Near the gates of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 15, 2025David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty

One particularly surreal aspect of Donald Trump threatening the tax-exempt status of Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest and foremost educational institutions—and excluding it from federal research funding for refusing to heed the administration’s oversight demands—is the fact that even some of the nation’s most hateful and antidemocratic entities qualify as tax-exempt charities. As I explain in my book, Jackpot:

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation is broadly defined as an organization with religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. There are charities dedicated to “fostering appreciation” for camellias and “promoting the medium of American mime.” (The latter, last I checked, had more than $6 million in assets.) In 2017, according to one investigative outlet, the National Christian Foundation—one of the largest faith-based donor- advised funds—distributed more than $19 million of its donors’ money to tax-exempt charities that were anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant.

Among the NCF’s leading recipients is Alliance Defending Freedom, a network of Christian lawyers that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group for its antigay activities. The Alliance collects tens of millions in tax-exempt donations each year. It has expressed........

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