In yet another case study of the grifterism that has taken over politics on the right, The Daily Beast reports that the Breitbart editor’s college scholarship “charity” for white males has so far only benefited just one white man: himself.
The scholarship’s rollout this past January received a glowing announcement in Breitbart: “In a move certain to infuriate the left, Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos has created the Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant, a scholarship exclusively available to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer, and ethnic minority classmates.”
Yiannopoulos claims that the fund has taken in between $100,000 and $250,000. But according to Margaret MacLennan, a Canadian conservative on YouTube who was brought in as its director, she was never even given the software needed to set up the operation as a real charity and to review scholarship applications. And just to make the scam even more blatant, the donation document is simply a bank transfer form to send the money to Yiannopoulos’s personal account. Experts also told The Daily Beast that the manner in which Yiannopoulos was raising money is likely a violation of charity laws in many states.
Donald Trump is really just a larger version of this: a poisonous mixture of white male identity politics and ripping people off.