The Wrong Kind of Charity

The Apple TV series Ted Lasso built a prodigious following thanks to its heartwarming first season (it's a shame they never made any more seasons…). A variety of entertaining characters and themes contributed to a series of heartwarming plots that ultimately paid unusual flattery to middle America, depicting the sort of man that Hollywood typically mocks as the breath of sanity that a troubled world needed. But this isn't an editorial about Ted. We're here to look at how one of the show's other characters was introduced. Rebecca Welton is freshly divorced from wealthy womanizer Rupert Mannion. She loathes her ex-husband, loathes his empire, loathes his favorite football (soccer) club, and is determined to burn everything he ever cared about to the ground. She wrangled ownership of the club in the divorce and aggressively sets about destroying it. The video above only hints at it, but after firing the club's manager out of spite, she plans to replace with an American bumpkin who coaches American football. This isn't a clever idea; this is sabotage. She wants it to be a disaster. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Now of course, Ted is going to end up being so wonderfully kind to everyone that by the end of the season she's apologizing to him for using him as a patsy, but that's the unrealistic, heartwarming twist that built the show a bunch of social capital that it could use to sell a duped audience a bunch ofwoke messagingovertwothree more seasons. The Rebecca Welton that we started with is the archetype we find in the real world. And we have a great real-world version of her inMacKenzie Scott Bezos. Married to Jeff Bezos for 26 years, MacKenzie Tuttle (Scott was her original middle name) is said to have had no role in Amazon after 1996. The couple divorced in 2019, ostensibly over Jeff's affair with Lauren Sanchez, and MacKenzie walked away owning 4% of Amazon. Despite giving away most of her shares, her wealth has increased as Amazon's value has increased, and she has at times been the world's wealthiest woman. And she's behaved remarkably like Rebecca Welton in her opening appearance. Where Rebecca was ready to give poor Higgins a £1,000,000 painting and organized her post-divorce life around burning down Richmond football, MacKenzie wanted nothing to do with Amazon or Jeff's other businesses and set about giving away the money she'd gotten from him. And how does she give money away?Quite unlike any other philanthropist in the world. MacKenzie Scott has become famous for dumping huge sums of money on organizations that had no idea it was coming. Unlike other wealthy philanthropists, she's shown no interest in how the money is spent. No interest in oversight. No interest in making sure the suddenly flush activists running these places don't pocket it all. She seems to care how the money is used about as much as Rebecca cared about the value of the paintings she was getting rid of. Chief Executive Michael L. Lomax said he has seen the rise over the past two decades of a more data-driven, return-on-investment approach to philanthropy. 'You understand this is going to be a negotiation, that the donors have expectations and you have to meet those expectations,' he said, referring to his more commonplace interactions with philanthropists. 'And then you have somebody like MacKenzie Scott saying, we're in this together, we trust you and we trust your judgment,' he said. 'She's rewriting American philanthropy.' Now of course, the recipients of Scott's recklessness are thrilled, and she's clearly got a strong partisan bent in how she selects them. We can't say whether becoming beloved by the left-wing establishment is intended as revenge against her ex-husband, but it's working - he takes shots online every time she cuts a check. To those aligned with the causes she donates to, she's one of the world's greatest heroes, both for the volume of her giving and because she asks for no influence in return. She's credited as the source of the wealth, and she is used to shame all of the people who actually built their own wealth for not similarly tearing their accomplishments apart and distributing them to theater kids. And what do all these blind donations to activist groups achieve?Watch the reddit community struggle with that: Scott'sWall Street Journalpuff piecehighlights donations to 'Native Forward' and the United Negro College Fund. We can look at executive compensation for both - here'sthe more famous one: The UNCF's executive compensation is 2.5% of total expenses, which doesn't seem like much but is about five times the share of expenses that S&P500 companies spend on their executives. Could the organization hand out money to black kids under the direction of a CEO making only $260,000 per year? We may never know. Of course, a widely-known entity like the United Negro College Fund isn't going tobehave as scandalouslyas some less famous 'nonprofits' do, and perhaps MacKenzie Scott does deserve credit for avoiding the truly awful ones. But the nonprofit world is full of scams, and the general model of writing them large checks seems like a great way to fund something other than charity. Notable researcherhas captured government-scale charity-laundering, both in data and in commentary: The phenomenon of charity working both as cover for enriching allies and organizing other agendashas been captured in other mediaas well. Even far-left true believershave noticed the practice, complaining that their revolutions keep taking a back seat to the money game. Americans of all stripes are shocked when they are exposed to payroll information for nonprofit executives.Aren't you guys supposed to be sacrificing? How naive. If MacKenzie Scott represents the 'cut a check to an organization' extreme,Michael Dellhas entered the arena at the other end. Last December, theDell Computer founder announced a plan to donate to the Trump accounts of 25 million American children. These donations are now arriving in the form of actual deposits into recipient accounts. The logistics of this extraordinary distribution are handled by Dell's own foundation. The foundation has executives, but farfewer of them than the United College Negro Fund, and they are paid much lessdespite their larger responsibilities. Michael Dell is not making no-strings-attached gifts to charitable organizations. Michael Dell is making no-strings-attached gifts to charity recipients. Dell's donations cannot be used to pay charity employees. They cannot be spent on luxuries. They cannot be redirected towards regime change. Michael Dell's donations are going to children. To some,that's a problem: 'The so-called 'Trump accounts' are a missed opportunity that focused on Donald Trump's vanity and giving Republicans a hollow talking point rather than truly helping young people' - Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) Beyer is hardly the only partisan who condemns Trump Accounts over their namesake, but it would be a mistake to attribute the animosity to simple TDS. The real issue is that the mechanism of giving directly to recipients bypasses wonderfully exploitable patronage systems. How are the right kind of people supposed to get rich and look down their noses at the rest of us if charitable donations bypass them? MacKenzie Scott has given away billions and been sainted for it, because every dollar landed somewhere that could be converted into salaries, prestige, and political influence. Michael Dell is giving away billions and being scolded for it, because his dollars land in a child's bank account. There is charity that funds organizations, and there is charity that funds recipients. One of these is called 'rewriting American philanthropy'. The other is called a 'missed opportunity'. The charity industry is not against giving money away. The charity industry is against giving money away in a form it cannot touch. Michael Dell has committed a great sin. He's performed the wrong kind of charity. Disclaimer: The author has multiple children receiving Dell grants. Addendum: Search Engine AI repeatedly 'helped' with this essay by singing the praises of MacKenzie Scott and offering unsolicited partisan criticisms of Trump Accounts. Principles vs Tribes is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.