Top Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos is under the microscope for his self-promotional “Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant” charity.
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.
The long and short of it is that over the past few weeks, Yiannopoulos’s affairs have come under scrutiny because a fellow conservative “YouTube personality” Margaret MacLennan started throwing all kinds of shade Yiannopoulos’ way. Specifically, where donations seemed to be getting sent.
MacLennan alleged in a tweet that Yiannopoulos was transferring money intended for the grant and having it transferred to a personal account. MacLennan posted a screenshot of the alleged transfer to bolster the claim, sarcastically stating, “We all know I clearly profited from donations to the Grant.” She claimed to The Daily Beast that this was for the purpose of transparency.
The screenshot was of a document given to donors that provided instructions for wiring money into Yiannopoulos’s bank account (PDF).
In Milo’s defense, he’s a self-promoting grifter editor at a news organization that can’t be bothered with any facts. What is being written here isn’t much different than Yiannopoulos’s baseless attacks on former Daily Kos writer Shaun King. If you don’t remember the crazy racist insanity Milo Yiannopoulos helped devise, you can read about it here. Needless to say, Milo Yiannopoulos is what happens when you take William Buckley Jr’s ghost, remove all wit and intelligence, add a pile of narcissism, with shovelfuls of misogyny and racism. Take that concoction, roll it in a pile of money and have a European boy band’s stylist dress it and you have Mr. Yiannopoulos. Anywhos, Milo’s “charity” hasn’t even begun to accept applications, though he tells The Daily Beast that he has already given out $100,000.
According to Pace University law professor James Fishman, Yiannopoulos’s charity must file a Form 1023 for tax-exempt status with the IRS within 27 months of the first month it was incorporated.
“Given the amount of money raised, I think it is inexcusable that this organization has not filed the Form 1023, or found an exempt 501(c)(3) organization willing to serve as the fiscal sponsor of the organization you mention,” Fishman told The Daily Beast. A fiscal sponsor is a “sponsoring organization that controls the books of the not yet exempt nonprofit, which can bootstrap on the fiscal sponsor’s exempt status,” he added.
Yiannopoulos says that there are administration changes underway in this charity, thus the delay, that there are documents being drawn up as we speak. There probably are; but it is pretty likely that Yiannopoulos, who has a very lucrative career going right now, realizes because people have gotten on him about it, that he can’t be both a legal and an illegal hypocrite about everything.
Yiannopoulos’ fallback for most of his behavior and statements is that he’s pranking liberals and politically correct types. Of course, like Donald Trump, when you fall back on your ideas by saying they’re pranks or jokes on other people, you’re usually just trying to cover up how much of an intellectual fraud you suspect you are.