As any American progressive with right-wing relatives will know, conservatives love bragging about how they give more to charity than those to their political left. One of my uncles in particular used to relish throwing this fact in my face at family gatherings. Looking back, I wish my younger self had understood the realities of American non-profits the way I do now, so I could have come up with better retorts.
In the UK, as I recently learnt while reading about Mermaids’ challenge to the anti-trans LGB Alliance’s legal status as a charity, organisations wishing to be recognised as charities undergo real scrutiny (even if, as in this case, the system sometimes fails). But in the US, having a hateful raison d’être is no barrier to gaining charitable status. Quite the opposite. In this land of opportunity, a hate group can quite easily register as a charity – and even a church (!), thereby escaping even the minimal financial oversight required of secular charities – on the flimsiest of grounds.
As a result, far from promoting any equitable notion of the common good, a great deal of tax-deductible American ‘charitable’ giving funds hateful and discriminatory initiatives that cause significant harm, both at home and abroad. And since the only transparency most Americans have probably encountered is the kind that goes on an overhead projector (look it up, Zoomers), much of that funding is unaccountable dark money.
