The U.S. tax system contains a valuable benefit for prominent white-nationalist groups, which for years have enjoyed a legal status that allows them to not pay levies and lets supporters write off their donations. This status also, for tax purposes, puts them in the same legal category as zoos, colleges, museums, orchestras and planetariums.
It’s a lucrative classification. Four well-known organizations associated with white nationalism — the National Policy Institute, the New Century Foundation, the Charles Martel Society and VDare Foundation — have raised $7.8 million in tax-free donations over the last decade, according to a recent analysis by The Associated Press.
Their tax status is getting renewed scrutiny after the 2016 election, in which white nationalists openly and widely championed President Donald Trump, raising their profile in American politics and adding overtly racist voices that were not part of the national dialogue in recent elections.
In a new proposal, legal expert Eric Franklin Amarante of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas is calling on the Internal Revenue Service to change the rules. His proposal, which he published online, would force white nationalist groups to start paying taxes by removing the provision they rely on for their tax exemption, a broad rule that benefits organizations that sponsor lectures, conferences and public discussions.
“They get the assumption — the benefit of the doubt — that they are operating in the public’s interest, that this is a worthy organization,” Amarante said. “Is this really how we want to operate? Do we really want to give the federal government’s seal of approval, the imprimatur, to these organizations?”
The white nationalist movement has its intellectual roots in an old tradition of justifying racial prejudice through appeals to nonscientific theories of human evolution. The movement’s adherents generally espouse discredited ideas about race, arguing that there are important hereditary differences between people of different races. Many also oppose racial integration and support a separate state for whites.
Recently, white nationalists have tried to distinguish themselves from white supremacists, an older term associated with terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. White nationalists say that they do not believe that whites are superior to people of other races or that they should have more power in society.
White nationalists also make use of anti-Semitic themes, and supporters often show off Nazi salutes.
The white nationalist groups qualify for tax-exempt status because they have successfully argued that they have an “educational” mission, and charity advocates are uncomfortable with an arrangement in which the IRS decides which groups qualify for that educational status based on their messages.