TELL ME IT AIN’T SO. Did A Prominent Trumpster Run A Charity Scam? (VIDEO)

Back in January, Internet gadfly and prominent Breitbart personality and all around Branch Trumpidian announced that he was starting a charity:

Alt-right provocateur, Breitbart.com technology editor, #GamerGate champion, Twitter martyr, and inveterate self-promoter Milo Yiannopoulos now has another qualification to add to his CV: race- and gender-based scholarship creator.

Yiannopoulos, who has made a career out of inflaming the tensions between the progressive, identity-group-focused social internet and the roiling anti-PC counterculture that opposes it, has created a college scholarship fund only for white men.

According to its website, the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant is “exclusively available to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer and ethnic minority classmates.” Yiannopoulos is its president.

…

The inaugural $2,500 grants, available for the 2016 school year, will draw from a pool that Yiannopoulos hopes will reach $125,000, for 50 grants in total. That money will come from private donors, whom Yiannopoulos would not name, and a $25,000 initial donation from Yiannopoulos himself. Yiannopoulos did disclose that one of the first group of donors is among the “very famous rappers, novelists, politicians [who] are all fans of mine on the DL.”

Let me make this clear at the outset. In a lot of ways I am sympathetic to what Milo did here. Men, in general, are underrepresented on college campuses. Nationally, at least 57% of all underclassmen are women. Someone should be concerned about this shocking loss of human capital. And while there are scholarships earmarked for just about every race, ethnicity, or perceived sexual orientation, if you are a white kid from Appalachia just try finding one that is targeted for your. For that matter, find me a college that offers priority admission to white males despite the fact that they were the sex mix reversed colleges would be looking at federal sexual discrimination lawsuits. And, generally, anytime you can make fun of Social Justice Warriors and the education oligarchy that spawns them, it is a manifestly good thing.

What isn’t so good is collecting money and then not doing what you’d promised:

Months after he was supposed to give away more than $100,000 for college scholarships, Milo Yiannopoulos says all of the money is still sitting in his bank account.

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.

How do we know the money is in Milo’s personal account?

Margaret MacLennan, a Canadian conservative tasked with running the grant, called out Yiannopoulos when she was criticized on Twitter about the lack of charitable giving. “We all know I clearly profited from donations made to the Grant,” she said sarcastically, while posting an image of instructions that were given out to donors… on how to wire money to Yiannopoulos’ bank account.

We all know I clearly profited from donations made to the Grant. @NormalBot pic.twitter.com/je8MHetIaf

— Margaret MacLennan (@MargaretsBelly) August 17, 2016

None of this looks good. Money in a personal bank account. No tax exempt status despite the legal requirement that such status be in effect before actively soliciting contributions. No means to apply for the scholarships. No way of making good on the promise of providing the scholarships for the 2016-2017 academic year.

As of this writing, the website has been edited to change the award date to Spring semester of the 2016-2017 year but here is still no way to apply.

Milo has at least acknowledged the problems and is making pleasing noises about making things right but talk is damned cheap.

I don’t know if Milo was simply emulating his beau ideal, Donald Trump, in soliciting money from the gullible with no real plan to disburse the largesse to the intended recipients, or if he was just sloppy, in over his head, and lost interest in the project after the initial media buzz. Regardless, this stinks. And it needs to be fixed.

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