Legal Insurrection Foundation 4th Anniversary

Legal Insurrection Foundation 4th Anniversary

How old is “Legal Insurrection”? Well, it depends how and what you are counting.

Last October, we celebrated the 14th Anniversary of this Legal Insurrection website:

My first blog post was October 12, 2008, Obama is “Door  No. 2″.  Each year I write an anniversary post, you can read them to see the ebb and flow of opitimism and pessimism….

We have weathered many storms over the years, and this year was no different. Earlier this year, we were unexpectedly kicked off Salsa Labs, our CRM (“customer relationship management”) platform without any claim we violated their terms of service. “Coincidentally” we were deplatformed after it was bought by a far-left wing activist group. Funny that. It cost us dearly in time spent, lost revenue, consultants, and out of pocket expenses, that in the end will result in an almost $40k hit. But we survived.

Just like we survived earlier this year when a malicious education group we were covering tried to get us kicked off our hosting service and then tried to interfere in our domain registration. They tried to decapitate us from the internet, but we survived.

We don’t know where the next attack will come from, but we know it will be unexpected and that our readers and donors will stand with us. We thank you for that.

We know what it’s like to be under attack, this year was just worse than in the past. It’s why we understand what people under attack are going through (I understand it particularly well). We try to be first responders to people in trouble, by shining a light.

It took a long time to change our structure, but on March 1, 2019, we launched the Legal Insurrection Foundation:

Today marks the launch of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, an IRS-approved 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Consider this a soft opening. We’ll have a party, and maybe some fireworks and music, in April. For now, we’re trying to make sure all systems are running smoothly….

The Foundation is a research, investigative, and educational project that has been years in the making for me. I first considered forming such an entity in 2014, after the fights involving the American Studies Association adoption of the anti-Israel academic boycott. I’ve always been most proud of our original research, reporting, and investigation, but I was frustrated that our lack of resources did not allow us to do as much as we wanted in that and subsequent efforts.

Faced with the somewhat daunting task of putting it all together, my own tendency towards procrastination, and then family health issues, things got delayed. By years.

We finally filed in September 2017, and received IRS approval in March 2018, though I didn’t find out about it until months later because we didn’t receive the IRS approval letter at that time. Even with that IRS approval in hand, it was uncertain whether the vision ever would become reality. Planning remained on hold through the summer and fall. Finally, late last year, with improvements in my wife’s health, we decided to go for it.

The legal, regulatory, accounting and operational requirements have been more daunting and expensive than I anticipated. Kemberlee helped me with some of these logistics. I made a substantial personal donation to the Foundation to get us started, but moving forward we will have to rely on reader donations and other support….

Someone once described us as “disrupters,” a characterization I hadn’t thought of before that. It is this spirit of disruption and impact that will drive the Foundation. We will not be a passive research entity, issuing reports no one reads, but an entity that uses research, investigation, and education to create an impact on the public discourse.

LIF now is the operating entity. But wait, there’s more.

On February 2, 2021, we launched Critical Race Training In Education (CriticalRace.org).

Critical Race Theory and the corollary Critical Race Training have been a major focus at Legal Insurrection….

The impact on education has been enormous, and destructive. What started on college campuses has moved to primary and secondary education, and into the broader culture. Government agencies and private corporations now are some of the worst offenders of the obsessive focus on race.

We created the most comprehensive database, currently over 200 colleges and universities and growing, with an interactive map by state. Each school page contains not only a listing of ongoing activities, but also a custom search function to obtain the most up-to-date information….

Fox News covered the launch, Website launched to track critical race theory teaching in higher education….

That database of 220 colleges and universities has been expanded since launch to over 500 colleges and universities, 100 medical schools, the 50 most elite K-12 private schools, and the military service academies. Almost 3 million page views and over 7 million user actions (page views plus other clicks on links) later, CriticalRace.org’s influence is extensive, with approximately 125 media links to the site.

But wait, don’t go anywhere, don’t change the channel.

Last week LIF rolled out its third platform, the Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org), to fight against racism and discrimination undertaken in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

 So we are starting equalprotect.org, the Equal Protection Project, because we’re seeing very troubling patterns in society.

Our highest ideal as a society is enshrined in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, and federal, state and local law, which is you do not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. And we are seeing that unfortunately, under the concept of equity, that there is outright discrimination on the basis of race.

A perfect example is in Providence, Rhode Island, where I’m located right now. the Providence School District, the largest in Rhode Island, has founded a program for teacher loan forgiveness, new teacher loan forgiveness, funded by the Rhode Island Foundation, the largest charity in Rhode Island. There’s one catch to it. You cannot apply unless you are non-white. So they have are openly discriminating against new white teachers with this program. And nobody seems to blink an eye at it.

We have filed a federal complaint about it. We are pursuing it, but nobody is challenging this. The Governor is no place to be found. The Attorney General is no place to be found. This is a government program to discriminate and unfortunately that’s what has happened to the equity agenda. And we’re getting reports from around the country of these sort of problems.

So we are organizing to investigate these things, to expose them and if necessary, to litigate them. And one of the things we’re doing, and you can sign up at our website if you’re a lawyer who wants to help in this effort, at equalprotect.org, a lawyers network speakers Because this has to be a national effort. As you mentioned, the Biden administration’s behind it also. So that’s what we’re doing and we ask people to come and visit and join us.

There has been substantial additional media coverage of the launch of EPP. Hopefully more to come.

The past four years have been very exciting, we’ve grown tremendously, and are proud of the team we have put together and what we have accomplished. We are going to focus in the coming year on maximizing the impact of the assets we have created — LI, LIF, CRT, EPP — and for that we need more resources. We can’t do it without financial support.

If you appreciate and support what we are doing, we urge you to DONATE. As a tax-exempt 501(c)(3), your donations are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by law.

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