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May 2, 2025 - Blood Money
34:21
Unbiased in the time of Bias with Jacob Wells, Founder of Givesendgo.com
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All right, welcome to the latest Blood Money episode.
Today, I have a very special guest, Jacob Wells from Give, Send, Go.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing great, Vam.
Glad to be here.
Thank you for coming on the Blood Money podcast.
So, Jacob, you are one of the founders of Give, Send, Go.
Tell us a little bit of background about Give, Send, Go.
So, Give, Send, Go is now in its 10th year.
It's crazy how time goes by.
It's just so fast.
The foundation for Give, Send, Go was actually just at a family gathering.
Many people know this, but I'm one of 12 children, six boys and six girls, big family from New England.
And we were looking at the rise of social media platforms 10 years ago.
Facebook was in its heyday of growth and same with Twitter at the time and new platforms like Instagram were emerging.
So social media was really rising quickly, and on the back of that, crowdfunding platforms were gaining momentum as a new business structure, leveraging social media companies or social media platforms to connect people to fund different endeavors.
Our platform deals more with philanthropic causes, where maybe platforms like Indiegogo or Kickstarter deal with project-related causes.
But we saw the rise of this happening.
This new industry with crowdfunding.
And we said, wow, it's really cool how people are being connected and able to fundraise.
We saw who now is our big competitor, GoFundMe, in the marketplace, really dominating the market.
But what we thought GoFundMe was missing was the intangible piece that we recognize as being an essential part of fundraising.
Money helps meet our material needs, but we say this all the time.
There are immaterial needs that people have that no amount of money that you give them will help satisfy.
And I'll use an example.
Somebody could lose a child in a tragic car accident.
Now, you can raise $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to pay for funeral expenses for that family, but that money isn't healing the hurt.
It's not dealing with those immaterial realities that exist underlying to...
The money in that solving the physical problem.
So we came from a faith background, a Christian background, and said, well, we know a solution to those immaterial problems that exist.
And that's the hope that God gives us in the midst of difficult moments.
And so why don't we begin a platform that shares hope with people while they go through?
Difficult times.
So that's what set us apart as a crowdfunding platform 10 years ago.
We started with a desire to be more than just helping people raise money, but also injecting hope into difficult moments.
Prayer is a big part of the Give, Send, Go website.
It seems like you guys do prayers to help people along with their cause.
Could you tell me a little bit about that?
Yeah, so our mission statement at Give, Send, Go is explicit.
It's to share the hope of Jesus through crowdfunding.
We believe that Jesus brings hope in very difficult situations.
And as we grew as a company, we're figuring out, well, what does that look like?
What does it mean to share hope in a crowdfunding technology platform where people are raising money?
And so we wrestled through what that would look like.
And we built encouraging messages throughout the website as a way.
For that to take place.
But then we wanted to take it a step further.
And in the middle of COVID-19, when people were being pushed into isolation, being told to stay indoors and all of that stuff, we said, well, we have everybody's phone number that's creating a campaign.
Why don't we start calling these?
People that are in very difficult situations and begin praying with them over the situation that they find themselves in.
So we hired a prayer team.
We call it the Hope Team now.
And what they do is they call campaigns as they come on to Give, Send, Go.
And they just say, hey, listen, we can see that you're going through a difficult moment.
We're going to pray for you right now because we know that there's something bigger than just this moment and situation that you're going through.
And so our team will pray for the campaigns as they come on Give, Send, Go and spend an incredible, incredible journey.
I mean, you guys have dealt with a lot of really difficult situations, it seems like.
Weren't you guys in the middle of that whole Canadian trucker thing where they're trying to cancel anybody that was donating to the Canadian truckers?
Yes, I just spoke at a conference this morning and we talked all about it.
And we're still in the middle of that.
We have a $300 million lawsuit against Give, Send, Go because we didn't back down and cancel the campaign like the pressures and the powers that be wanted us to do.
