By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[This is the foreword to the new book by Douglas French: When Movements Become Rackets (2025)]

Dante Alighieri, in his book Inferno, places those who betray benefactors in the deepest circle of hell. If that is true, the place is likely overpopulated with the managers and executives of nonprofit organizations.

In recent years, such organizations have been implicated in egregious schemes to launder money and influence for every sundry and malevolent cause and hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. But even those not on the take from taxpayers have vast problems, so much so it is a wonder why anyone donates to them at all.

The more you study this stuff, the more cynical you become. The pandemic period gave rise to hundreds of these things designed to plan for pandemics and end them. Many were funded by crypto scams born of stimulus payments provided so that people could work from home. Some had fancy philosophical cover such as "effective altruism," about which the scandals never end. Tens of billions in fraudulent court judgments have come down.

Sometimes the racket benefits forever just from a name. Consider the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA. My God, who doesn't want to stop cruelty to animals? It was founded in 1866 and maybe did some good, I don't know. But these days, it is a main force to stop working-class people from making money by breeding and selling dogs and cats, taking from people a lucrative business that also helps people have companions at a low price.

This doesn't stop cruelty; it bolsters an industrial cartel of professional breeders.

But then you look up the organization. Assets: $553,325,000; contributions: $338,217,130; programs: $25,068,713; investment income: $13,573,862; book royalties: $3,953,489; fundraising fees: $11,884,368. The CEO gets a million plus a year. The fundraiser alone makes $500,000. The 14 top executives earn more than $275,000 a year each. More than a thousand people work there.

I cannot say with certainty, but this has all the earmarks of a racket, all in the name of not stopping but actually creating "puppy mills."

With those kinds of assets, why doesn't it just become a foundation? Because it has a massive organization to support and can raise $338M per year. Why leave that kind of money on the table? But being a nonprofit also requires them to raise money to keep up appearances, per rules via the IRS. So the fundraising letters arrive like a tsunami, every dime pouring in in order to keep up appearances.

For all I know, that might be among the best. No comment is necessary on the Southern Poverty Law Center (as ably exposed and surveyed by Doug French in Chapter 1), which depends foundationally on spreading the word that America has a massive problem with racism and Nazism that they alone can solve. Ex-employees have blown the whistle many times on this scam, but it never makes a dent in the organization, which everyone knows is a scam but it somehow keeps lasting.

As for Harvard University, another nonprofit but with assets of $53 billion, the less said the better. I would also put in this bucket countless fake libertarian organizations such as the Cato Institute, which somehow weighed in eight months after the start of the pandemic period to endorse lockdowns, masking, tax-funded medical interventions, and mandatory injections. There's some liberty right there!

I looked up the 990s of an organization founded in the postwar period that has long since failed to pursue its mission, which was once about backing economic freedom; indeed now it does nothing at all except vamp for social media. What I found was a long list of legacy foundations, institutions that are forced to give a percentage of interest and dividends to other nonprofits. It's a gravy train.

Once you are on it, you stay there seemingly forever even if your nonprofit only pretends to operate and do what it claims to do.

And yet people...