Shaun King nonprofit exposé at The Daily Beast

Originally published at: Shaun King nonprofit exposé at The Daily Beast | Boing Boing

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I listened to Shaun King’s podcast back in maybe 2020. He was a fiery and maybe angry orator. Somehow, I got on his mailing list, but started to lose interest and never had anything to do with the grassroots law project. The sums the article talks about are relatively small and I’m not seeing huge smoking guns/go to prison kinds of things. There are undoubtedly thousands of nonprofits and for-profits orgs that are pulling off serious scams. Maybe I missed something in the article, I don’t know.

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This is a really unclear summary. After reading it I thought Shaun King was a journalist and he investigated Cory Booker’s nonprofit. After going to the site, I’m still not sure what Cory Booker has to do with anything?

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I skimmed the article but I didn’t yet see if it mentioned his dog that his PAC paid for. That dog is worth much more than my car!

It’s a competing group, but the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation had even more crazy financial arrangements, including purchasing a $6mil house and Patrisse Cullors used foundation funds to pay her brother $840k for “security”. She had to step down.

Cory Booker has nothing to do with King’s nonprofit, as far as I know. The BoingBoing post is just making a (well deserved, IMO) dig at Booker for not seeing through King’s grift. A lot of people on the left have been very critical and skeptical of King almost from day 1. Booker, on the other hand, has appeared with him on panels, sent out supportive tweets, etc, even relatively recently. So the post is just saying that King is like spam: most people recognize spam for what it is quickly, and most people recognized King as a grifter very quickly, but Booker didn’t. And Booker is neither ignorant nor vulnerable, so it’s potentially a little suspect that Booker didn’t recognize the grift.

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Shaun King seems like such a mixed bag. There have been accusations about his fundraising for years with evidence that raises eyebrows but isn’t quite damning enough, but then there’s the work does in drawing attention to injustices that may fly under the radar and in identifying bad actors so that the process can be started on serving justice. Because of the latter he’s a big target of white supremacists who want to discredit him any way that can, which has (potentially) led to making mountains if molehills of issues that have impacted his credibility, whether deserved or not.

I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that this isn’t the first time his financials have been laid out. Last time it was quickly forgotten because there didn’t seem to be anything there. It doesn’t sound like there’s enough of anything here either, unless I’m missing something.

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This is a nuanced assessment, and I pretty much had the same reaction (but with more bewilderment and less nuance). These hit pieces keep coming, and they fail to yield concrete evidence. Then again, he’s launched a lot of costly ventures that haven’t panned out. The money he’s raised for others all seems to all go to the intended sources though.

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Yeah. I used to follow his stuff (around the mid 10s, I guess?), and would occasionally out of nowhere hear folks tear him down, accusing him of everything from defrauding donors to being a Dolezal (one Black queer activist friend of mine called him “Talcum X”), but never actually providing evidence. Eventually it seemed like enough of his ventures kind of fell apart that, fraudster or no, it seemed worthwhile to find other voices to read/follow/listen to, and I more or less stopped following him.

Seeing this, I thought maybe it would finally clarify the whispers and murmurs I’d been hearing about this guy I had all but forgotten about, but it really didn’t.

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