The Proprietarian Manifesto: IV. Capitalism Versus Noncapitalism

Capitalism: The Engine of Prosperity

Private enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else in human history. This isn’t ideological cheerleading—it’s what the historical record shows. Understanding why capitalism tends to generate prosperity helps explain the problems caused by noncapitalist institutions.

Capitalism rewards people who solve problems others are willing to pay for. An entrepreneur who builds a better product or finds a cheaper way to deliver an existing service captures some of the value they create. This profit motive, whatever its moral complications, produces relentless experimentation. Most new businesses fail. But the ones that succeed—by genuinely serving customers better—scale up and spread their innovations. The smartphone in your pocket exists because companies competed to pack more capability into smaller devices, each iteration building on the last. Centralised systems struggle to replicate this trial-and-error discovery process because the costs of failure fall on everyone, while the benefits of caution accrue to the decision-makers.

This mechanism requires private property. When people can accumulate property and own it securely, they maintain and improve them. A farmer who owns his land plants trees that won’t bear fruit for a decade. A factory owner invests in equipment that takes years to pay off. If they had to share their property with countless others, they wouldn’t treat it well. Private property rights transform short-term extractors into long-term stewards. This extends beyond physical assets. Intellectual property, contracts, and corporate structures allow strangers to collaborate across time and space. A pension fund in Norway can finance a factory in Vietnam because legal systems enforce agreements and protect investments. This web of trust, built on enforceable property rights that can be transferred and accumulated freely, channels savings towards productive uses.

The Historical Evidence

The data is striking. In 1820, roughly 90% of the world’s population lived in what we’d now call extreme poverty. Today, despite a much larger population, that figure has fallen below 10%. This transformation correlates closely with the spread of market economies, international trade, and secure property rights.

Countries that built the institutions of capitalism earlier—Britain, the Netherlands, the United States—industrialised first. Those that did so later but thoroughly—South Korea, Singapore, and more recently China and Vietnam—experienced explosive growth. Meanwhile, economies organised around central planning consistently underperformed their market-oriented neighbours, whether comparing East and West Germany, North and South Korea, or the Soviet bloc with Western Europe.

What Capitalism Really Is

The common understanding is that capitalism means the freedom to engage in enterprise without state control. “Private property”, as in “nongovernmental property”. But this is false. Capitalism is distinguished by the alienability of rights—the ability to transfer rights to others. When rights are alienable, property can be bought and accumulated by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs then compete with each other by using the means of production as efficiently as possible to serve their customers.

When rights are inalienable, like when voting rights in an organisation can’t be freely sold, bought and accumulated, there is noncapitalism. Noncapitalism doesn’t have to take the form of complete state ownership of all property. It can also take the form of a society where all property is owned by noncapitalist institutions like cooperative organisations and trustee organisations.

Cooperative organisations are organisations owned by their customers or workers, whose voting rights are inalienable. Members in a cooperative can’t accumulate voting rights because otherwise entrepreneurs could buy them up and thereby run the organisation as a proprietary enterprise. This has significant downsides.

Trustee organisations, including all nonprofits, have no owners at all. They’re managed according to their statutes by trustees who appoint their own successors. In trustee organisations, the problems of noncapitalist institutions are the largest.

Noncapitalist institutions have some unique benefits, but only few exceptions to capitalism are needed, much fewer than there are now. More poverty is caused by a lack of capitalism, including a lack of proprietary governance, than by a lack of redistribution. Besides, redistribution actually doesn’t require democratic governance.

What Capitalism Requires to Work Well

Capitalism requires more than just the alienability of rights to work. Markets function poorly without rule of law, competition, and institutions that prevent fraud and coercion. Crony capitalism, where connected firms extract favours from government, produces very different outcomes than competitive markets where incumbents face constant challenge.

