Breaking: Amy Wax Now A Charity

University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax has spent the last several years trying to get fired from her highly-paid academic sinecure, by making enough openly white supremacist remarks to force her employer to conclude that continuing to expose students to her would constitute educational malpractice. (Background here and here).

Even in the midst of our present veritable golden age of right wing grifting, this has got to take some sort of sugar-free vegan cake:

 Penn’s actions represent an unprecedented and deeply destructive threat to the practice and traditions of free expression on campus and the tenure protections afforded to professors who express unpopular views. They are further evidence of the “woke” takeover of our university system, which seeks to stifle and punish dissent and purge our campuses of any deviation from a narrow set of progressive dogmas.
I am committed to fighting Penn’s efforts to banish and punish me. But resisting Penn’s campaign is expensive. So please contribute to my legal defense fund and help me continue to fight on.

But wait there’s more. In addition to her GoFundMe site, Wax has set up the Amy Wax Defense Fund, which includes this remarkable assertion:

Professor Wax has already incurred significant legal expenses, but seeks support to give this fight the resources it deserves. She does not want to settle – she wants to win. Professor Wax intends to take the University to court, if necessary.

Even on a university campus, you should be allowed to tell the truth. Please help Professor Wax preserve that right. Contributions to the Amy Wax Legal Defense Fund are tax deductible under the Section 501(c​)3 of the Internal Revenue Code.

My knowledge of tax law is shall we say tenuous, so help me out here LGM commentariat. How in the living heck is sending money to a private individual under these circumstances contributing to a legal charity? Indeed how are such payments not simply more ordinary income for Amy Wax, and therefore not merely not deductible, but taxable to her?

Aside from that technical little detail, let us linger for a moment on the sheer chutzpah on display here.

(1) Amy Wax’s household income is quite likely over one million dollars per year. As a very senior law professor at an elite law school she probably makes $300K-$400K per year. But that modest sum also probably represents the minority of her family’s income:

I mean, I’m married to an academic oncologist, a cancer doctor, okay? He and his colleagues are some of the most conscientious, devoted, hard-working, conventional bourgeois people in the known universe. They are the people that keep this society going.

Say hello to Roger Cohen, Associate Director of this and that on the Penn Medical School faculty.

Roger almost certainly makes more scratch than Amy, maybe quite a bit more, so you do the math.

(2) Amy Wax is now a minor right wing celebrity who also knows scads of high profile right wing lawyers. Can’t one of them step up to help her out with the costs of the presently non-existent litigation she supposedly can’t pay for?

(3) Wax is a law professor, so if we pretend for just a moment that this isn’t all just a straight-up grift, can we note that somebody well into the 99th percentile of household income is claiming that she can’t afford the costs of a very simple and straightforward lawsuit (which again she hasn’t filed yet)? Does that seem like a very fair and efficient legal system? Yet Wax, who has spent nearly three decades now getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to help reproduce that system, is now out on the metaphorical street, panhandling to stave off the freedom-hating predations of the Woke Mob ™.

Wax’s GoFundMe has raised $176,000 so far, with an average donation of $135, so the median donation to this worthy cause is probably forty bucks or something.

Ain’t that America?