So they're actually trying to sue us for $300 million.
We're fighting that in the courts in Canada.
We've been in a lot of high-profile campaigns like that one, where the world is really looking at what's going on here.
And we believe firmly, particularly in Western societies where we claim freedom is a foundational principle, that governments shouldn't be interfering with the free right of Protests and going after grievances against your government.
I mean, you're no longer a democracy or a freedom-loving institution or country if you remove people's right to protest.
It's fundamental to Western society.
So we were happy to support it and stood firm on that principle when the pressure was trying to tell us to take it down.
So let me get this straight.
The Canadian government's suing you guys for $300 million?
So it's not directly the Canadian government.
It's a company who found some coffee shop owner who said that the honking aggravated her.
And now they're trying to rally a whole bunch of businesses to say that their businesses were destroyed because of the truckers clogging the streets.
It wasn't the mandates that shut the businesses down, the Canadian mandates that shut everyone's businesses down and you had to get a vaccine requirement in order to go into a business that caused the business harm.
It was the trucks that came in for two weeks.
Thank you.
So they're trying to blame you guys for the trucks that came in there.
Excuse me.
Something got caught in my throat there.
But yeah, they're saying that because we allowed...
That campaign, even though it had existed on GoFundMe before us, like if you remember the situation, they raised 10 million, the trucker organization raised 10 million dollars on GoFundMe.
It was just that GoFundMe came to the pressure and said, no, we're going to take this money and we're going to give it to people that we think it should go to and we'll work with the truckers to disperse it.
And then they got massive pushback for that.
And then the campaign came to give, set and go.
A lot of the funds initially were raised on GoFundMe.
They're not being sued because they did what the powers that be wanted them to do, which was take it down, not help facilitate the protest.
And we said, no, they have a right to protest.
They're bouncing in bouncy castles in the middle of freezing cold winter and having barbecues in the street.
This is not some terrorist organization like GoFundMe helped facilitate funding.
For in the summer of love, the summer of 2020, when there were riots throughout America because of the political tension and the things that were surrounding some of those racial tensions that we saw play out.
So, yeah, we are in the middle of a $300 million lawsuit where they're coming after us saying, well, we harmed the businesses somehow because we were a platform that allowed this campaign.
Crazy.
I mean, how's that playing out through the Canadian courts?
I would think that that's kind of hostile ground for anybody looking for any sort of First Amendment-type freedom, because the Canadian government necessarily hasn't been very pro-freedom of speech.
Right.
No, you're right on there.
It doesn't seem to be a good place for this to be adjudicated, because the Canadian courts haven't been...
Proving themselves to uphold solid principles of freedom like you just mentioned.
And so we're currently, we just submitted a motion just, I think, a week ago to have the case moved out of Ottawa because that's where the trucker protest occurred.
And the court currently hearing the case is right there smacked up in the middle of Ottawa.
So we're saying it shouldn't be heard in Ottawa.
It should go to a different court.
We firmly believe that just to remove any potential biases, court members that may have been influenced by the protest happening right in their neighborhood or something like that.
So I think regardless of what happens in Canada, though, with the outcome of this lawsuit.
There are still great protections here in the U.S., and GiveSendGo is a U.S.-based platform.
And I don't know if you've discussed or even your followers know about Section 230, but Section 230 protects platforms like ours against the content uploaded by its users.
And it's necessary because it shouldn't be on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or even GiveSendGo to monitor and police.
Everything that happens on their website, it would be an impossible task and we wouldn't be able to navigate.
So that's why laws like Section 230 were put in place.
Wow, wow.
All right, so now tell me about this whole situation with great work, by the way, against the Canadian government.
I wish you guys the best of luck there.
Thank you.
What's going on with this Carmelo Anthony fundraiser?
I guess there was some controversy regarding that.
Could you tell us what's going on with that particular situation?
Oh, man.
Yeah, it's fascinating to see the controversy, particularly because I...