Nor do markets automatically handle everything well. Things like environmental externalities, public goods and information asymmetries require government regulation. The question isn’t whether government has a role but what that role should be and how to design interventions that don’t undermine the market mechanisms that generate prosperity in the first place.

Democracy has a poor track record in this regard. Most democracies are fundamentally flawed and corrupt, failing to provide the basic institutions for capitalist prosperity. The best kind of government for this purpose is the proprietary government. Proprietary governance introduces capitalism to governance and performs much better than the noncapitalist governance we have today—Democracy, socialist authoritarianism and monarchy.

Problems With Noncapitalist Institutions

Noncapitalist institutions—cooperatives and nonprofits, including charities and universities—worsen over time. They grow sclerotic and bloated, leech on society, and drift towards ideological extremism. The society that creates and funds them increasingly suffers under their growth.

Lock-In

Cooperatives are organisations owned by their workers or customers. In cooperatives, every participant typically has one vote. Because their vote will always only count as one, they become passive as more participants join. As a result, their oversight decreases and managers get away with corruption and worse performance. Dissolution becomes unlikely even when efficient, because participants who can’t effectively operate the cooperative also can’t dissolve it. All property owned by the cooperative becomes ‘locked in’—it doesn’t end up in the hands of those who value it more.

Nonprofits face the same problem more acutely, because they have no participants at all, only managers who run the organisation according to its statutes. Since nobody can reap profits, managers never benefit from dissolution. The organisation persists until bankruptcy, even if others could use its resources better. Any non-negative rate of return allows a nonprofit to endure; any positive return allows it to expand. Nonprofits can survive earning returns so low that investor-owned firms wouldn’t compete with them. This explains why, despite aggressive entry by for-profit hospital chains after 1965, nonprofit hospitals maintained their market share.¹

Nonprofits also receive large government subsidies—tax exemptions, favourable postal rates, exemptions from securities regulation. Though nonprofits existed before these subsidies and many would survive without them, the subsidies protect inefficient nonprofits against for-profit competitors.

Drift and Capture

Nonprofits inevitably drift to new priorities, in particular towards ideological extremes. This is intrinsic to their structure.

Trustees and managers always have discretion, that’s why they exist. Each generation of trustees has different priorities, even if only slightly. As a result, priorities drift further from founders’ intentions with each generation. For instance, if a trustee’s decisions overlap 50% with their predecessor’s, the third generation overlaps only 25% with the first.

Ideological extremists tend to be intolerant of differing views; moderates are more tolerant because they care less intensely. Moderate managers might choose extreme successors, but extremists rarely appoint moderates. Drift towards extremism is therefore a one-way street. Progressive groups become woke; Islamic organisations become Islamist. This isn’t necessarily ‘institutional capture’ through intentional action. People act according to their beliefs, and the system’s nature ensures certain beliefs end up overrepresented.

Harvard University exemplifies this: founded as a Christian theological school, it became a scientific institution cultivating America’s elite, and has now drifted towards far-left ideology. The same can be said about Columbia and many other prestigious universities.

Beyond organic drift, nonprofits are also vulnerable to capture by wealthy donors with political agendas. Universities and think tanks depend on donations and grants, making them susceptible to influence from foreign governments and ideological actors. Qatar has donated billions of dollars to Western universities—according to U.S. Department of Education data, Georgetown received approximately $930 million from Qatar since 2005, whilst Cornell received over $1.7 billion, Texas A&M over $900 million, and Northwestern over $600 million, primarily to fund branch campuses in Qatar’s Education City in Doha.² These donations come with strings attached, whether explicit or implicit. Researchers studying Middle Eastern politics at foreign-funded institutions face obvious conflicts of interest. Similar patterns emerge with other donors: Saudi Arabia ($3.3 billion to U.S. universities), the UAE ($1.4 billion), and China have all made substantial donations to Western universities, often to departments studying their regions or policies.³ The nonprofit structure provides no mechanism to resist such influence—trustees seeking donations have every incentive to accommodate major donors, and no shareholders exist to object when institutional independence is compromised.

