Who is Andrew Conru?

Andrew Conru was an early tech entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area. His most lucrative endeavour was a hook-up service named Adult Friend Finder, which he sold for $500 million in 2007. He has now regained control of it and is once again CEO.

“My goal was never to seek fame or fortune, but rather to create tools that would help people connect, find love, and improve their lives,” Conru wrote on his personal website. For much of his career, he has avoided the limelight.

He set up the Conru Foundation in 2017, dedicated to “fostering enlightenment values of truth, evidence, and free inquiry”. Since then, he has given large sums of money to some of the most notorious far-right activists in the US. According to public filings, Conru gave $150,000 to Turning Point USA between 2019-21. The organisation is run by the youth activist Charlie Kirk, who has said the LGBT pride flag is “an insult to all of us”.

In 2020, he sent $5,000 to the Unz Review, a viciously racist website run by Ron Unz, best known for writing that “the standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite possibly, almost entirely so”.

Around the same time, Conru began leaving comments on the YouTube page of Simon Webb, a far-right content creator. In 2021, Webb published a book (The Equalitarian Dogma: Why Ideology and not Science Dominates Debate on Ethnicity and Race in the Modern World) that acknowledged a “generous grant” from the Conru Foundation. The donation does not appear in the Conru Foundation’s public accounts, suggesting it was instead given privately. Webb’s book references scientific racists like Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton.

Conru, according to Matthew Frost of the Human Diversity Foundation, was upset about media attention in summer 2023, when he was identified as the backer of Center for the Study of Partisanship & Ideology (CSPI). The news broke in the American press after the Conru Foundation’s accounts were published. The CSPI was founded by an academic named Richard Hanania, formerly a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Hanania, in blogs uncovered after the donation became public, advocated for the forced sterilisation of low-IQ people. “Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or piece of art,” Hanania wrote. “It’s shameful.” Conru has given $200,000 to Hanania’s organisation.

Matthew Frost furthermore told our undercover reporter that Conru was privately funding one of the most notorious white nationalist agitators in the US: Jared Taylor. He is the founder of American Renaissance, a website and conference, and has written: “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”

The Conru Foundation has supported a number of organisations, some of which appear to be contradictory in their aims. It has donated to projects that are antithetical to the eugenicist goals of HDF and the culture war obsessions of Turning Point USA. For instance, the Conru Foundation has donated $5,400 to Books For Africa, $10,000 to Girls Who Code, $25,000 to Doctors Without Borders, and $25,000 to The Trevor Project, which works in suicide prevention for LGBT youth.

In response to HOPE not hate’s findings, Andrew Conru, through his lawyer, told us that he cut ties with the Human Diversity Foundation and ordered a review of his philanthropic activities. “Mr Conru helped to fund the HDF project at the beginning,” said a statement. “It unfortunately now appears that it has deviated from its initial objective, and the motivation for his funding, which was to promote free and non-partisan academic research.” We asked Conru whether he also privately funded Jared Taylor, and the statement sent on his behalf did not deny the claim. Furthermore, he did not explain why he had chosen to fund the Unz Review, the CSPI, or Turning Point USA. His representative said he had begun a review of his philanthropic activities.