Minnesota nonprofit accused of siphoning $6.5M to fund Vegas trips, luxury cars, private liquor store
The head of a Minnesota nonprofit allegedly siphoned off more than $6 million in taxpayer funds to treat himself to such lavish goodies as trips to Vegas, luxury rides and shopping sprees at Harley Davidson.
Trahern Pollard, founder and now-former director of the nonprofit We Push For Peace, was supposed to be leading his organization in providing “conflict de-escalation’’ work after George Floyd’s murder — an effort fueled by millions of dollars in government contracts, according to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in a new lawsuit against the group.
Instead, Pollard diverted more than $6 million of the dough to fund a well-heeled lifestyle for himself — not to mention to pay off child support, settle a tax bill with the IRS and subsidize his private businesses, including a liquor store and a used-car dealership, authorities said.
Pollard’s fellow former director, Jaclyn McGuigan, also was nailed in the alleged scheme.
The organization was driven into the ground by “rampant abuse,” including by Pollard (far left), prosecutors allege. Instagram
McGuigan, the charity’s treasurer, paid herself $1,000 a week from the nonprofit’s funds into her personal account while stealing thousands of dollars more in government grant funds as “administrative” expenses, according to prosecutors.
“Instead of helping the community, they helped themselves to millions of dollars that should have gone into the community,” Ellison said in a statement.
After Floyd’s murder at the hands of cops in 2020, We Push For Peace received millions of dollars in government contracts to try to de-escalate regional conflict and interrupt violence when police weren’t present.
When the AG started investigating how the group spent its public cash, Pollard and McGuigan tried to cover up their misconduct, according to the lawsuit.
After We Push For Peace eventually elected a new board and blocked Pollard from receiving more money, so he just started a competing for-profit business, Change Makers, to drain its remaining revenue, leaving the group no longer operational, according to court documents.
Pollard allegedly submitted false statements under penalty of perjury, claiming a child-support payment was “nonprofit overhead” and describing a $35,000 payout to his personal friends as “Chicago payroll.”
In all, Pollard is accused of misusing $6 million in assets for his personal gain, while McGuigan allegedly took $500,000, although the lawsuit said the exact amounts are uncertain.
Non-profit group has twisted the meaning of ‘genocide’ — and hijacked a Zionist hero’s name — to suit its own woke purposes
Few figures loom larger in the moral and legal history of the 20th century than Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the word “genocide” after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. Lemkin witnessed the epitome of evil, and then gave the world the language to describe it.
The word “genocide” exists because he understood that what had been done to the Jewish people was so unprecedented that existing legal vocabulary could not define it properly. He spent the rest of his life ensuring that the world would never again lack the words — or the legal framework — to confront such crimes.
That is precisely why what is happening now is so grotesque.
The family of Raphael Lemkin is taking legal action against the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has hijacked his name and repurposed it for its own warped woke agenda.
Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust.
In a formal complaint to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and state regulators, filed alongside the European Jewish Association, the family argues this isn’t an academic dispute or a legal debate over copyright — it’s the theft and weaponization of a Holocaust survivor’s legacy against his own people.
Lemkin was a committed Zionist who dedicated his life to preventing the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Institute bearing his name, by contrast, moved with stunning speed after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks to accuse the victim, Israel — the world’s only Jewish state — of genocide in the wake of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Joseph Lemkin, a relative who has emerged as a leading voice in the fight, described the moment he realized what the organization was doing as both shocking and deeply personal. His teenage son stumbled across the Institute’s social media and brought it to his attention.
What he found was not a sober, scholarly institution devoted to genocide prevention, but something else entirely: a radical activist platform, saturated with ideological messaging, where the word “genocide” was casually thrown around in a manner that would have horrified the scholar and victim who coined it.
The word “genocide” exists because Lemkin understood that what had been done to the Jewish people during the Holocaust was so unprecedented that existing legal vocabulary could not define it properly. Getty Images
The Institute’s social media is filled with warning of “trans genocide.” If you scroll back to 2023, you’ll discover silence, or worse, equivocation, in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel.
On the Institute’s website, merchandising includes political symbols, including Palestinian flag paraphernalia, alongside products with quotes attributed to Lemkin himself.
Joseph Lemkin told the Post bluntly, “This is not the work of a neutral academic body. It is an agenda-driven operation that has appropriated a name in order to lend its activism moral authority.”
