In 2010, GoFundMe launched with a simple promise: a digital wishing well for personal emergencies. GiveSendGo followed in 2014 as a faith-based alternative, built to fund church mission trips and medical bills. Neither platform was designed to reward racism. Yet today, both have become critical infrastructure for monetizing racial hostility—transforming viral acts of bigotry into six-figure paydays for the perpetrators.

The mechanism is not accidental. It is the predictable result of algorithmic outrage economics, deliberate platform positioning, and a donor base that treats money as a political weapon. What began as tools for charitable giving have evolved into parallel financial ecosystems where racial controversy is not a liability but a fundraising asset.

The Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism tracked this phenomenon and found that between 2016 and 2022, extremists raised over $6.2 million across 324 campaigns on 10 crowdfunding sites. GiveSendGo alone hosted $5.4 million—roughly 86.5% of all tracked funds.

The Architecture of Spite

When a racist incident goes viral, the initial wave of public anger drives massive traffic to the video. Mainstream platforms amplify it. Then, far-right networks execute a well-rehearsed playbook: they attach a crowdfunding link, reframe the perpetrator as a victim of "cancel culture," and watch the donations pour in.

This process is fueled by what behavioral economists call "spite donating"—contributions made not to support the individual, but to send a political message. Donors give $5, $10, or $50 as an act of defiance against what they perceive as unfair public shaming. The financial loss is eclipsed by the psychological thrill of causing frustration to their political enemies.

• Spite Donation: Money given as a political counter-protest against "cancel culture"
• Algorithmic Hijacking: Extremist networks attach donation links to viral racist incidents
• Platform Loopholes: Campaigns rebranded as "family support" to bypass hate speech bans
• Default Tips: Platforms profit from 10-15% default tips on outrage-driven donations

The Shiloh Hendrix Case

In 2025, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was captured on video hurling a racial slur at a five-year-old Black child in Rochester, Minnesota. The video went viral. Almost immediately, a campaign titled "Help Me Protect My Family" appeared on GiveSendGo.

White supremacist groups flooded the platform, using the campaign to spread propaganda. The fundraiser amassed over $700,000. The donation boards became so toxic—filled with explicit racist and antisemitic comments—that GiveSendGo's co-founders were forced to disable the comment section entirely. Meanwhile, the Rochester chapter of the NAACP raised over $340,000 for the targeted child's family on GoFundMe before closing the fundraiser at the family's request for privacy.

The Chud the Builder Pipeline

Few cases illustrate the monetization pipeline more clearly than Dalton Eatherly, known online as "Chud the Builder." The 28-year-old Tennessee livestreamer built an audience of over 200,000 by walking through public spaces shouting racial slurs at Black passersby and filming the reactions. If targets became upset, he would flash his firearm.

On May 13, 2026, Eatherly's provocations escalated. Outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee, he shot a Black military veteran, Joshua Fox, five times. He livestreamed the aftermath from his stretcher, claiming self-defense. Following his arrest on attempted criminal homicide charges, donations to his GiveSendGo campaign surged past $300,000. His personal "meme coin" briefly skyrocketed.

A judge later barred him from using post-shooting crowdfunding money to post his $1 million bond, ruling those funds could only go toward legal defense. While Fox's family launched a separate GoFundMe to cover medical bills, Eatherly's case became textbook proof: racial harassment, when performed for an audience, is a highly lucrative business model.

The GoFundMe Loophole: Lindsay Clancy

GoFundMe explicitly bans fundraisers that directly fund the legal defense of violent crimes. But organizers have learned to exploit semantic loopholes. Instead of fundraising for "Legal Fees," campaigns are framed as "Help an Innocent Family Relocate" or "Support the Children of a Stressed Mother."

The Lindsay Clancy case demonstrates this perfectly. Clancy was charged with first-degree murder for the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three young children in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Her trial—centered on an insanity defense citing severe postpartum psychosis—ended in a mistrial in September 2026.

During the trial, a campaign called "The Musgrove Family Fund" launched on GoFundMe. The fundraiser was explicitly set up for Clancy's elderly parents to cover their travel, lodging, and living costs. Because the money went directly to the parents rather than a legal defense trust, GoFundMe verified the campaign as compliant with its Terms of Service. The fundraiser amassed over $1.2 million and subsequently raised its target goal to $3 million. Clancy's defense attorney openly acknowledged that the parents had depleted their retirement savings to foot the bill for her private defense—the GoFundMe essentially acted as financial replenishment.

The GiveSendGo Catalyst

GiveSendGo didn't start as a hub for spite donations. It was launched in 2014 by evangelical Christian siblings as a niche, faith-based alternative to GoFundMe. However, its trajectory completely shifted between 2020 and 2022, transforming the site into the primary financial sanctuary for deplatformed political figures and right-wing causes.

