Follow the Trust Fund?
Down the 501(c)(4) rabbit hole and other misc. items
The other pieces on Declare Emergency were getting too long.
wrote in the comments to the last piece on Declare Emergency:
You left out the most important point, Who's paying them? To figure out what is going on in the World, the Old Adage always prevails: "FOLLOW THE MONEY".
Great question!
Short answer: No idea.
Long Answer: There’s a bit of a rabbit hole.
On their donation site, Declare Emergency states, “Even though we'd really like to be able to tell you your donation to this very important cause is tax deductible, we regretfully cannot. The IRS says our 501(c)4 non-profit is not set up that way.”
501(c)4 non-profits are by definition “not set up that way.”
Any weón initially setting up one of these organizations has to choose after weighing the benefits and tradeoffs of each organization type which is best for their mission.
This among several other items offer a stark contrast to the close cousin, the 501(c)(3) non-profit.
The website DonorBoxBlog provides a great summary of the differences both in text and graphical form.
A 501(c)(4) is a “social welfare group” that can advocate for causes and propositions, like 501(c)(3)s. However, 501(c)(4)s can also endorse specific candidates – one of the most substantial differences between the two. Examples of this status include political action groups to advance reproductive or civil rights. While nonprofit organizations with this status are also tax-exempt, donations to 501(c)(4) groups are not tax-deductible.
In other words, a tradeoff, so to speak of the funds going into the organization not being tax deductible is the organization can be far more political than a 501(c)(3) by politicians running for office or reelection directly over more abstract ideas such as “the climate,” or “eliminating fossil fuels.”
Declare Emergency however give no IRS or state identification numbers on their website. These are usually needed if a taxpayer wishes to deduct his or her donation on their income taxes. Since this is a 501(c)(4), such is arguably not necessary anyways.
But how would a donor know he or she is really donating to a non-profit anyways and not fake organization?
Usually one can find the non-profit status somewhere on the non-profit’s site. Sometimes this is on the bottom, or the about page. Or on the donation page itself.
For very large non-profits that have a Wikipedia page, this information is usually present there too. Other alternatives are to use Propublica’s Non-Profit Explorer, or Guidestar (free to search, to use) or Charity Navigator.
None of those websites returned a result for “Declare Emergency,” meaning perhaps (1) they’re a fraud (unlikely), (2) they do business under a different name, or (3) they’re a new non-profit who have not filed returns yet with the IRS.
A hint is a logo at the bottom of their donation form.
Action Network are a fundraising platform similar to ActBlue or WinRed. ActBlue largely funnel money into the Democratic Party and WinRed the equivalent for Republicans.
Why “the left” have two different groups is a mystery, perhaps it’s this:
One’s political leanings aside, setting up a payment processing and tracking service from scratch is no small feat. The amount of work Substack’s payment processor Stripe does on the back end ensure Substack readers and writers are able to transact is nothing short of impressive. These organizations likely do a lot of heavy lifting so that brats like Declare Emergency can focus on other things, like blocking working class people from getting to their jobs.
That aside, for those who’ve chosen to pay for this free publication: Thank you!
Among their other customers are the the DNC, AFL-CIO, Daily Kos, United We Dream, Black Lives Matter, and EDF.
Ah, EDF. They sound familiar. As in the Environmental Defense Fund.
Recalling
's piece The Anti-Industry Industry, EDF are almost top dog in the Anti-Industry Industry grift game.Interestingly enough, they’re listed twice on his chart.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is a 501c3, while EDF Action Fund, however is a 501c4.
Here’s one of Bryce’s charts from his article.
And here’s an updated table of each organization’s tax exempt status. The ones in bold are additional ones we found with nearly identical names but with differing non-profit statuses.
Some of these orgs essentially double dip. Which is likely perfectly legal but two separate organizations have to be setup and run.
If there’s anybody who understands non-profits in depth please drop into the comments. Is it also legal for the same people to operate or sit on the boards in both non-profits?
Also we didn’t double check Bryce’s numbers but he may be undercounting.
asked in a separate comment:Would love to know what these people really do. Me thinks maybe they are rich kids with nothing better to do LOL
Non-profits are more often than not filled with PMC kids who went to status schools to get hobby degrees. No doubt there. Likely at least upper middle class and a trust fund present.
Here’s Will Regan.
(And to answer Declare Emergency’s stupid question, yes of course a “fossil fuel exec” would receive the same treatment if they did the same thing.
But you won’t find a “fossil fuel exec” doing such a thing because they’re too busy actually doing something productive.)
On ‘Ol Will himself, ABC7 reports on a Declare Emergency sponsored blockade event last fall.
A climate crisis activist was sentenced Monday to 60 days in jail, with 30 days suspended, for stopping traffic on the D.C. Beltway last month, according to the District Court of Maryland.
On Oct. 10, William Regan, 43, of Oregon, a member of Declare Emergency, was arrested along with six other people after the activists blocked traffic on the Inner Loop of the Beltway, demanding President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency.