Bloat

Trustees can’t distribute surpluses to shareholders, but they have discretion over hiring and salaries. This enables phantom jobs for friends and administrative bloat. Trustees have no incentive for efficiency. An example: Yale University now has more administrators than students.⁴

The Problems in Practice

The problems with noncapitalist institutions—lock-in, drift, bloat, and capture—can be found across the nonprofit landscape. Concrete examples from higher education, NGOs, and charities illustrate how these structural defects play out in practice.

Higher Education: The Cathedral of Bloat

Yale University now has more administrators than undergraduate students. In 2003, Yale had 5,307 undergraduates and 3,500 administrators. By 2019, undergraduate enrollment had grown by only 600 students, but administrators had increased by over 1,500—a 45% expansion.⁵ Yale achieved the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university.⁶

This is not an anomaly. From 1987 to 2012, American colleges and universities hired 517,636 administrators and professional staff—averaging 87 new hires every working day.⁷ Administrative positions grew 60% between 1993 and 2009, ten times the rate of tenured faculty growth.⁸

At Penn, full-time non-medical administrators increased 78% over twenty years, compared to just 40% growth in faculty, while student enrollment grew only 5%.⁹ Harvard’s administrators grew 43% since 2004, while faculty increased just 11%.¹⁰

As law professor Todd Zywicki observes: “The interesting thing about administrative bloat in higher education is, literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing.”¹¹ Anthropologist David Graeber described administrators hiring assistants, then deciding “what the assistants will actually do later.”¹²

Mission Drift at Scale

Harvard University exemplifies ideological drift over centuries. Founded in 1636, its Rules and Precepts adopted in 1646 instructed students that “the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life” and required Bible reading twice daily.¹³ Its 1692 motto was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae”—Truth for Christ and the Church.¹⁴

Today, the motto is simply “Veritas,” and no one reads the Bible. The institution that trained Puritan ministers now ranks among the most secular and politically progressive universities in America. Each generation of trustees and administrators drifted incrementally from their predecessors’ values until the cumulative change became transformational.

The YMCA followed a similar trajectory. Founded in 1844 London as the Young Men’s Christian Association, it began as a Bible study and prayer group. By the twentieth century, it had “become interdenominational and more concerned with promoting morality and good citizenship than a distinctive interpretation of Christianity.”¹⁵ Today’s YMCA—rebranded as “The Y”—is essentially a secular gym chain.

While such cases of mission drift are benign, many others are much worse, especially those found in the NGO sector.

NGOs: From Watchdogs to Ideological Actors

NGOs are notorious for their ideological drift and capture.

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch was founded during the Cold War to monitor human rights abuses in closed societies. Its founder, Robert Bernstein, built it into one of the world’s most respected human rights organisations. Then, in 2009, Bernstein publicly broke with his own creation.¹⁶

Writing in the New York Times, Bernstein accused HRW of abandoning its founding mission. The organisation had “cast aside its important distinction between open and closed societies” and was helping turn Israel “into a pariah state.” “When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies,” he wrote. “Now the organisation, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.”¹⁷

In 2023, departing senior editor Danielle Haas confirmed Bernstein’s diagnosis in a farewell email to over 500 staff members. She described “years of politicisation” that “violated basic editorial standards related to rigour, balance, and collegiality.” The organisation’s Israel coverage, she wrote, showed “shattered professionalism” and “abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness.” Staff who disagreed felt “silenced” and feared “stigma and retaliation.”¹⁸

HRW illustrates the one-way street towards extremism. Under leadership committed to a particular ideological direction, moderates either conform or leave. The organisation hired Omar Shakir—a supporter of the BDS movement—as its Israel-Palestine director.¹⁹ Dissenting voices learned to self-censor. The drift became self-reinforcing.

The Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center began in the 1970s as a civil rights organisation fighting the Ku Klux Klan. It achieved notable successes bankrupting Klan organisations through civil litigation. But as the Klan declined, SPLC needed new enemies to maintain donor interest.

The organisation expanded its “hate group” designation far beyond white supremacists to include mainstream conservative organisations. The Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom (which has won multiple Supreme Court cases), and even Moms for Liberty parental rights groups now share the “hate map” with neo-Nazis and the KKK.²⁰

A federal judge concluded in 2019 that SPLC’s “hate group” label “does not depend upon objective data or evidence” and is “an entirely subjective inquiry.”²¹ The SPLC itself, defending against defamation lawsuits, has admitted its designation is “highly debatable and ambiguous,” belongs to the “realm of political debate,” and is “not capable of being empirically proven true or false.”²²

In 2012, a gunman targeted the Family Research Council specifically because he found it on SPLC’s hate map.²³ SPLC condemned the shooting—but kept FRC on the list.

Amnesty International

Amnesty International was founded in 1961 to advocate for prisoners of conscience. Volunteers sent postcards to authoritarian governments demanding releases. The model was simple, effective, and universal.

When the Cold War ended, Amnesty reinvented itself as an expert on armed conflict and international humanitarian law. The organisation took positions on abortion, sex work, and other contested political issues far removed from its original mission. Its head of the Gender Unit, Gita Sahgal, was suspended in 2010 after criticising the organisation’s relationship with a pro-Taliban figure. She accused Amnesty of ideological bankruptcy and misogyny.²⁴

In 2022, Amnesty published a report on Ukraine that critics said shifted blame for civilian deaths from Russian attackers to Ukrainian defenders. The organisation’s own internal review, obtained by the New York Times, found its conclusions “biased and not sufficiently substantiated.”²⁵ Swedish branch co-founder Per Wästberg, a member for over 60 years, resigned in protest.²⁶

Amnesty’s most persistent bias concerns Israel. The organisation has disproportionately focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while giving far less attention to more severe human rights violations in the region. NGO Monitor’s research found that between 2005 and 2013, Amnesty published 52 in-depth reports on Israel—more than on any other country in its Middle East section—while simultaneously soft-pedalling abuses in Qatar, where thousands of migrant workers have died.²⁷ In 2022, Amnesty accused Israel of “apartheid,” a charge rejected by the U.S. State Department and major Jewish organisations as historically inaccurate and reliant on antisemitic tropes.²⁸ In December 2024, Amnesty accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, a finding that Amnesty’s own Israeli branch rejected as failing to meet the legal definition under the Genocide Convention. Rather than engage with this dissent, Amnesty’s international board suspended its Israeli branch for two years, citing “anti-Palestinian racism”—effectively punishing members for disagreeing with headquarters.²⁹ The episode illustrated how the nonprofit structure enables ideological capture: when the organisation’s own Israeli members, with direct knowledge of the situation, challenge its conclusions, they are silenced rather than heard.

Charities: Where Good Intentions Go to Die

Charities often fall victim to ideological drift and capture, as well as other problems.³⁰

Corruption

Charities face a fundamental accountability problem: donors receive nothing tangible in return for their contributions. This enables managers to misuse funds with minimal oversight.³¹ Research estimates nonprofit fraud impacts nearly one in five organisations, with annual losses of $40-50 billion in the United States.³²

The Women’s Cancer Fund raised over $18 million between 2017 and 2022 from donors who believed they were helping cancer patients. Only about 1% actually reached patients. The rest funded executive salaries, luxury travel, and contracts with for-profit fundraising companies.³³

The pattern repeats endlessly. United Way of America’s president received a seven-year prison sentence in 1995 for using donations to fund lavish vacations and support mistresses.³⁴ The founder of Modest Needs was indicted in 2024 for embezzling $2.5 million meant for low-income families.³⁵ Feeding Our Future allegedly squandered $48 million of federal child nutrition funding on mansions and luxury cars.³⁶

The Overhead Illusion

High-profile scandals represent only the most egregious failures. More pervasive is simple inefficiency—the natural result of organisations whose managers face no competitive pressure to minimise costs. Charities routinely spend 30%, 50%, or even 80% of donations on “overhead” and “fundraising” rather than their stated missions.

