Republicans need to crack down on the corrupt ‘NGO sector’ NOW

With the Justice Department now charging the Southern Poverty Law Center not with merely paying “informants” in the Ku Klux Klan but actually reimbursing them for cross-burnings, it’s clearer than ever: It’s past time to dismantle the entire NGOcracy, posthaste. 

The term “non-governmental organization” is itself a deceptive coinage, blurring the distinction between true charities and activist outfits, as if every group that’s not part of a government is somehow the same.

Indeed, the rise in calling them all “NGOs” coincides with a trend of charities turning into political-activism fronts, from Médecins Sans Frontières to Oxfam.

When organizations get billions in funding to fight social ills, they face a perverse financial incentive when those ills start to dissipate.

As witness this actual atrocity: A nonprofit founded to ensure equal rights for black Americans in the South allegedly wound up paying the last ragged rump of a race-terror group to keep on terrorizing them — and so keep its donors jazzed up so the money would flow in after it became clear that black Americans do, in fact, have equal rights. 

But the SPLC is only one element of this self-dealing lefty NGOcracy.

Look at San Francisco’s Community Forward, a nonprofit contracted by the city during COVID to  . . . give free alcohol to alcoholic vagrants to “address” the suffering caused by their addiction to alcohol. 

The city’s new Mayor Daniel Lurie has moved to shut them down, after spending close to $5 million ensuring that their clientele stayed deep in the throes of addiction. 

How many more programs like that have escaped notice just by being slightly less absurd? 

Moving closer to home, there’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to force private building owners to sell out to nonprofits — i.e., “charity” empires run by his political allies. 

This is sold as boosting housing affordability, but it’ll do the reverse.

Such forced sales will send a blaring signal to developers to spend their money elsewhere, crashing new construction — even as turning existing stock over to unproven (and likely incompetent) stewards will only worsen conditions in existing buildings.

The city’s done such handovers for decades, and the experiment keeps failing every time — except to help the NGO sector expand.

At the more macro scale, there are groups like Democracy Docket. Founded by Dem legal megasleaze Marc Elias, it’s a propaganda shop nominally dedicated to protecting free and fair elections — which means elections won by progressive Democrats and nothing else. 

It uses its considerable reach to fight common-sense voter-ID laws and shriek that any and every Dem gerrymander is pure, perfect and morally justified — in other words, to ensure that US elections remain compromised and suspect in the eyes of the voters. 

That drumbeat is going to continue and intensify as we head into election season and beyond, eroding faith in our system. 

So what can be done?

Scrupulous probes into funding are a good start. Lefty orgs have long played fast and loose with the law on these issues; this sector is rife with nepotism and corruption — as witness the LA debacle around homeless nonprofit Abundant Blessings, whose CEO stands charged with embezzling $23 million in tax dollars to buy luxury cars and homes (he pled not guilty).

Not to mention the $9 billion in Minnesota social-services fraud or the other outrages being exposed by Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud drive.

Prosecute away, Trump Justice Department.

Congress should also do its own inquiries into the aims, policies, and structures of these groups: that the SPLC was able to get away with its evil for so long is justification enough for that. 

Unaccountable, rich nonprofits maliciously interfering with American life are a serious issue. It’s time for Republicans to make it a national one.