Southern Poverty Law Center: Donors Pumped Millions Into White Nationalist Group

The SPLC’s new report shines a light on the multi-million dollar funding mechanism for hate website VDARE.

Donors gave the prominent white nationalist hate group VDARE $4.3 million in 2019, over eight times more than the year before, according to tax records the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) obtained and shared with Hatewatch.

The large sum represents an unprecedented annual haul for an American white nationalist group and suggests that big-money donors of the conservative movement may be moving their riches to more extreme causes in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise.

In an era when white nationalists increasingly embrace decentralized online activism, VDARE stands out for its organizational prowess and links to power. Hatewatch connected former Trump administration officials Stephen Miller and Julia Hahn to its founder, Peter Brimelow, in a series of stories. (Miller invited Brimelow to speak at Duke University when he studied there, and Brimelow referred to a writers workshop Hahn attended with him in private emails leaked to Hatewatch.) Celebrity anti-immigrant columnist Ann Coulter contributes to the group’s online publication. Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham retweeted a VDARE post blaming non-white workers for a COVID-19 outbreak last year.

Even with such visible ties to the mainstream right, VDARE embraces an agenda that directly or indirectly cultivates a radical far-right world view in its sympathizers. Brimelow’s group published apologia about both a terrorist’s manifesto in 2019 and the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on its third anniversary. The group promotes the white genocide conspiracy theory, which many view as having inspired far-right terror attacks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; El Paso, Texas; and Christchurch, New Zealand, in recent years. Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler published a post on VDARE’s website titled “Yes, Virginia (Dare), There Is Such A Thing As White Genocide,” less than two months before a neo-Nazi murdered antiracist demonstrator Heather Heyer at his event. VDARE has also written in romantic terms about the insurrection waged on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

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DonorsTrust, a right-wing funding vehicle tied to Charles Koch, the Mercer family and other like-minded billionaires, pumped $1.5 million into VDARE in 2019, CMD previously reported. These tax records demonstrate that the dark money flowing from DonorsTrust accounts for only a little more than a third of VDARE’s revenue from that year.

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The big increase in revenue worked out well for Brimelow, whose salary nearly doubled from the year before. According to the documents, Brimelow made about $182,000 in 2018. In 2019, VDARE paid him roughly $345,000. The VDARE Foundation appears prepared to maintain his salary, as the nonprofit ended the year with over $3.5 million in the bank.

More: Donors Pumped Millions into White Nationalist Group | Southern Poverty Law Center

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