Stitt, in my political ideology, more on the right side of the aisle.
I'm a conservative Christian.
And where Give, Send, Go really got its initial momentum was when we allowed a young kid named Kyle Rittenhouse a legal defense fund.
He'd found himself in a very difficult situation, and he actually shot and killed two people, and then a third person he shot as well, who didn't die.
We allowed Kyle a fundraising campaign on Give, Send, Go when he was getting shut off from every other outlet.
And now we're here, fast forward four years later or so, and we've got a campaign for a young black kid who stabbed a young white kid.
These are both 17-year-old children and found themselves in a very bad, bad situation.
Didn't work out well.
I mean, Austin died.
Horrible tragedies for the families.
And what's happened is the right, many people on the right who used to champion free speech and due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law, not public opinion, they've now sort of changed their tune.
Many of them saying, well...
Give, send, go shouldn't be hosting this fundraiser.
I'm like, well, you were very much for this when it was for the people that you wanted to see it for, whether it was Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Penny or even Derek Chauvin, who we've allowed, or the McMichaels.
I mean, there's been so many different campaigns that fall on the political right that were being championed by the right.
Now, because this young black boy doesn't seem to fit.
Politically on the right, it's more on the left.
They're wanting us to take it down.
And so there's a lot of narrative running around it.
There's a lot of half-truths that are running throughout the internet about what the money is being spent on, things that just aren't even true.
I mean, there was a whole article, I think it was in the New York Post, that was just complete conjecture.
There was no fact-checking.
There was no solid, reliable information on it.
In so many pundits on the right, Ran with it as if it was truth.
Like, oh, they're taking the money and they're buying a house and they're buying Cadillacs and they're doing this and doing that.
It's not true.
And this reiterates why we wait for the courts to make determinations in these moments.
Because there's so much mistruth and falsehoods that run the narrative on social media.
It's rampant.
Wow, wow.
So all that stuff that's being said about him buying cars and houses, that's not true?
No, it's not true.
Could you dissect to us how this happened?
I mean, firstly, it's curious to me that they're not going with GoFundMe, they're going with Give, Send, Go.
But was this the family?
Could you tell us a little bit more about how this came about?
Yeah, so I think from what I understand is that somebody did try to set up a GoFundMe campaign.
For the Anthony family, and GoFundMe shut it down.
GoFundMe has a policy that they've had to become very vocal about, about not allowing people accused of violent crimes to fundraise on their platform.
Though they've made some exceptions for people on the left, it seems like in the past, but because it's become very vocal, and we've taken a stance at Gibson Go that, no, the principle in the U.S. is, That you are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
As difficult as that is with various horrific situations that happen in society.
So anyways, there was one on GoFundMe.
It got shut down.
I'm not sure who created that campaign.
But shortly after, somebody, somebody not related to the Anthony family, created a campaign on Give, Send, Go and started the fundraising process.
And it began to raise money quickly.
I think partially because narratives were already beginning to spread on both sides of the aisle around this situation.
And when narratives run, you know, half-truths, they spur people to action.
We saw this particularly with the Daniel Penny campaign a few years ago.
Fundraising campaign raised over, I think, close to $3.5 million.
But the bulk of that money was raised as a byproduct of the mainstream media immediately jumping on and making a racial narrative around the Daniel Penny campaign.
It was a black kid who died, and it was a white Marine who killed him.
And all of a sudden, it was white supremacy and all of the different narratives that the mainstream media wanted to create around that.
And the response is, all of a sudden, the right media, the alt media and the upcoming right media, the big pundits on the right, started saying, no, no, no, no, no, and driving traffic to his Give, Send, Go campaign.
And so Daniel Penny was able to raise a lot of money.
And then, as the campaign...
It takes on the life of its own in some respects because the mainstream media can't ignore it.
And so then they have to report on the campaign's growth itself.
And it garners more money as a result of that.
