U.S. civil society under attack

This is not the future, it's the present. This is what autocracy looks like - multiple strategies, visible and invisible efforts, at many levels, to shut down independent voices.

A nonprofit in Georgia has been issued a significant fine for crossing the (deliberately porous) line between politics and charity. If you don't think this is selective enforcement against the political center go look up who used to run the New Georgia Project. Then go into just about any evangelical Christian church and listen to the pastor preach politics. The Internet Archive, a key source of immediate history (Wayback Machine) and knowledge in general, is being sued. Musk and The Heritage Foundation sought philanthropic funding for a doxxing initiative (e.g., likely violence) aimed at volunteers to the site run by the nonprofit wikimedia foundation.

Think of the Administration's "first hundred days" as a hundred day, multi-pronged attack on every aspect of the U.S. democracy, including an independent civil society.

Here's the opportunity: There will be federal hearings, AI-written Executive Orders, lawsuits, digital attacks, and other strikes directly against institutional philanthropy and nonprofits. Oddly, because ideas don't always align with political parties, the Vice President of the U.S. is calling for sector changes, some of which are also coming from the progressive left.

In my experience, institutional philanthropy changes at scale when regulation changes. This is how we create opportunity from chaos. How can we shape the laws to benefit humanity and not (further) benefit oligarchs and the extremely rich?

Who is organizing for this moment? Who's funding and doing the nationwide outreach for civil society to protect itself? Who's hosting the values conversation about what better looks like? Who has put forward visions of philanthropy that align with thriving communities, democratic participation, and planetary health? How do people on the ground, outside of fancy offices, academic chambers, and reliable broadband inform these ideas?*

Please - you know where the above exist. I don't. I'm limited in what I can contribute, but I want to participate. How? Where?

PS: If you're a researcher cataloguing these actions, please be in touch. I'd love to learn from your work and share what I can.

NB: I was trying to link to the International Center for Nonprofit Law (ICNL.org) in my PS, above. Every time I clicked on their website my browser crashed. Coincidence? Digital attacks on a key sector resource?

*Who in civil society dares to name the bad behavior of other funders or nonprofits (see Heritage and philanthropy, above)? It's particularly challenging to distinguish the institutional funders who wave their hands around as if in distress, when in fact they're simply more interested in benefiting from the same public policies that harm their "grantees." That's the part of the so-called "deal" that the wealthy prefer to ignore.