A new report released by Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Hatewatch and the Center for Media and Democracy reveals big money donors pumped $4.3 million into white nationalist group VDARE in the lead up to the 2020 election.
That figure is eight times more than they received the year before, according to previously unreported tax records.
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.
“VDARE is a white nationalist group known for publishing apologia about terrorist manifestos and promoting the white genocide conspiracy theory. Seeing extremely wealthy people abruptly line their pockets with money is disturbing,” said Michael Edison Hayden, a Senior Investigative Reporter with Southern Poverty Law Center.
“We need to wake up to what the continuing changes in the Republican Party, including the embrace of the January 6th insurrection, really means,” said Hayden. “ This is not dark money flowing into some group who just wants to cut taxes. They want to destroy America as we know it and replace it with something totally unrecognizable.”
Hatewatch previously reported VDARE purchased a historic castle for $1.4 million without a loan in 2020.
These newly revealed donations illustrate how the extremist group was able to make that purchase, which brought them closer to Washington, D.C.
The tax records demonstrate that dark money flowing from DonorsTrust, a right-wing funding vehicle tied to Charles Koch, the Mercer family and other like-minded billionaires, accounts for a little more than a third of VDARE’s revenue from that year.
That group pumped $1.5 million into VDARE in 2019, CMD previously reported.
“America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version,” said Sam Francis, an editor dismissed by the conservative Washington Times after he made racist remarks at a 1995 conference, on a July 21, 2003 VDARE.com post. “Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely.”
Read the full report here.
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