A for-profit firm wasting such amounts of money would either improve or be acquired by more efficient operators. A nonprofit persists as long as donations or return on capital exceed the minimum needed for survival. The result is a sector where waste is endemic and improvement is optional.

A Notable Example of Ideological Drift: The Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation, established in 1936 by Henry and Edsel Ford, began as a conventional charity supporting Michigan educational and charitable institutions. Its charter purpose: “scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare.”

By the 1960s, Ford had transformed into what the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald calls “an activist, ‘socially conscious’ philanthropy” that “sparked the key revolution in the foundation worldview: the idea that foundations were to improve the lot of mankind not by building lasting institutions but by challenging existing ones.”³⁷ The foundation funded the controversial Ocean Hill-Brownsville “community control” experiment in 1967, which led to brutal teachers’ strikes.³⁸

Today, the $16 billion foundation funds voter registration groups, activist legal organisations, and progressive advocacy. The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson calls Ford “the Johnny Appleseed of litigation liberalism.”³⁹ Neither the Ford family nor Ford Motor Company controls it anymore.

The Pattern Across Sectors

These examples share common features predicted by the theory of noncapitalist institutions:

Lock-in: None of these organisations were dissolved when they drifted from their missions or became inefficient. Capital remains trapped in organisations that no longer serve their original purposes.

Drift and capture: Every example shows values shifting away from founders’ intentions over successive generations of leadership. The drift is always in the same direction—towards the ideological preferences of the people that staff these organisations, and sometimes towards the preferences of wealthy donors with political agendas. What looks like external “institutional capture” is often just the natural result of these structural incentives—whether from internal ideological drift or external donor pressure. And over time, extremists replace moderates because moderates are more tolerant of dissent. The one-way ratchet turns relentlessly.

Bloat: Universities exemplify administrative proliferation, but every nonprofit sector shows similar tendencies. When efficiency is not rewarded and inefficiency is not punished, organisations naturally accumulate unnecessary staff.

The lesson is not that all nonprofits are corrupt or that charitable impulses are misguided. It’s that the nonprofit form has systematic flaws that cause predictable problems. Anyone creating or donating to such organisations must understand these dynamics—or accept that their resources may ultimately fund objectives they oppose.

Solutions

Some solutions are possible. First, limit trustee organisations to a fixed lifespan—say, 20 years—after which they must dissolve. Capital should not transfer to another trustee organisation without founders’ approval. This solves lock-in, drift, and bloat.

Second, ban foreign governments and government-aligned individuals and entities from donating to nonprofits.

Third, stop subsidising trustee organisations over proprietary ones. Eliminate tax breaks and other advantages.

Fourth, consider proprietary organisations bound by statutes instead. Trustee organisations don’t distribute profits but still maximise revenue—surpluses become bureaucratic bloat rather than dividends. Proprietary universities and hospitals with appropriate statutory limitations could avoid this.

Last, there’s a for-profit alternative to nonprofit charities. Here’s how it could work: Someone offers $1,000 to multiple for-profit charities to, say, give schoolbooks to poor children. They choose the one offering to give 100 books over those offering 80 or 90. The charity is required to send evidence of actually delivering the schoolbooks, with a reimbursement plus fines for failure to perform or forging evidence. This right to the reimbursement and the fine can then be sold to a third party that investigates whether the charity has done its work.

This aligns incentives: cost savings become profit, superior performance increases willingness-to-pay. Nonprofits lack efficiency incentives and enable manager enrichment. For-profits have the right incentives.

