Why Billionaires Should Fund White Identity Politics

I have been watching videos of Jared Taylor, Keith Woods, and David Zsutty making an elevator pitch to billionaires, and the exercise raises a question that most people would rather not seriously engage with: why not? The instinctive answer is brand risk. Billionaires, so the argument goes, cannot afford to have their names associated with white identity politics, because the association conjures images of extremism, historical atrocity, and social toxicity that no amount of philanthropic goodwill can offset. This is the conventional wisdom, and like most conventional wisdom in our present cultural moment, it collapses entirely the moment one examines what those same billionaires have already chosen to fund without apparent discomfort or hesitation.

I am a libertarian and a black man living in the West, and I do not subscribe to identity politics of any variety. I have written as much on previous occasions, and my position has not changed. But understanding the appeal of identity politics requires no personal investment in it. Human beings are tribalistic by nature, and that is not a controversial observation in any serious field of inquiry, from evolutionary psychology to anthropology to political theory. Mainstream outlets have made peace with that fact, but they have done so selectively and with a consistency that deserves scrutiny. Non-white identity politics is not merely tolerated by the establishment; it is actively bankrolled by some of the wealthiest institutions on earth. Billionaire foundations such as the Mellon Foundation have poured substantial resources into anti-racist leadership training. Philanthropists and institutions with enormous cultural reach had no difficulty placing their brand behind Ibram Kendi, a man whose central intellectual thesis, that white racism is the singular and sufficient cause of every racial inequity that exists in American society, is so reductive as to be academically embarrassing. The money flowed regardless. It funded initiatives that, rather than resolving the tensions they claimed to address, appeared almost engineered to sustain and intensify them. Given all of that, the question must be asked plainly and with a straight face: if that constellation of choices represents acceptable patronage, what exactly is the coherent and principled objection to funding white identity politics?

Part of the answer lies in a persistent and largely unchallenged mischaracterization of what white identitarianism actually is and what its more serious practitioners actually produce. The default assumption, reinforced by a media apparatus that has strong incentives to caricature rather than engage, is that white identity politics is nothing more than a pipeline to Nazism, a vehicle for racial nostalgia, or a thin intellectual veneer over the desire to re-establish systems of racial domination. That assumption does not survive sustained contact with the material itself. Counter-Currents publishes sophisticated work on philosophy, literature, economics, and cultural theory, and has run substantive internal critiques of dissident politics that demonstrate a capacity for self-examination rarely found in ideologically committed publications of any stripe. The Unz Review, which has indeed platformed White Nationalists among its wide range of contributors, has also published rigorous and detailed critiques of White Nationalism, which is a more intellectually honest practice than the enforced consensus one finds at most mainstream outlets. Writers like Greg Johnson and Spencer Quinn are not producing a daily feed of racial grievance dressed up as commentary. They are engaging with philosophy, history, and civilizational questions with a seriousness that many better-funded publications cannot match. To compare that output honestly with publications like the Root or even the Daily Beast is to discover that the intellectual honesty and argumentative rigor are not distributed in the direction that most people, operating on assumption rather than evidence, would expect.

The mainstream media landscape, for its part, has become remarkably and almost defiantly comfortable with its own preferred forms of identity politics and social provocation. The New York Times has profiled the notorious antisemite Hasan Piker in tones that ranged from sympathetic to celebratory, and has published a piece by a black intellectual openly questioning the value of interracial friendship with white people, a sentiment that would have generated an entirely different editorial response had the racial identities involved been reversed. That category of content is largely absent from American Renaissance or Counter-Currents, publications that are treated by the media establishment as uniquely dangerous precisely because they cannot be so easily embarrassed. Nick Fuentes, a figure who is regarded as persona non grata within serious dissident political circles and who is criticized openly by the more intellectually serious white identitarian writers, is endlessly profiled and amplified by mainstream outlets not because he represents the movement but because he is useful as a scarecrow, a convenient figure whose most inflammatory statements can be used to discredit an entire spectrum of thought that the profilers have no intention of engaging with honestly. The publications that claim to be guarding the public against extremism are frequently more vitriolic, more intellectually careless, and more socially corrosive than those they hold up as cautionary examples.

There is also the straightforward financial reality of how Right-wing media patronage currently operates, and it is a reality that reveals the gap between stated principle and actual practice with some clarity. Billionaires and their associated foundations already fund conservative publications across a range of ideological positions, and many of those publications do not have the basic professional decency to pay their writers adequately. I once wrote for a publication that paid its contributors twenty-five dollars per quarter, delivered by cheque through the post, an arrangement that communicated with perfect efficiency how little the institution valued the labor that sustained it. Some dissident publications, by contrast, pay as much as two hundred dollars per piece, which is not a fortune but is at least an acknowledgement that writing has economic value. I know serious and talented writers who have abandoned mainstream outlets entirely, not out of ideological disillusionment but because the financial arrangement had become impossible to justify. The money exists within the conservative philanthropic ecosystem; it is simply not reaching the people doing the most rigorous intellectual work, which raises the question of whether the patronage model is designed to produce quality or to produce compliance.

