Coachella co-owner Philip Anschutz has once again come under scrutiny for bankrolling right-wing, anti-LGBTQ organizations at odds with the progressively minded music festival.
A new tax filing shows The Anschutz Foundation donated at least $325,000 between Dec. 2015 and Nov. 2016 to organizations with an explicit anti-LGBTQ mission, which was first reported by Pitchfork.
Anschutz’s history of contributing to anti-LGBTQ organizations prompted criticism in January 2017, when tax filings confirmed an earlier report that Anschutz’s foundation gave $190,000 to anti-LGBTQ groups between 2010 and 2013. The billionaire businessman denied claims he was anti-LGBTQ as “fake news” and “garbage.”
Pitchfork also notes that Anschutz’s group has given money to organizations like The Navigators—who lump LGBTQ people in with other hallmarks of “sexual brokenness”—Dare 2 Share Ministries—whose CEO once stated that “Homosexuality is a Satanic perversion of God’s gift of sex”— And since 2008, the Anschutz Foundation has donated over $175,000 to batshit crazy hatefrau Linda Harvey and the Mission: America Foundation.. The donations ranged from $25,000 to as much as $185,000, at least some of which presumably started in some small part as Coachella ticket costs.
Last year Back2Stonewall reported on Anschult’s other right wing extremist donations and actions.
Anschutz is openly anti-union, having funded anti-teachers union movies like Waiting for Superman and Won’t Back Down through his holding Walden Media, and was a founding funder of the Discovery Institute, which according to the SPLC has on its agenda the promotion of “intelligent design”—creationism—in public schools. He has donated to the Koch Brothers’s ultraconservative Cato Institute, and, as the owner and operator of the pro-fracking Anschutz Exploration Company, he has sued entire towns for their anti-fracking regulation and has been an avid supporter of the Keystone XL Pipeline. In his capacity as a music promotions tycoon and with Coachella, Anschutz is essentially mining the spending power of an ostensibly liberal youth culture and using their our own money against them.
You can see the full Pitchfork report here.