Most of our blog posts are for the benefit of nonprofits and the legal and accounting community that serve them. This is not one of those posts.

At this point, if you are not a billionaire*, we ask that you stop reading. No hard feelings — there will be more posts on UBIT, lobbying, and other fun tax-exemption issues for you soon. Come on back then. This is just a very special post for a special audience.

*We try to be as inclusive as possible here at MLC, so if your net worth is not yet over $1B but is at least many millions of dollars and you’re feeling bullish, we welcome you to stick around.

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Are we alone now? Great.

I want to talk to you about a special opportunity we have. Namely, one where you give our 501(c)(4) affiliate the entirety of your company, save yourself hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, and dominate our political system from the grave in perpetuity. And get yourself fawning and misleading (in your favor!) coverage in major publications.

Sound good? Excellent, let’s continue…

Since reading The Lever and ProPublica’s excellent and essential joint piece, by Andrew Perez, Andy Kroll & Justin Elliott this morning, I have been wrestling with the best way to write about Barre Seid’s $1.6B gift to “The Marble Freedom Trust.” The Trust, a 501(c)(4), will be run by Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society who advised on the prior administration’s disfiguration of the judicial branch and is dedicated to various conservative and theocratic causes. 

I find the current state of affairs repugnant, and it is brutally depressing to see our country’s reactionary forces so thoroughly financed in perpetuity.  So, rather than try to organize a blog post, I will just free-associate…

There are times when I read over the most recent batch of IRS 501(c)(3) denial rulings and shed a tear (figuratively speaking, of course) for the shattered dreams of well-intentioned but misguided applicants. This is not one of those times.

There was a batch of six IRS denial rulings that came across my desk, and I will probably cover at least a few of the other five eventually. But my penchant for schadenfreude drew me to the one that mentioned blatant partisan campaign intervention and prohibited benefits to a multi-level marketing company. And honestly, it’s much worse than that.

Let’s do a quick recap as an excuse to cover these two issues, one of which is as “black-and-white” as they come (electioneering) while the other (managing private benefit so that a relationship to an affiliated for-profit does not cost the 501(c)(3) its exempt status) is typically a very gray area and one that we spend a lot of time talking to clients about in order to get the balance right. But, honestly, I just wanted to share some insane facts.

What exactly are we supposed to do?  And how do non-profits fit into it?

There have been many days that I considered writing this post.  Apparently, Texas’ two latest blows against the autonomy of women and voting rights were enough, especially when cast against a backdrop of a pandemic and displacement around the globe from war and climate-caused disasters.  Horrendous injustice and suffering are not new, of course. The dominant forces in this country have always actively fought to disenfranchise and inflict cruelty upon women and people of color.  

But I’d argue that the way we experience these tragedies is new.  Technology may have increased our capacity to solve problems.  But, that increase is exponentially outpaced by the increase in our awareness of the full extent of misfortune.  Even when we manage to put our phone down and try to enjoy the relative privilege of our lives, it still rattles against our table, reminding us of its portal back to a situation that feels hopeless.

The answer to the questions at the top?  I have no idea, truly.  I default to pessimism, which may have a high degree of accuracy but is not always constructive when it comes to pushing the rock back up the hill.  

Still, if you think you know what to do and you want to leverage the non-profit sector to push back against these developments, I can at least offer a few thoughts on some tools to think about.