recipients of all this money are in desperate need of it. Kavanaugh has the lowest net worth of anyone on this list at roughly $1 million, but will be making $250,000 a year in the Supreme Court. Ford has a net worth of millions, and her lawyer was working pro-bono.
Sorry about you, starving kids in Africa. Maybe you should have been millionaires who either vehemently hated or loved Trump, then maybe we would have showered you with millions of dollars you didn’t even need, merely to own those evil [insert political party here].