Shortly after the lineup for the desert music festival Coachella was released Wednesday, some not-so-savory details about the annual concert’s owner. Billionaire Philip Anschultz, who owns entertainment company/Coachella parent AEG also came to light namely that he supports a litany of conservative causes and has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-LGBT groups and climate change denial organizations.
Anschutz supports extremist “anti-LGBT hate groups like Gordon Kligenschmitt’s Pray in Jesus Name.” Pray in Jesus Name has delivered millions of petitions to Congress for “religious freedom”, anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage causes.
The Anschutz Foundation has extensively supported other more heinous openly anti-LGBT hate organizations. That includes $110,000 to Alliance Defending Freedom, $50,000 to National Christian Foundation, and $30,000 to Tony Perkin’s Family Research Council between 2010 and 2013, and since 2008, the Foundation has donated $175,000 to batshit crazy hatefrau Linda Harvey and the Mission America Foundation.
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.
There has been no news of weather Beyoncé who will headline the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival along with Kendrick Lamar and Radiohead, or any other acts have or will drop out.
The festival, set for April 14-16 and 21-23
Stay tuned.