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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

Tens of millions of dollars were raised for "bail funds" across the country to bail out people arrested at the riots over the summer. Once the groups paid the bail on behalf of someone, the money was returned to the person bailed out not the group that paid it. The district attorney in Portland, Oregon, and other DA's in larger cities, was not prosecuting the majority of people arrested, except for the most egregious of cases, so, I guess you could say people were getting paid to cause destruction.

https://www.mrctv.org/blog/well-duh-portland-fund-bail-out-p...

https://bailfunds.github.io/

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Both this comment and its source are remarkably thin on details: the claim that people are not returning money to bail funds seems to be based on a single tweet from a single organization. I've given regularly to bail funds for years, and most report being able to recover and reuse bails for subsequent cases[1].

But even more saliently: nobody was "paid to cause destruction." People we being bailed out following mass arrests in the midst of a pandemic and unprecedented social unrest. Whether or not a particular fund has failed to recoup its bails is immaterial to the fact that nobody gave to bail funds as a mechanism for direct wealth transfer. That just wouldn't be very efficient.

[1]: https://bailproject.org/faq/

You're just attempting to deflect with an unrelated topic.

The article says a single fund spent $100,000. Where are you getting "tens of millions" from exactly?

Doesn't the IRS sort of dislike when you don't declare that as income?

[dropped; incorrect assertion]

Citation for this? The opposite seems to be the case based on reporting from Propublica among others:

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...

I’d need to dig up the links, but my understanding was the opposite—rich people have harder to analyze finances compared to low cap with simpler finances. So they audit the easy ones even though low reward.

This seems easy to automatically audit? I mean there is a government record of who receives the money.

As others have pointed out, this assertion is the exact opposite of reality.

People protesting against authorities killing innocent people (ostensibly, at least partly the basis of racism), is altogether a different thing from people trying to stop the validation of an election, which is to say, overthrow the Republic.

One is civil disobedience in the face of a legitimate problem, however the other is a coup attempt.

And of course, there's nothing wrong with people paying for other people's bail, there is however, something wrong with financing a coup.

Hopefully, those involved in civil disobedience who really did break the law by 'looting Target' will face reasonable justice irrespective of their bail, and those attempting to stop the transfer of power between Presidents will face proportional charges.

Edit: I should be clear I don't mean to be supportive of any of what is going on in any direction: BLM/Trumpland/Apple/Facebook/BLM/COVID/Free Speech/Hate Speech etc. Even as most of the press hides under the veil of 'technically truthful' there's quite a bit of strong narrative building going on. Sufficed to say, the 'insurrection' on capital hill was of another league altogether what with the legitimacy of the Office of the President being maligned to support the interdiction of the transfer of power. That's a 'really big deal'. In 200 years we will remember COVID and Trump for dubious reasons, while the BLM protests and FB/Apple/Twitter wars won't like make the history lesson.

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