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 Trump’s rise.
In an era where 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.
Extreme right discourse is *everywhere*.
Celebrity anti-immigrant columnist Ann Coulter contributes to the group’s online publication. Even with visible ties to the mainstream right, VDARE embraces an agenda that cultivates a radical far-right world view in its sympathizers.
VDARE promotes the white genocide & Great Replacement conspiracy theories - very concerningly now gaining traction in Britain - which many view as having inspired far-right terror attacks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; El Paso, Texas; & 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 an antiracist demonstrator. VDARE also romanticizes the Capitol Hill insurrection.
“The Dissident Right is an intellectual movement,” Brimelow wrote of the Capitol insurrection. “Our ideas are considered dangerous by [mainstream media] Cultural Marxists, but we’re actually quite few.. (the) movement was the American people.”
VDARE’s recent fundraising prowess coincides with the Republican Party’s embrace of the anti-immigrant, anti-democratic worldview promoted by Steve Bannon & Donald Trump & his followers.
Total donations to the VDARE Foundation surged throughout the Trump era.
DonorsTrust, a right-wing funding vehicle tied to Charles Koch, the Mercer family & other like-minded billionaires - who influence the UK by helping fund publications like Spiked & Tufton St think tanks like the IEA - pumped $1.5 million into VDARE in 2019.
JOIN 👏THE 👏 DOTS.
In February 2020, VDARE paid $1.4 million in cash to purchase a castle in West Virginia, establishing a base that is less than a two-hour commute from Washington, DC.
The purchase provides a small window into how VDARE may be spending their newly acquired wealth.
During the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations in June 2020, VDARE impersonated journalists from VICE Canada & asked antiracist protesters to identify themselves by name & face to their large #racist audience on YouTube.
Facebook & YouTube have since suspended VDARE’s accounts.
The group also stumped for the defense team of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer a jury convicted in April of murdering Floyd.
The big increase in revenue worked out well for Brimelow, whose salary nearly doubled from the year before, making £345,000 in 2019.
DonorsTrust - the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement” - & other similar funds, donate to many US hate groups every year.
'Donor-advised funds' (DAFs) manage individual charitable accounts for its clients for a fee, who can then shield their identities from the public.
In 2019, DonorsTrust also provided $10,500 to the New Century Foundation, the nonprofit behind Jared Taylor’s white nationalist American Renaissance magazine & website. An associate of Brimelow, he shared a stage with him & Richard Spencer at an “alt-right” event in 2016.
Jared Taylor promotes dehumanizing pseudoscience on his website, including the myth that Black people are predisposed to be less intelligent than other races - something else with support in Britain, & a view that exists within the Govt, & in the past, amplified by Boris Johnson.
One foundation that formally ended its funding of VDARE is the Innovia Foundation. For years, it facilitated a wealthy donor’s contributions to VDARE.
Despite pleas from its CEO, it was only after national press attention that the foundation’s board adopted an anti-hate policy.
Like many extreme far-right figures, Brimelow invests in Bitcoin.
His cryptocurrency donor list included French computer programmer Laurent Bachelier, who donated to open admirers of fascism such as Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer & white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Anyway, what happens in the US generally happens in the UK shortly afterwards. Brexit, Bannon & Farage mainstreamed far-right rhetoric, & now it is increasingly normalised: it's already *crystal clear* that the fastest growing terrorist threat in Britain comes from the far-right.
Last year it was reported that for the first time, the largest number of Prevent referrals in the UK related to far-right extremism.
Of cases referred on to Channel, 43% were for rightwing & 30% for Islamist radicalisation.
I've written elsewhere about the dangerous rise in right-wing populist nationalism, & the increasingly dangerous & cavalier rhetoric of the Tory Govt, the mainstream press, & publications such as Spiked & the Spectator - as well as Govt links to Viktor Orban & other extremists.
And now, with #GBNews funded by questionable US Libertarians & overseas hedge-funders clearly becoming Britain's Fox News & normalising & mainstreaming further explicitly "anti-woke" (ie intolerant, demonizing & scapegoating rhetoric), I fear for Britain.
Imho, you should too.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
My own summary is above, but journalist @gilduran76 - of the brilliant #FrameLab - has now written his own summary, review and interpretation of it, which I reproduce with a few links and commentary, below.
To fully understand Silicon Valley’s project to destroy democracy, read 'The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State.'
In 1999, it was rebranded as 'The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.'
Life was demonstrably worse in the 1979 than it is today.
Zymunt Bauman calls this yearning for an imagined past, ‘retrotopia’, in which the ‘Volk’ (the ‘simple folk’, who Reform UK claim to represent) are constructed as homogenous, Christian, white, & ‘indigenous’.
Life was demonstrably inferior in the 1970s compared to today for almost everyone in England.
Life expectancy in the UK in 1980 was 71 for men and 77 for women. By 2019, life expectancy at birth in England had increased to 79 years for men & 83.5 for women.
1. Economic Hardship
In 1979, the UK economy was struggling with high inflation, unemployment, and a budget deficit. This eroded purchasing power, making essentials like food, clothing, and housing more expensive relative to wages. "Stagflation" was a significant problem.
'Anti-elite man of the people' Nigel Farage, educated at one of the most expensive private schools on earth, is now the highest paid MP in the UK. His basic annual MP salary is £91,346 plus expenses.
The UK National Living Wage for people aged 21+ is just £12.21/hour.
Let's take a look at some of Nigel Farage's additional earnings that he's legally obliged to declare in the MPs Register of interests - and which contains a few surprises - starting with GB "News".
Between 16th July 2024 and 15th January 2025, Farage decalred earnings of £264,790 for his work as a presenter on Reform UK Ltd's 24/7 propaganda channel, GB "News", co-owned by Islamophobic billionaire hedge-funder, Paul Marshall.
The front-page article, published in the Daily Telegraph, claiming “London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population” was covered across the media and widely discussed by politicians and others.
The claim that “One in 12 in London is illegal immigrant” is based on this report, commissioned by Thames Water, conducted by the research company Edge Analytics in February 2023, which the Telegraph says it obtained “under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
The EDL is an Islamophobic protest movement aimed at preserving UK identity and culture in the face of a perceived Islamization of the UK and Europe.
So is Reform UK.
The EDL reinforce the notion of the “nationalist subject” - a fallacious conception of citizenship - that wrongly assumes members of the majoritarian culture are possessed of certain core values, beliefs, and traits that embody the true essence of the nation.
🧵 Quite a few politically & historically illiterate brainwashed Trump-supporters replied or quote-tweeted the tweet below to tell me lifelong democratic socialist George Orwell was not in fact a democratic socialist. Truly Orwellian. So I asked Oligarch Musk's Grok about it...