The outrage is boiling over about the ultra-conservative Civitas Institute, which last week published personal, albeit publicly available, information about the protesters arrested at Moral Monday demonstrations: mug shots, party affiliations, cities of residence and, taking a page from the white supremacist intimidation playbook, their employers.
Turnabout is fair play. Here is a list of people on staff and on the board of Civitas Institute and its sister organization, Civitas Action.
When we began building this database on Thursday morning, all the names were listed on the Civitas Institute website. Now, only President Francis X. De Luca is listed. (The full listings remain available on an archive page at the Wayback Machine website.)
Civitas Institute is a conservative think tank funded largely by the Pope Foundation, which has given it more than $8 million since its founding in 2005about 97 percent of its income. It is a tax-exempt nonprofit. Art Pope sat on the institute’s board of directors until Gov. Pat McCrory appointed him as state deputy budget director.
Civitas Action shares an office and many of the same staff. But CA is different from the institute: It’s a 501(c)(4), a nonprofit that can legally lobby. Such groups are not required to disclose their donors.
CA has a link on its website titled “Carolina Transparency,” which is a guide to elected officials. However, CA is not subjecting itself to the same level of transparency; none of its staffers or board members are listed. We found them through the group’s 990 tax forms.
The sources for this material include the organizations’ websites, LinkedIn, Lexis-Nexis, the N.C. Board of Elections, the Internal Revenue Service, Guidestar.org and employer websites. In some cases, we could not verify exact ages, so we gave a range.
This was originally published as two posts on our Triangulator blog.
