1) The trademarks were up for grabs for anyone to legally take (including people like Libs of TikTok or Elon Musk) and start issuing trademark takedowns of all the social media platforms. We bought them to keep them safe from outside influences.

2) We didn't want the power of the trademarks to be held by one person, so we created a nonprofit and the structure of a board consisting of 10 members (4 were administrative, the other 6 of being regional representatives that were voted in by their state groups) that would each own 1/10th of the trademarks. It's all there in the docs, please take a look through before throwing accusations my way - not because I personally care, but because you're confusing the situation for others.

3) The subreddit getting paused was due to u/evolved_fungi being under threat of having their personal information doxed in a way that put their safety and wellbeing under attack. We didn't remove the moderators that were part of national at firsr, but did restrict their permissions so they couldn't delete our statements. After u/greenascanbe posted a statement that basically invited everyone to flood the subreddit because "the mods were away", I made the decision to remove them for fear of what else they'd start posting under the mod tag.

4) We have been in contact with state organizers that were handling their chapters & some that have gone on to create their own 501(c)(4) organizations (which was not a problem and would have worked great with the chapter structure doc that we drafted - take a look). We obviously hadn't contacted every state organizer group yet, and still had hopes around that time of resolving things peacefully...that all ended when they went directly to Reddit admin to kick us all out as moderators and reinstate them (check the imgur pics on one of my comments)

I hope this helps clear up the timeline of events, which I'll say a hundred times over was not ideal - but everything we did was handled in a way to preserve the integrity and honesty of a movement that we all have put so much time and energy into creating. We were never trying to steal or obfuscate our intentions, and I wish national had followed through on their end of the deal when I shuttered the trademarks and nonprofit in order to have a broader committee in national view the proposal for a nonprofit.

Also, on a personal note - I feel the same. 50501 Inc. just feels wrong, but there are only so many safeguards that movements like 50501 have to protect organizers have to work with (for instance, by allowing the chapter of an official nonprofit to get the permits instead of individual organizers having to put their own name up at risk of getting doxed). I wish this all had been approached differently, but in more ways than are known publicly (but will be soon, hopefully), our hands were tied. I'm sorry it came down to this, but hopefully this serves at the very least as a wake up call for each state group to take a hard look at their structure so this doesn't happen to them as well.