Conclusion

Capitalism’s success stems from a simple mechanism: the alienability of property rights allows resources to flow towards their most productive uses. Entrepreneurs who serve customers well accumulate capital; those who fail lose it. This constant reallocation—guided by prices rather than committees—has generated unprecedented prosperity over the past two centuries.

Noncapitalist institutions lack this corrective mechanism. Cooperatives and nonprofits can’t be bought by more competent operators. Their capital remains locked in even when others could use it better. Without shareholders to satisfy or acquirers to fear, managers face no penalty for inefficiency, drift, or bloat. Worse, these institutions become vulnerable to drift and capture—by internal ideologues who (gradually) shift the mission, or by foreign governments and wealthy donors who buy influence through strategic grants. The results are predictable: universities with more administrators than students, charities that enrich their executives, human rights organisations that parrot the talking points of authoritarian regimes, and advocacy groups that betray their founders’ missions while sitting on billions in assets.

The lesson is not that all collective action must be organised through investor-owned firms. Some functions—basic research, poverty relief, preservation of cultural heritage—may justify nonprofit structures despite their flaws. But we should be clear-eyed about those flaws and not let noncapitalist institutions proliferate and expand more than necessary. Every resource locked into a sclerotic nonprofit is a resource unavailable for better uses, and is likely to be used in ways that harm society.

The reforms outlined above—sunset clauses, restrictions on foreign donations, elimination of tax advantages, and for-profit alternatives—would help. But the deeper point is structural. Capitalism works because it subjects resource allocation to continuous market testing and gives people the incentive to serve each other most efficiently. Institutions that don’t adapt eventually disappear. A society that wants prosperity must keep most of its capital within the capitalist system, where shareholder oversight and the profit motive can do their work.

The Governance Cooperative

In one domain, noncapitalism has long been the norm: governance. Democratic governments are in reality consumer cooperatives in the domain of governance. Democratic politicians bankroll nonprofits for activist support, creating an industry of professional activism that distorts democracy. Under noncapitalist governance, noncapitalist institutions support each other. To solve this problem, governance itself must become capitalist. With few exceptions, governments should be proprietary. To have a well-functioning capitalist society, with all its benefits including material prosperity, we need capitalism in governance. Without capitalism in governance, capitalism can’t prevail outside of governance.

Click here to read the final part of the manifesto.

1. Hansmann, H. (1996). The Ownership of Enterprise, pp. 240-241. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1pncrw1

2. U.S. Department of Education foreign gift and contract report data; see also Mitchell Bard, “US Department of Education is concealing foreign donations to universities,” JNS, March 5, 2024; Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Georgetown University Awards Medal to Qatari Royal Who Praised October 7 Mastermind,” April 18, 2025.

3. Bard, “US Department of Education is concealing foreign donations to universities,” citing DoE data showing Qatar ($5.7 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3.3 billion), UAE ($1.4 billion), and Kuwait ($1.3 billion) as largest Arab donors between 1981 and 2023.

4. Yale Daily News, “’Reluctance on the part of its leadership to lead’: Yale’s administration increases by nearly 50 percent,” November 10, 2021.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. The Chronicle of Higher Education found in 2018 that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university.

7. Bowdoin Review, “Death By a Thousand Emails: How Administrative Bloat is Killing American Higher Education.”

8. Ibid., citing Department of Education data.

9. Daily Pennsylvanian, “Penn administrator hiring far outpaces faculty growth, raising concerns of ‘bloat’,” February 20, 2024.

10. Harvard Crimson, “Bloated or Beneficial? Harvard’s Growing Admin,” May 25, 2023.

11. Bowdoin Review, quoting Todd Zywicki.

12. Bowdoin Review, quoting David Graeber.

13. Harvard Graduate School Christian Fellowship, “Harvard Shield,” citing Harvard’s “Rules and Precepts” adopted in 1646.