So the same thing has happened in this Carmelo campaign.
Somebody created the campaign for the family.
It wasn't the family that created the campaign.
And it was the right side of the aisle now that was running the race narrative, talking about a black kid killing a white kid and running the racial tension.
And the byproduct of that was the mainstream media came to the defense in essence of the other side of the aisle narrative.
And it fueled donations to the campaign.
This is what happens when these when these things narratives start running around these these situations.
But it was not created by the family.
It was created by somebody unrelated to the family.
And they just chose the family as the benefactor, the recipient of the funds.
And then the New York Post, I believe it was the New York Post, that posted an article about the family buying.
A $900,000 house in a gated community and buying a new Cadillac.
The article was very poorly written.
It didn't substantiate anything, the claims that were made.
And then it came out not long after.
But the problem is the damage is done.
You get a mainstream publication like the New York Post posting something and then the pundits start running with the headline.
But the news, the actual truth of the situation, It doesn't typically make its way out there.
And what the truth of the situation was, the family did have to move because of death threats.
The Anthony family had to move because of death threats.
They already lived in a $900,000 house, and they moved laterally in the sense of the size and scope of house.
From one house to another, in a gated community where they would find a little bit more safety from the threats that they were receiving.
They didn't purchase vehicles that was just made up.
Someone saw a Cadillac in their driveway, but it was a few years old.
They'd actually purchased it several years earlier because Carmelo Anthony actually grew up in a family where both his mom and dad were together and they were...
Relatively successful as a family.
They weren't impoverished.
They had a decent upbringing economically, and so they could afford decent stuff.
So that's part of the combating of the misinformation is that people post stuff real quickly, they jump to assumptions, and then it paints narratives.
So you've been getting a lot of...
I mean, it seems as though you've pretty much done the same thing with whether it's the truckers and fighting for people's just freedom of speech and being able to protest.
It seems like you're pretty much across the board.
You're being pretty consistent.
It's just people don't like that in the Carmelo Anthony situation, a lot of people think that he murdered Austin, I believe was the gentleman's name.
By stabbing him in the heart.
So it's basically because of that, you're getting a lot of backlash now.
It is because of that.
And to be fair, I mean, Carmelo did admit to killing Austin.
He said, I stabbed him directly to the police officers.
But the problem with that is you have to ask the question, why?
And Carmelo and his...
His defense team have made a claim that it was in self-defense, that he was being attacked.
And so if we're to operate as a society, you have to operate on principle, not on emotion.
Emotion is good.
Emotion is useful for situations.
But when you get down to how you're supposed to operate, what your rules are, they have to be Void of emotion.
They have to be built on principles and frameworks for proper societal function.
And one of our frameworks in the United States and in Western society at large is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.
And as we begin to chip away and society and other companies have It begins to undermine the principle for everybody.
And it actually gives space for the division that we start seeing rising again within our culture.
Because when you start picking and choosing, you create opportunity for division.
Presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law actually has some very, very significant value to creating flourishing societies.
I talked about this on another podcast.
Here are four basic truths about the presumption of innocence, why it's better than the presumption of guilt.
One, the presumption of innocence builds social cohesion.
We're trying to exist together as a society.
If you have a presumption of guilt as a framework for your legal system, then your society, your people live in fear.
Fear of accusation and immediately being under the gun to have to defend themselves.
And it doesn't create a great place of...
Societies don't do well when they're ruled by fear.
They just don't flourish as well as when you have freedom and the presumption of innocence.
So we set presumption of innocence as a framework because it actually builds better societies.
People aren't living in fear.
They can live within freedom and it builds social cohesion.
And then point number two is it's very difficult to prove a negative.
It's much harder to prove a negative, which the person accused would have to do in order to prove themselves not guilty versus the accuser proving a positive.
And so because it's harder to prove a negative, we say, nope, we're going to afford the person accused the presumption of innocence.
And then you have the resources of the state.
So the prosecution, the state, has...
