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It’s perhaps inevitable that there are already several online fundraisers for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last week. Conservative social media users often rally to financially defend anyone perceived as a member of their team, regardless of how unpalatable their actions might be. One GoFundMe for the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, has already raised more than $439,000, $10,000 of which came from the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who argued that everyone deserves a hearty defense.
But there was one specific fundraiser that betrayed just how careless the right has become in its tribalist impulses. On GiveSendGo, the “Christian” alternative to GoFundMe, the primary fundraising post for Ross is explicitly white supremacist in nature.
GiveSendGo was built as a kind of conservative, faith-based alternative to GoFundMe, and it has crowdfunded small fortunes for plenty of conservative heroes accused of violent or bigoted actions. For example, it hosted a campaign that raised $836,000 for Shiloh Hendrix, the white mother who called a child on a playground the N-word. It is also where Kyle Rittenhouse raised more than $586,000 for his defense after he killed two men in 2020. Many Jan. 6 insurrectionists—even those who assaulted police officers in their efforts to overturn the election—turned to this platform when they wanted help.
But the site’s Ross fundraiser, which has raised more than $171,000, reveals an even darker side of these crowdfunding efforts.
Titled “Stand With Our Brave ICE Hero,” the fundraiser is a legitimate campaign connected to the agent. It has been shared by Jacob Wells, a co-founder of GiveSendGo, who has personally vouched, on social media, that the funds will go to Ross. It was boosted by major conservative accounts, as well as the right-wing news outlet Alpha News, which was the first publication to share video from Ross’ perspective of the Minneapolis encounter.
But skim to the third paragraph of its description of the event, and you’ll see—or would have seen, as the page has since been edited—a rather odd description of the situation: “This didn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s the direct result of anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish) fanning the flames of resistance.”
In case that reference to Frey’s religion isn’t enough, there are other tells about this particular fundraiser’s specific white supremacist leanings. The fundraiser’s URL is www.givesendgo.com/Theyallmustgo. Then there’s the opener, addressing “America First patriots”—a signal, often, to the more white supremacist element of the right. The text also speaks of “illegal aliens … flooding our nation … and threatening our sovereignty” and of efforts to “purge … parasites from our soil,” dehumanizing rhetoric that evokes Great Replacement conspiracy theories.
But we don’t actually need to decipher the language here, because the man who created the account is an avowed white supremacist who has no desire to hide his views. On X, the man—who goes by Tom Hennessey, it’s unclear if that is his real name—defended the killing by asking if Good was a “negrophile” and arguing that “American stormtroopers … should be able to use extraordinary violence on our behalf.” He celebrates whiteness on his account, argues for the protection of “White American bloodlines,” and promotes the idea that Jews ruin white nations by “flooding” them with immigrants.
It’s not clear if he has any direct connection to Ross, but this isn’t his first fundraiser. In November, Hennessey set up a GoFundMe page for a 20-year-old Mississippi State University student who yelled “Fuck the Jews” at Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy. (The page said that Jewish complaints about “hate speech” were weaponized to get “the goyim get locked up.”) And in December, Hennessey set up another page, this time for Crystal Wilsey, a woman who repeatedly used the N-word at a Somali American couple and declared herself to be “a racist.” In fact, the ICE agent page was admittedly out of character for Hennessey, as it didn’t involve an explicitly racist incident. But it did establish this as, at minimum, a hobby for him.
The people who donated to this GoFundMe, or those who just expressed interest, such as Megyn Kelly, may not have all read the page or clocked its white supremacist origins. It has since been edited to remove the reference to Frey’s Judaism; it has not been toned down that much overall. But this incident shows the carelessness behind right-wing solidarity. Ross’ supporters, acting on a kind of anti-left impulse, may think they’re helping their movement by supporting patriots. They are also exposing overt hatred at the core of the anti-immigrant movement.
