Money Laundering and Elections

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Non-profits organized and licensed as 501(c)(3) entities get donations to them characterized as tax deductions, and they are prohibited from engaging in any form of political campaign for or against a candidate. Non-profits organized and licensed as 501(c)(4) entities, on the other hand, are allowed to engage in political campaigns, including direct partisan politics.

So far, everything’s jake.

However.

Quite a number of 501(c)(3)s sent all of their donations to 501(c)(4)s explicitly to help fund politicians’ campaigns and to allow their donors’ donations engage in those direct partisan politics. That’s strictly, narrowly legal.

Here are three examples, though, of something more nefarious.

  • Democracy Matters Foundation provided 96% of its 2024 expenditures to its affiliated(!) 501(c)(4), Democracy Matters, some $31.38 million
  • Guarantee Our Votes Project spent just 0.2% of its $13,919,873 on 2024 legal and office expenses; the remainder went to donations like $13.85 million to America Works USA
  • America Votes Education Fund in 2024 gave $20,748,002 to its 501(c)(4) affiliate(!) America Votes. It claimed a token $532 in office expenses and $274 in fundraising expenses that year, and it had no paid employees

Should that sort of thing be legal? It looks like money-laundering to me.

“Sophisticated Free-Market Pricing”

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That’s how a letter-writer in Wednesday’s WSJ Letters section, a university professor who should know better, characterizes campus economies.

Whether the general campus environment fosters particular political or economic attitudes is a legitimate question, but the pricing of campus amenities isn’t evidence of socialism. If anything, it is evidence of sophisticated, free-market pricing.

If it’s a matter of free-market pricing, then since tuition and fees cover all of that extra, colleges and universities have no need of Federal funding or of student loan guarantees.

Research conducted at colleges and universities is a separate matter, and Federal funds, if any, should be carefully controlled. All outcomes from programs partially or fully funded by the government should be strictly in the public arena and beyond the ability of school researchers to patent or otherwise personally profit from them.

Pick One

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In an article regarding Europe’s censors’ efforts to govern and limit American speech, Nathan Harden, RealClearEducation Editor, warned about AI packages embedding invisible and supposedly unremovable watermarks in writing (and eventually in imagery and recordings of speech, also) so that those censors can identify and block speech of which they personally disapprove. In the course of that, the author wrote this about Anthropic AI-generated watermarks in particular.

The marking technology subtly biases words the model picks, in a pattern Anthropic controls via a secret key. The watermark survives ordinary copy and paste, and there is no way to opt out. Anthropic says the mark carries no information that could identify a user and won’t affect the overall meaning of the text.

It isn’t possible to subtly bias words in a text without the overall meaning of that text being so influenced. Surely Anthropic’s managers understand this.

Harden then asked the critical question:

Americans should be asking a more fundamental question: Why is European law dictating how an American company produces words for Americans?

The answer is because [Anthropic’s] managers are all too willing to surrender to Europe’s censors in order preserve their precious presence there and not willing enough, if at all, to spend that energy preserving the freedoms of the nation that nurtured them and provided them the environment in which they grew and now prosper.

How, then, can [Anthropic] or its products be trusted in America or anywhere else?

A Remaining Question

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GSA says it has discovered more than $13 billion in suspected fraud by federal contractors since March.

Since then, the task force has announced a litany of fraud busts, spanning multiple agencies.

That’s just a small sample of the $250 billion in public funds fraud that the newly formed anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance (R) has found.

Left unaddressed, though, is what will GSA, DoJ, and the respective Department Secretaries and Agency Directors will do about those bureaucrats who enabled, if not actively facilitated, all of that fraud, whether out of personal ideology, crookedness, or incompetence? These also need to tracked down, prosecuted, and if convicted jailed for a good long time.

“Serious Legal Error”

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That’s what Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson claims the Supreme Court made when it lifted an injunction against President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order requiring, among other things, HHS to collect States’ voter registration rolls and the Post Office to work out procedures for not delivering mailed ballots to recipients who are not on those rolls. Her beef is that

the ruling could create election chaos and leave states trapped between filing legal challenges too early or too late.

And

“The Court does a disservice to all concerned by distorting Article III standing and ripeness principles to issue a ruling that contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” she wrote.

This is fatuous. If there is any uncertainty associated with drawing too close to Election Day, it’s not from Supreme Court, or any lesser court, ruling, it’s from the steady drumbeat of quibbling lawsuits from Leftists who want the ineligible to vote and from others pushing unserious boundary and corner cases just to see what trouble they can cause.

The majority dealt with that, whether they realized it or not by ruling the suit in the present case out of bounds because they’d suffered no injury because no procedure had yet been set up that caused or would cause injury.

Jackson wasn’t done.

Jackson said the decision “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

We’re supposed to believe that a lawyer so highly trained and so talented that she became a Supreme Court Justice is unable to work her way through a couple of clearcut rulings. This from a Supreme Court Justice who’s already confessed she’s not capable of saying what a woman is.

But she still wasn’t done.

“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize,” Jackson wrote….

Here she is, claiming to be able to read minds.

Good grief.