On Monday, Regan was sentenced before Montgomery County Judge Sherri Koch. He was also sentenced to one year of unsupervised probation.
On the Declare Emergency website, they describe the sentencing as “unprecedented” emphasizing the non-violent aspect.
Typical narcissists trying to make a criminal into a victim.
Yes, a non-violent one, but still a criminal.
Due to good behavior, he didn’t serve the full sentence anyways, he tweeted a few months ago.
Wonder if Declare Emergency is going to continue to leave out the fact one of their activists likely broke his terms of probation with last week’s stunt? If receiving a lifetime ban from an art museum is all he got as punishment, then he’s very fortunate indeed.
Oh, and apparently he’s with Extinction Rebellion NYC too.
43 years old!
That’s a manchild.
That’s just one person, but it’s likely the Google Machine has information on some of the others.
The Declare Emergency manipulation game is strong too.
Get a load of the way they portray their vandals in the art museum.
“Two parents who were terrified about their children’s futures (as well as all children)”
When someone asked the sensible question of who would take care of their children when these “parents” are in jail (spoiler alert: they won’t), Declare Emergency went full Cluster B reversal.
Take a look.
As
has argued on his show, Disaffected, the primary driving dynamics for these people is Cluster B. It's getting more and more difficult each day to refute his thesis.Don’t consider us the only ones who’ve noticed Declare Emergency’s nasty negative side effect of keeping regular working class people, primarily in this case, black people, from getting to where they need to go.
Andrew Revkin noticed this too with a Declare Emergency Blockade last summer.
A David Kerrigon disagreed, because apparently there’s an “evidence-based analysis” out there from the Noble Arbiters of Truth in Fiat Academia. In particular the work of Erica Chenoweth’s (a Harvard Kennedy School Fiat Academic) in her book Why Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Works is apparently the better take than Revkin’s “superficial view.”
(It’s actually called Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know® for the record. )
Well shocker, it turns out Revkin does have a point in that there’s a huge backlash to being so absolutist. In other words, why could they not have opened just one lane?
He wrote an entire piece here on Substack.
Well worth the read. Basically one of the men stuck in traffic notifies the heartless goons that he’s on probation, and that he’ll get in trouble if he’s late. He eventually loses his temper, and ends up being arrested himself.
Just like these other Declare Emergency goons, he’s also an adult, responsible for his own emotions, however the assholes who started this whole thing in the first place did not face nearly the consequences he did.
The sequence, recorded by videographer TJ Jones, pulled me in like a Mamet play or Tarantino script. The full video, now you YouTube, is wrenching and infuriating. Think of it as a 25-minute mini-series focused on a struggling, stressed-out, down-on-his-luck ex con vying for a better life who gets sucked back into the void as his weaknesses collide with some unexpected obstacle.
In a lame reversal, one of the Declare Emergency assholes even setup a GoFundMe page for the arrested individual (they all were arrested too but that was their intent).
Reichstadter tweeted that he has started a GoFundMe campaign for the arrested man. On the fundraiser page, he wrote this: "I'm doing this fundraiser for my friend, a man who was caught in a blockade I helped participate in. I believe he was abused by police who wrongfully arrested him for assault due to him bumping into me a few times during the blockade. I hold that this man behaved nonviolently toward me and I did not feel threatened by him, and I will testify to that under oath in support of him at trial if needed.”
Evil.
The story in its entirely is unreal.
If that’s not enough watch this interview with Jonathan Tijerina, another Declare Emergency member.
That young guy, before he lost his shirt and lost his temper, he was talking to several of you and he had physically manhandled a couple of you, and I think you were one of them. But his story seemed pretty disturbing. You know, he said he's going to lose his job if he doesn't get to work. He's on parole. And he had several years of essentially heading in a track toward a career.
He mentioned to one of you that he had a kid, and he kept saying just open one lane. Open one lane. And something about that, open a lane, struck me as a path to avoiding what ended up happening - which was - along with 13 of you getting arrested, which is fine, you know, doing civil disobedience - he lost his temper in front of the police after several of you had actually very diplomatically declined to say that he had manhandled you.
But then he was really losing his temper and he got arrested and his life is now on exactly the opposite track that he had hoped it would be on.
Again, none of this made it to the Washington Post puff piece. But why would it?
“The role of the corporate press isn't merely to train the population as to what to think. It is there to train them regarding what to think about--or what not to think about.”
- Michael Malice
Well, if I understand you correctly, you’re wondering why an outfit would have two forms … one a 501c3 and the other a 501c4. Well, it’s not unusual for an org to do that. One of its iterations can take donations that are tax exempt for the org but not tax deductible for the donor ( i.e. 501c4), which leaves the org free to operate politically. But then for those supporters who will only donate if it’s tax deductible, there is the 501c3 separate org that can’t operate politically, but can do “education” etc., and also pay rather hefty salaries to the principals. They are just two sides of the same coin, gaming the tax system.