Much, much greater resources at their disposal than an individual to prosecute.
And so, as a protection against the state, we apply presumption of innocence because it gives us a buffer between the strength of the state.
And then lastly, it's because we've recognized in our Western legal tradition that...
An accused guilty person going free is far less worse than, excuse the bad grammatical situation there, but it's much less, it's not nearly,
let me frame this properly.
It's much worse for an innocent person to be wrongly convicted than it is for a guilty person.
To be let free.
And this drives itself right back to the Bible, to God's discussion with Abraham.
It was written, the Babylonians knew about this.
They wrote about it in Hammurabi's Code.
It was in the Magna Carta.
Like, our whole framework of legal process derives itself from these principles.
And they all come together for a flourishing society.
And this is why we uphold the presumption of innocence.
And, you know, that's a long-form answer to why we do what we do at Give, Send, Go, which is we're going to support people on either side of the aisle when they're accused of very difficult and even violent crimes because when we begin to undermine the principle, it actually gives rise to all the ills of society that we don't want.
Seems as though you're treating the truckers the same way you're treating Carmelo Anthony despite the politics.
That's how I'm reading it.
It's exactly, it's how it has to be.
We have to operate as a society on principles, not on personal feeling.
You said it correctly.
I'm not a supporter of Carmelo or his family, and I haven't donated to that campaign.
Give, Send, Go is a platform, and people can fundraise on Give, Send, Go for legal endeavors.
And we say now more than ever, particularly with the amount of fake narratives that do fly and flow out on the internet and through social media, that people need the most rigorous defense now more than ever.
So we should be supporting everyone's right to a strong legal defense, a private legal defense, if they're capable, if their community wants to support that.
Very cool, man.
Very cool.
Is there anything we haven't touched upon regarding it?
I'm going to actually pose a few more questions to you beyond the Carmelo Anthony topic.
But is there anything we haven't talked about the Carmelo Anthony topic that's important for you to convey to our viewers?
I think, like, what you, you know, the couple things, and I'll just reiterate them real quickly, is the Carmelo, the Anthony family, they didn't set up this campaign.
People are trying to paint it as if it was a money grab by them.
It was someone that didn't even know them that created the campaign.
They just happened to be the recipient of it.
And it's unfortunate that this has become the racist narrative.
Pushed thing that it's become because this is just a tragedy.
This is a very sad situation where a young boy has lost his life and another young boy is going to face the ramifications of his actions for a long time for the rest of his life and his family.
Very, very much a tragedy all around.
And give, send, go.
We are.
We're going to continue to stay neutral in these endeavors and we're going to do what we've been called to do, which is share hope in the midst of these broken situations.
Before I get to my other questions, I mean, obviously you have a connection to Christ.
It seems like that's part of your barometer.
Yeah.
Yeah, very much so.
I mean, it's how we look through everything that we do.
It's like, okay, what is the basis for even the idea of Christ, which is that God became man and then took the punishment that we deserved?
This is redemption at its finest.
So when I look at a situation like Carmelo, Anthony, and his family, those are the people that Jesus came and died for.
Like, Jesus died for Carmelo.
Jesus died for the Anthony family.
He died for the Austin Metcalf family.
He died for these broken situations because as humans, we don't get it right.
We have...
A selfish desire inside of us.
And the point of the cross is that true life comes through selflessness, not selfishness.
And so we try to do everything based upon those principles.
Jesus had a cool discussion with some Pharisees back in the day.
And they're like, you're hanging around with all these sinners.
And he's like, yeah.
Because that's what I came for.
I came for the people that...
It's not the people that aren't sick that need the doctor.
It's the people that are sick that need a doctor.
So you will probably see give, send, go marred in controversy all the time.
Because we hang around with broken people.
And they need Jesus just like we need Jesus.
And that's the principle we stand on.
That's the principle of who Christ is in this world.
Wow, wow.
That's amazing, Jacob.
