One particularly surreal aspect of Donald Trump threatening the tax-exempt status of Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest and foremost educational institutions—and excluding it from federal research funding for refusing to heed the administration’s oversight demands—is the fact that even some of the nation’s most hateful and antidemocratic entities qualify as tax-exempt charities. As I explain in my book, Jackpot:
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation is broadly defined as an organization with religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. There are charities dedicated to “fostering appreciation” for camellias and “promoting the medium of American mime.” (The latter, last I checked, had more than $6 million in assets.) In 2017, according to one investigative outlet, the National Christian Foundation—one of the largest faith-based donor- advised funds—distributed more than $19 million of its donors’ money to tax-exempt charities that were anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant.
Among the NCF’s leading recipients is Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of Christian lawyers that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for its antigay activities. The Alliance collects tens of millions in tax-exempt donations each year. It has expressed support for foreign laws criminalizing sodomy, represented business owners in court who refuse to serve LGBTQ customers, opposed transgender troops, and even disputed that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming, was a hate crime.
I bring this all up because acting US Attorney Ed Martin, Trump’s ill-fated pick for permanent US Attorney for the Washington, DC, district, apparently had a cozy relationship with the white nationalist group VDare. According to a 2024 report from Media Matters, Martin has called himself a “big admirer” of the nonprofit group. (His nomination appears doomed, albeit for unrelated reasons.) Media Matters wrote:
Martin also repeatedly hosted VDare leader and white nationalist Peter Brimelow on his now-defunct radio program The Ed Martin Movement. During an episode that aired on November 29, 2018, Martin praised Brimelow as “a guy worth listening to” and told him, “I’m always glad to give you a voice, you’re always welcome here.”
VDare, which suspended its activities last July, was an active tax-exempt charity during Trump’s first term. In 2018, too, the Trump administration reinstated the tax-exempt status of white nationalist Richard Spencer‘s National Policy Institute, which had its status revoked automatically for failing to file mandatory 990 tax returns for three years running.
It is telling that a president who never questioned the tax-exempt status of white nationalist groups is now suggesting his IRS might take a hard look at Harvard’s.
Of course, even that simple suggestion would seem to violate federal law, which states explicitly (emphasis mine): “It shall be unlawful for any applicable person”—the president, vice president, any of their staffers, or any cabinet member—”to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” (The law was passed post-Watergate to ensure that no administration could weaponize the IRS as President Richard Nixon sought to do.)
Even if Harvard has some issues to work out related to alleged antisemitism, US taxpayers continue to subsidize nonprofits that exist largely to stoke anti-immigrant and religious hatred. If we are compelled to support these kinds of groups in the name of “education,” we’d best be compelled to also support legitimate institutions of higher learning. As I wrote in the book:
Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who slaughtered those Black parishioners in Charleston, wrote that he was motivated by “black on white” crime propaganda he discovered on the website of the nonprofit Council of Conservative Citizens, one of whose former board members, a self-described “race realist” named Jared Taylor, runs the like-minded New Century Foundation, another tax-exempt nonprofit. VDare Foundation, a vehemently anti-immigrant journalism nonprofit, has collected more than $5 million over the past decade. Its website features headlines such as “Milwaukee Shooting: Six Out of Eleven Mass Shootings in 86% White Wisconsin Are by Minorities or Immigrants” and “NYPD Releases Pic of Suspect in Tessa Majors Killing. Guess What? He’s Black.”
Taylor’s New Century Foundation also appears to be inactive these days, and an entirely unrelated nonprofit exists under the same name. When I reached Taylor by phone circa 2020, he told me he disagreed with Roof’s motive of starting a race war (“that’s immoral”), but said “his grievances were understandable.” Taylor also disputed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of the Council of Conservative Citizens and New Century as white nationalists, saying, “I call myself a ‘race realist’ and a “white advocate.’ ”
Alas, our current, Orwellian, administration—with its nasty scapegoating of immigrants and clumsy attempts to erase the historical contributions of women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhites from the public commons under the guise of eliminating “DEI”—has proved itself a “white advocate” at the expense of just about everyone else.
