Last week, the world of journalism was rocked when hyper-local outlets Gothamist and DNAInfo abruptly shut down a mere week after their reporters voted to unionize. Their billionaire owner, J. Joe Ricketts, and a DNAInfo spokesperson both pointed to vague concerns about nonexistent increased costs from the unionization effort. Many were shocked that a seemingly benevolent billionaire like Ricketts would engage in such a transparently anti-union action.

But anyone who would have examined the last decade or so of the Ricketts clan’s political spending would not have been shocked. As Ricketts made known in September this year, he believes “unions exert efforts that tend to destroy the Free Enterprise system.” And he’s certainly put his considerable money where his mouth is.

Over that period, Ricketts, his wife, and his children have spent millions of dollars on various anti-union and anti-worker candidates and campaigns, ending up the fourteenth-biggest individual donors in the 2016 election cycle, just behind Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban. At both the state and the federal level, the Ricketts have been active class warriors while largely escaping the kind of sustained scrutiny given to other big-money, right-wing donors.