Before murdering nine African-American congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, white nationalist Dylann Roof wrote a manifesto explaining his motivations. The young, white man had heard about black-on-white crime and looked it up on Google. What he found first was the website of the white nationalist hate group Council of Conservative Citizens, where he read fabricated claims that black people are more prone to violence and that black Americans kill white people at higher rates than they kill other black Americans. (The exact opposite is true, and the disparity is very large.)
But it wasnt the Council of Conservative Citizens that birthed the black-on-white crime myth. It was a nonprofit called the New Century Foundation, a hate group founded in 1990, along with its American Renaissance magazine, by the prominent white nationalist Jared Taylor. On the pages of his magazine and those of the conservative National Review, Taylor laid out his false argument: The United States has neither a unique culture of violence nor inadequate gun laws. It has a high rate of violent crime because it has a large number of violent black criminals.
Other white nationalist groups pounced at Taylors racist propaganda, including the Council of Conservative Citizens, which has had a long and collaborative relationship with Taylor and his organization.
Black-on-white crime is a key white nationalist talking point, Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), told Sludge. SPLC considers American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens white nationalist hate groups.
Taylor is at the center of white supremacist propaganda, said Beirich. He is THE purveyor of the black-on-white crime myth that has inspired so much violence. His ideas led to Dylann Roof and lord only knows how much more hate crime.
Roof cited the Council for Conservative Citizens website in his manifesto, causing the organization to take a lot of blame and leaving it in need of a spokesperson. It called on its ally Taylor to fill that role. He condemned the killings but defended the propaganda that inspired them. Our site educated [Roof], said Taylor. Our site told him the truth about interracial crime.
Soon after the Roof massacre, the largest charitable nonprofit in the United States began funding the New Century Foundation, Sludge has discovered. Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the philanthropic arm of financial giant Fidelity Investments, gave increasing amounts to the New Century Foundation from the 2016-18 fiscal years. In FY2016 (July 2015 through June 2016), it gave $13,000. In FY2017, $31,000. In FY2018, its giving rose to $56,350. In total, it gave over $100,000 to the New Century Foundation
The New Century Foundation is still up and running with a relatively small annual budget. In the 2017 calendar year, New Centurys total contribution revenue was $284,173, and Fidelitys FY2018 contribution was nearly 20% of that annual total.
Taylors foundation likely used the money from Fidelity Charitable to spread hate propaganda through American Renaissance and to hold annual conferences that bring white supremacists together to spread their ideas and organize, said Beirich. ...
Fidelity Charitable did not answer Sludges questions about why it donates to a white nationalist hate group that created the theory that inspired an act of terrorism
Donor-advised fund sponsors (DAFs), which manage numerous individual charitable accounts for their clients in exchange for fees, have become increasingly popular among wealthy philanthropists. The arrangement offers donors a double tax break when they donate appreciated assetsa charitable tax deduction and a capital gains tax exemptionand donors can opt to remain anonymous. Many of the largest U.S. charities by annual revenue are DAFs.
Fidelity Charitable, a DAF, is not legally connected to Fidelity Investments, but the financial firms associates invest Fidelity Charitables clients money when it is not distributed to nonprofits. Fidelity Charitable took in over $10 billion in the 2018 fiscal year, making it the countrys biggest charity by revenue by a long shot. At the end of June 2018, Fidelity Charitable was sitting on nearly $27 billion in net assets.
Sludge previously reported that Fidelity Charitable has donated to white nationalist nonprofit the VDARE Foundation. From the 2015-17 fiscal years, Fidelity Charitable gave VDARE a total of $36,100. It did not donate to VDARE in FY2018. Fidelity Charitable and other major DAFs have given millions of dollars to dozens of SPLC-designated anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
Pretty sure the people who donate to Fidelity Charitable tell them what charities they want their money to go to, and it seems like an extremely small fraction of their donors want their money to go to these groups ($56,000 out of the $10,000,000,000 they took in 2018, or 0.00056%).