I really appreciate the amazing work that you guys have done.
I mean, certainly in the dark ages of, you know, 2020 to 2024, it's like you guys were the only platform that people like me could go on or people that I associate with could go on to do fundraising because we're literally banned from everywhere.
And what you're telling me is you don't want to play this game of opposites where now that we're in pole position as, I guess, more right-winger type.
You're not going to do the same to the left as they were doing to us.
Do it to others, basically.
You can find an excuse to cut off your enemy, but the principle of Jesus was you turn the cheek and you give grace when it's not deserved, and that actually begins to change culture.
That actually is what fixes culture.
Censoring people, cutting people down, shutting them off, that doesn't fix culture.
It just inflames it.
Let's actually extend grace when it's not deserved and see unity begin to take place in culture.
I think that what's happened is 50, it's actually more than that, 60, 70 years ago in society, particularly here in America, we removed the very concept that there was a God.
We said, no, there's no God.
God's dead.
He's gone.
We're going to pull that framework out from underneath us.
And the byproduct of that is pride.
Because the very idea of God in society, it makes you and I subservient beneath.
We're not God.
If there is a God, we immediately become not God.
But because we have taken God out of society, all of a sudden humans get elevated to God status.
And what is one of the characteristics of God?
Is omniscience.
You know everything.
And so this pride of who you are has now infiltrated all aspects of society.
The right and the left.
And we operate with this sense of pride which pushes us into this place where we can't talk to anybody anymore.
We have to fight about everything because it's just my way or the highway.
The whole premise.
For this experiment, this America experiment, was that there was a God and you aren't Him.
You don't know everything.
And when you realize that there is a God and you don't know everything, you automatically get put on the same footing and you can extend grace because you realize, no, I'm not God.
I don't know everything.
I can engage with you, because I don't know everything.
You're probably going to teach me some stuff because I don't know everything.
Your experience is different than mine.
That's the value of free speech.
The value of free speech is that I don't know everything so I can learn, but we've allowed God to be removed, and now we've become gods, and we know everything, and pride is a byproduct of that, and it just creates war and tribalism, and that's what we're experiencing right now.
Yeah, yeah, so true, so true.
For the viewers out there, thank you so much for joining us for this Blood Money episode.
Definitely make sure you support GiveSengo because principled organizations like GiveSengo, regardless of the political climate, are so necessary.
And the reason I wanted to bring up my personal experience is that as a patriot, it's just insane that we've let go of the truth, we've let go of logic, and we've gotten these tribalistic groups of red...
Jacob, you don't stand for that.
You're clearly a right-winger, but you're not a right-winger at the cost of truth, at the cost of censoring other people.
That, to me, is music to my ears because there's not many organizations that are not politicized like that, including our courts, by the way, which we're seeing how political our courts have become, as opposed to just following the Constitution and the rule of law.
The story in the Bible, in the book of Joshua, Joshua and the Israelites have entered the promised land, and they are beginning to battle the nations that were there.
And an angel of God appears before Joshua, and Joshua says, whose side are you on?
Now, God had called Joshua and the Israelites into the nation, and so they were doing what God was asking for them.
But this angel of God...
Dressed up in armor said, I'm not for you.
I'm not for you, Joshua.
Like, I'm for me.
And the whole purpose of Scripture is, no, we don't get pulled into political sides.
We stay centered on truth, on principle.
I heard a saying once that says, what's new isn't true, and what's true is not new.
Truth has existed from the very beginning.
And it's principles that undergird the very fabric of our world and our society.
And we're going to continue to stand on those principles.
And it is what heals our country.
It's what brings our country back together.
It re-inculcates the very moral fibers that once made this country the greatness that it was.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thank you so much, Jacob, for the work you're doing in that regard.
For the viewers out there, make sure you check out AmericaHappens.com where we have all of our featured episodes.
Make sure you check out our Rumble channel as well as our Roku channel.
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