14. Ibid. The original 1692 motto was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae.”

15. Wikipedia, “YMCA,” citing the organisation’s transition “from evangelical origins to interdenominational and more concerned with promoting morality and good citizenship.”

16. Times of Israel, “Bob Bernstein, HRW founder who later slammed its anti-Israel bias, dies at 96,” May 29, 2019.

17. Robert Bernstein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” New York Times, October 19, 2009.

18. Times of Israel, “Outgoing Human Rights Watch senior editor blasts group’s ‘infected’ work on Israel,” November 27, 2023, reporting on Danielle Haas’s farewell email.

19. NGO Monitor, “Human Rights Watch (HRW),” citing Omar Shakir’s BDS advocacy.

20. Wikipedia, “Southern Poverty Law Center,” citing federal court rulings and congressional testimony.

21. Center for Immigration Studies v. SPLC, U.S. District Court (September 2019), Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruling.

22. SPLC’s own legal defense filings, as cited by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

23. Washington Post, “The Southern Poverty Law Center and the delicate task of defining hate in 2018,” November 8, 2018.

24. Wikipedia, “Criticism of Amnesty International.”

25. Quillette, “False Accusations and Ideological Bias,” August 11, 2022, reporting on the internal review obtained by New York Times.

26. Ibid., citing Per Wästberg’s resignation.

27. NGO Monitor, “Amnesty’s Disproportionate Focus on Israel,” January 6, 2016, https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/amnesty_s_disproportionate_focus_on_israel_/. The report found that from 2005–2013, Amnesty published 52 in-depth reports on Israel, more than any other country in the Middle East region. On Qatar, see NGO Monitor, “Amnesty International,” noting that Amnesty’s Secretary General Salil Shetty praised Qatar for being “quite open to Amnesty’s criticism” despite thousands of migrant worker deaths.

28. U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price stated on February 2, 2022: “We reject the view that Israel’s actions constitute apartheid.” See also American Jewish Committee, “Amnesty’s Outrageous Lie, its Big Problem with Jews, and the Truth About Israel,” February 4, 2022; ISGAP, “ISGAP Fellows Reject Antisemitic Tropes in Amnesty Report,” April 2022, noting that major Jewish organisations called the report “libelous” and accused it of “fueling antisemitism.”

29. Times of Israel, “Amnesty International suspends defiant Israel branch for ‘undermining’ its mission,” January 8, 2025; JNS, “Amnesty International suspends Israeli branch for two years,” January 7, 2025. Amnesty Israel stated that “careful analysis does not find that the findings meet the definition of genocide, as carefully formulated in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” See also Elliott Abrams, “Why Amnesty International Suspended Its Israel Branch,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 7, 2025.

30. This section includes only a few examples. For more, read ‘The Charity-Industrial Complex, John Smoke, im1776.com: https://im1776.com/2021/11/16/lets-be-uncharitable/. For a particularly shocking case of captured charities turning against society, read ‘Weaponized Philantropy: The Reece Committee’s Buried Warning to America’, Eric Buesing, https://sleuthfox.substack.com/p/weaponized-philanthropy-the-reece

31. CharityWatch, “Charity Scandals of 2025.”

32. ACFE Fraud Magazine, “The dark side of giving: Exposing charity fraud,” citing New York Times estimates.

33. FTC v. Cancer Recovery Foundation International (Women’s Cancer Fund), 2024.

34. Britannica Money, “Charity fraud,” citing the 1995 United Way case.

35. ACFE Fraud Magazine, citing the 2024 Keith Taylor indictment.

36. The Charity CFO, “3 Types of Nonprofit Fraud to Watch Out for Today,” March 24, 2022.

37. InfluenceWatch, “Ford Foundation,” citing Heather Mac Donald.

38. Black Agenda Report, “The Ford Foundation and Black Power,” reprinting Robert L. Allen’s 1968 analysis.

39. Capital Research Center, “The Ford Foundation.”