The first major catalyst was the Kyle Rittenhouse legal fund in August 2020. After GoFundMe banned campaigns raising money for his legal defense, conservative networks flooded GiveSendGo. A campaign rapidly raised over $600,000. Data leaks later revealed that the platform itself banked more than $40,000 in pure donor tips just from hosting this single campaign.

The second catalyst was the 2022 Canadian "Freedom Convoy" trucker protests. After GoFundMe froze over $8 million in donations under pressure from Canadian authorities, donors redirected their money to GiveSendGo. The campaign raised more than $3.5 million in just the first two days. Leaked data showed that GiveSendGo generated a staggering $735,000 in pure corporate profit from the trucker protest alone, thanks to its default 10% tip structure.

Following these events, GiveSendGo leaned heavily into its identity as a "censorship-free" zone. The platform's co-founders, Jacob Wells and Heather Wilson, explicitly changed their marketing to position GiveSendGo as an alternative for those restricted from mainstream sites.

How the Platforms Profit

GoFundMe doesn't technically take a "platform fee" anymore, but it still generates millions from controversial campaigns through transaction fees and donor tips. The company's current revenue model relies on two primary mechanics that scale massively when a campaign goes viral:

• Transaction Fees (2.9% + $0.30 per donation): A $1 million campaign with 40,000 donors paying $25 each generates $41,000 in total transaction fees—$12,000 from flat fees alone
• Default Tips (typically 15%): GoFundMe automatically adds a voluntary tip to checkout totals. If half of donors on a $1 million campaign leave the default tip, GoFundMe pulls in an extra $75,000 in pure, un-deducted profit
• GiveSendGo's Model: The ADL found GiveSendGo generated over $2.6 million in pure tips just from hosting controversial, deplatformed fundraisers over a multi-year period

Every minute a racially explosive campaign remains active, payment processors are humming, default tips are stacking up, and the platform is actively generating revenue from public outrage.

The Donor Psychology

People donate to these campaigns for reasons deeply tied to identity politics and internet subcultures. While some donors are explicit white supremacists, researchers point out that the vast majority are driven by specific psychological motivators.

The single largest driver is "spite donating." Many donors do not necessarily support the specific racist act; instead, they see a viral public backlash as an attack by "the left" or "woke culture." Donating becomes an active political counter-protest—a way to "send a message" using their wallets.

Sociologists also point to "in-group favoritism." In deeply polarized societies, people naturally feel a psychological urge to protect members of their own "tribe." Studies on peer-to-peer giving show that white campaigners systematically raise significantly more money on crowdfunding platforms because structural and implicit biases make a majority-white donor base view them as more relatable, sympathetic, and "deserving" of help.

Anonymity plays a critical role as well. On mainstream social media, people hide their biases to protect their jobs. But when a platform allows them to hide behind a screen name, it acts as a digital mask. Donors feel safe to act on aggressive, mean-spirited, or heavily prejudiced beliefs without facing real-world consequences. This is why donation boards on alternative sites frequently become filled with explicit racial slurs and hate symbols under aliases.

The Normalization of Racialized Politics

Political scientists note that the massive financial support generated by these campaigns points to a growing normalization of explicitly racialized politics and algorithmic outrage online. The financial infrastructure of online hate extends far beyond isolated viral videos—it spans complex white supremacist networks, strategic legal defense funds, and a distinct ecosystem of "alt-tech" payment platforms designed specifically to bypass mainstream bans.

Organized hate groups systematically use crowdfunding to fund their operations: building physical compounds, producing propaganda, operating hate-speech podcasts, and financing legal defense for members facing criminal charges. Following the January 6th Capitol Riot, multiple individuals linked to the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and localized militias raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for their legal teams. Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, raised nearly $160,000 via alternative platforms to fight civil rights lawsuits.

Civil rights researchers point out that these fundraisers are often highly strategic. Individuals who display racist behavior online quickly realize that doubling down on their actions—rather than apologizing—triggers an immediate wave of media attention and algorithmically driven outrage. This visibility is then directly funneled to an open donation link, converting public backlash into a highly lucrative revenue stream from ideological supporters.

What Comes Next

The tension between mainstream platform bans and alternative crowdfunding shows no signs of abating. As long as outrage drives engagement, and engagement drives revenue, the incentives remain aligned for platforms to look the other way—or at least to collect their fees before stepping in.

Researchers and civil rights organizations continue to document the flow of money through these ecosystems, but the fundamental architecture remains unchanged. The same frictionless infrastructure built to help people pay for medical bills and disasters has made it incredibly easy for bad actors to turn racial outrage into a highly profitable business model.

Until that architecture changes—through regulatory pressure, payment processor intervention, or a fundamental shift in platform incentives—the monetization of racism will continue to find a home online, one viral campaign at a time.