When the word “genocide” is stretched to encompass everything from policy disagreements to social grievances, it does not promote justice — it subverts it. Bettmann Archive
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, founder and chairman of the European Jewish Association (EJA), the Brussels-based umbrella organization representing Jewish communities across the European continent, joined the legal effort.
The Institute, he argued, “pretend[s] to be an academic one” while in reality functioning as an activist organization that “spread[s] lies about Israel” and contributes to a broader ecosystem of rising antisemitism, particularly on campuses and social media.
The legal questions now emerging are significant. Can a nonprofit use the name of a historical figure without authorization, particularly when that usage creates the impression of endorsement? Does the posthumous right of publicity extend to figures like Lemkin, whose legacy carries not just personal but moral significance? And at what point does naming cross the line into misrepresentation?
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, told the Post, “The organization that has taken his name and now accuses the Jewish state of the very crime he coined to describe our destruction is not honoring his legacy — it is desecrating it.”
Rabbi Menachem Margolin has joined the legal effort with the Lemkin family. NurPhoto via Getty Images
He went further, calling it “antisemitism wearing the costume of human rights,” and warning that “when you let our enemies steal our language, our history and our dead, you make the next attack possible.”
When the word “genocide” is stretched to encompass everything from policy disagreements to social grievances, it does not promote justice — it subverts it.
The people behind this manipulation are showing exactly who they are. This is not a misunderstanding — it is moral bankruptcy dressed up as activism that we’ve come to expect from activists who are willing to exploit even a Holocaust survivor’s legacy to advance their warped political agenda.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, reacted with fury. “Expressly against a family’s wishes, this Philadelphia-based, far-left, pro-Hamas ‘nonprofit’ stole the name of a true giant in actual genocidal studies,” Fetterman told the Post. “We have free speech in America, but you can’t steal a man’s legacy to promote its twisted, antisemitic views.”
The Institute being sued spreads lies about Israel and helps contribute to a growing atmosphere of antisemitism, argues the lawsuit. Getty Images
That distinction — between free speech and false appropriation — is critical. The First Amendment protects the right to say controversial, even offensive things. It does not grant the right to cloak those views in the borrowed authority of someone who cannot consent.
Raphael Lemkin gave the world a word because he believed that naming evil was the first step in stopping it. Today, his family is fighting to ensure that the word — and the name behind it — are not turned into tools for a cause anathema to everything he stood for.
If Lemkin’s name can be hijacked to accuse the Jewish state of committing the very crime he defined to describe Jewish destruction, then we are no longer just debating semantics or history.
We are watching it be rewritten in real time — and turned against the very people it was meant to protect.
Trans athlete dominates California girls’ track meet as protesters demand: ‘Keep men out of women’s sports’
A trans competitor at a California girls’ track meet swept the field in multiple events Saturday while protesters outside demanded biological males be barred from competing against girls.
At the CIF Southern Section Division 3 preliminaries held at Yorba Linda High School, AB Hernandez, a senior from Jurupa Valley, delivered commanding performances in all three jumping events against female athletes.
CIF Track & Field student A.B. Hernandez at the triple jump. Rafael Fontoura for CA Post
The biggest gap came in the triple jump, where Hernandez posted 42 feet, 4 inches. The nearest competitors finished at 39 feet, 7 1/2 inches and 37 feet, 8 inches.
In the long jump, Hernandez recorded 20 feet, 4 1/4 inches, finishing more than a foot ahead of the second-place mark of 19 feet, 1 1/2 inches. Third place reached 18 feet, 7 inches.
Hernandez also tied for first in the high jump after clearing 5 feet, 2 inches alongside Reese Hogan.
The results immediately reignited outrage from critics who argue biological males possess physical advantages that undermine fairness in girls’ athletics.
Outside the venue, demonstrators gathered before the meet for a “Save Girls’ Sports” rally led by former NCAA athlete Sophia Lorey.
The results immediately reignited outrage from critics who argue biological males possess physical advantages that undermine fairness in girls’ athletics.
Outside the venue, demonstrators gathered before the meet for a “Save Girls’ Sports” rally led by former NCAA athlete Sophia Lorey.
Tennis icon Martina Navratilova backed Olympic gold medalists Nancy Hogshead and Kaillie Humphries after they criticized California’s handling of the issue.
“Right on Nancy!!! We are just built different!!!” Navratilova wrote on X.
She later added: “Newsom could overturn this in a second. No excuse.”
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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