The intellectual output of the mainstream Right provides further grounds for skepticism about where billionaire patronage is currently directed. There are honorable exceptions worth naming: the National Review’s economics coverage maintains a genuine standard, and City Journal is a serious publication that engages with urban policy and cultural questions with real depth and care. But the typical mainstream conservative outlet operates within an extraordinarily and almost willfully narrow intellectual bandwidth, cycling through politics, transgenderism, immigration, and whatever the designated cultural outrage of the week happens to be, with very little apparent interest in philosophy, history, economics, literature, or any of the other disciplines that might equip readers to think rather than merely to react. Nobody is made more intelligent or more capable of navigating the world by reading the Daily Wire, and the billionaires who fund the institutions of the mainstream Right have purchased, at considerable expense, a vast machinery for the production of intellectual mediocrity dressed up in the aesthetics of cultural warfare.

The association with Candace Owens alone should give those billionaires pause. Owens worked for the Daily Wire and was treated for a period as a significant and credible voice within conservative media, which tells one a great deal about the standards being applied. Her conspiratorial detours, including her sustained promotion of the Khazaria hypothesis as a framework for understanding Jewish identity and influence, have been methodically and publicly debunked by dissident writers including Keith Woods, whose piece on the subject demonstrated exactly the kind of careful engagement with historical and genetic evidence that her boosters showed no interest in applying before amplifying her. If institutions with reputational concerns were willing to stand behind Owens without apparent hesitation, the argument that white identitarianism represents a uniquely unacceptable reputational hazard is not merely inconsistent; it is transparently selective in a way that demands explanation.

White identity politics, understood on its own terms rather than through the distorting lens of its most hostile interpreters, is not an argument for fascism, racial hierarchy, or the restoration of any historical system of domination. It is, at its core, the position that the multicultural project as it has been implemented in Western societies has failed to produce the harmonious, integrated future its architects promised, and that white people ought to be permitted the same relationship to cultural pride and civilizational continuity that every other group is not only allowed but actively encouraged to cultivate and celebrate. Whites are, in a genuinely remarkable cultural inversion, the one group for whom expressions of cultural pride are treated as inherently suspect, as evidence of latent hostility rather than ordinary attachment to one’s heritage and community. A society that systematically pathologizes the cultural confidence of its historically constitutive population is not a society that has solved the problem of social cohesion; it is a society that has simply transferred the instability from one location to another while congratulating itself on its moral progress.

I say all of this as a black man who lives in the West and who has no interest in pretending that the achievements of Western civilization are either incidental or evenly distributed across human cultures and history. The things that make Western societies functional, and that make them the destinations that people across the world consistently choose when they are free to choose, are not accidents of geography or the spoils of exploitation. Patent and copyright law, the limited liability corporation, the independent judiciary, the regulatory frameworks that have been adopted and adapted across the globe, including the financial regulatory sandbox that Britain developed and that has since been widely replicated, these are Western inventions that reflect a particular civilizational tradition of institutional creativity and formal economic reasoning. Mercantilism as a practice existed in various forms before the West engaged with it, but mercantilism as a theorized and formally articulated economic policy is a Western intellectual contribution. The very concept of progress, the idea that history moves in a direction and that human societies can be deliberately improved rather than simply endured, is a Western idea with a specific intellectual genealogy. Western civilization has been the most generative and institutionally creative society in recorded history, and the argument that its founding population deserves to see that civilization sustained is not an argument that requires an apology.

What white identitarians are ultimately saying to prospective billionaire patrons is something quite simple: that the people who built the societies where everyone wants to live, whose legal systems everyone wants to operate within, whose technologies everyone wants to use, and whose institutional frameworks have become the global standard, deserve to have their cultural and civilizational continuity treated as a legitimate interest rather than an embarrassing anachronism. Billionaires who have spent years funding anti-racist initiatives that produced division rather than reconciliation, and the mainstream conservative media that spawned outrage rather than thought, have not purchased safety or respectability through those choices. They have purchased association with intellectual mediocrity and social dysfunction at considerable cost. The pitch from Taylor, Woods, and Zsutty may make people uncomfortable, but discomfort is not an argument. Those who find the proposition objectionable are welcome to construct a principled case against it, but that case should probably begin with an honest account of why they choose to live in Western countries, conduct their affairs under Western legal frameworks, and depend daily on Western technologies, if the civilization that produced all of those things is so contemptible.

https://counter-currents.com/2026/05/why-billionaires-should-fund-white-identity-politics