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I'm not sure that's the high note, either. Patio11's famously Straussian, and there's a lot of his writing that's focused on stuff after that fact or separate from it. Sometimes that's just him being what he calls a 'dangerous professional' (fintech guy, not Bond villain), but other times it's so he can plant seeds to say 'I told you so' without risking defamation or being clearly wrong.
(I don't trust him, even if I appreciate his expertise.)
The question is where that goes. He's talking compliance rules as if they're something written down in steel, but Itch.io (a company using MacKenzie's own Stripe) still owes Vintage Story 300k+. These aren't rules written in steel even well outside of culture war. There's some clear 'oh, you all do a bunch of the illegal stuff', but at this point it's not even clear that the ultra-clear-cut 'you lied on this form with real clear evidence strict liability' will get anywhere, or that if it does go anywhere, will even get the guy who did it in jail.
Will anyone be able to tell if every compliance officer on the planet decides to just make an exception?
(caveat: I did ask an LLM, though I don't think it gave any useful answers and did not use it to write out this post.)
Which is weird, because non-profit law doesn't require you to be non-partisan in the colloquial sense: as he spells out, the rule is against acting "on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office". The second shoe here drops when the IRS joins the ring with a steel chair and pulls charitable org status.
... does that happen? Enforcement of the Johnson amendment has long been more in the than in the breach, and both the Trump 1 and Biden admin's loosened it. The IRS has not, historically, been very happy to beckon to a conservative's call, and that's only been augmented by the Obama-era cuts trying to hammer them for bad past actions. What makes it change, here?
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