Milo’s Mendacious Money Grab
Leave it to the non-Twitter checkmarked Milo Yiannopoulos to take the money and run.
When last we saw Milo, he was busy claiming that he’s setting up a charity to help white guys (as if they need the help).
So where’d the money go? Well, it went directly into his pocket:
The Breitbart editor and professional political agitator (recently banned from Twitter for harassment) came under fire this week as allegations surfaced that his charity, which would provide college scholarships exclusively to white men, has so far done no charity work with the money.
Yiannopoulos told The Daily Beast on Thursday that his lawyers are drafting paperwork that would establish it as a legal charity, but experts say that the way in which the “Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant” accepted donations was unethical and possibly illegal.
Yiannopoulos promised in January to create a college scholarship fund for “white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education” that would be awarded in “early summer 2016.” The fund has raised somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 to date, Yiannopoulos told The Daily Beast via email.
But the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant has not filed any paperwork to become a charity in the United States. When asked if an application for tax-exempt status had been sent by his lawyers to the Internal Revenue Service, Yiannopoulos said, “I’ll check.”
No scholarships have been awarded and the charity’s website shows there isn’t even a way for prospective students to apply for them.
The grant program was announced with the self-congratulatory fanfare typical of many Breitbart articles written about its chief firebrand.
Milo took money from a bunch of folks who thought he’d do some “good” with it.
Nothing Milo has done in regards to this scam has been on the up and up. Normally, you set up a charitable entity before you start accepting donations. He did the opposite. He began collecting money before the entity was established as a 501(c)(3).
Milo was busy raising money even before the entity was established as a nonprofit, and now his former partner claims that donors were instructed to wire money into Milo’s personal bank account.
That’s highly unusual in and of itself. What this looks like is that Milo got a bunch of people to give him money and he pocketed it.
If it walks like a grift, talks like a grift, and smells like a grift, it’s a grift.