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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

From The New York Magazine, Intelligencer [nymag.com]:

At first glance, Robert Rotella appears to be a typical libertarian donor. Through the foundation named in his honor, the Bellevue, Washington–based founder of Rotella Capital Management has donated millions to libertarian and conservative organizations like the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, and Turning Point USA. One of his particular favorites is the Institute for Justice. Since 2010, he has donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the group, and through it, he has helped set up a Supreme Court battle with dramatic implications for public schools. Justices heard Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue on Wednesday: the Institute for Justice had brought the case against the state of Montana in order to force it to include religious schools in its tax-credit scholarship program. The case has implications not just for the First Amendment but for teachers’ unions, who view it as yet another attempt to take precious resources away from public schools.

Interesting.

Rotella’s financial support for libertarian causes is enough to make him a consequential figure, but there’s another reason to know his name: A closer look at the financial records of the Robert P. Rotella Foundation, which he manages alongside his sister, Rosemarie, reveals that he isn’t just interested in right-to-work laws or free enterprise. He’s also a significant funder of white nationalism.

Of the $5.8 million the foundation has donated to various causes since 2002, roughly $105,000 has gone to organizations like the National Policy Institute, or NPI, which is led by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. A comprehensive review of the foundation’s available 990 reports indicates that its financial support for white nationalism began in 2014 and continued through 2018. Though $105,000 is not an exceptionally large sum of money, white nationalist organizations are small, and it doesn’t take much money to keep them afloat. “Annual recurring donations are kind of where it’s at for these guys because they all have financial limits, imposed by federal law, on how large the donations can be,” explained David Neiwert, the author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.

“A guy like Spencer, for instance, doesn’t need a single sugar daddy to give him money,” Neiwert added. “Basically, the National Policy Institute is Spencer, and he just needs an annual salary. Five thousand dollars is basically 5 percent of that annual income for him. He just needs another 20 of those donations and he’s done for the year. That’s actually not that hard to get, because there are a lot of people out there who are willing to keep that chunk rolling in for him every year.”

Rotella was one of those people. His foundation gave $2,500 to NPI in 2014, then doubled the sum in 2015. It handed off another $5,000 chunk to the group in 2016. Donations to other white nationalist groups follow a similar pattern. Between 2013 and 2017, his foundation donated $10,000 every year, or $40,000 total, to the Charles Martel Society, a white nationalist organization that publishes The Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-academic journal that focuses on “race science.” Members of the journal’s advisory board include Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt University professor emerita who describes herself as an “ethnic separatist,” and Tom Sunić, a writer whom the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “an intellectual voice for white nationalists” and who once complained that the media “pathologized White Western peoples into endless atonement.” Until 2018, the RPRF’s donations composed roughly 13 to 18 percent of the Charles Martel Society’s donation income, depending on the year.

Yes, very interesting.

Original Submission