Conspiracy theories about Soros aren't just false. They're anti-Semitic.
October 24 at 2:53 PM
On Monday, a pipe bomb was sent to the home of George Soros, the liberal billionaire philanthropist whose name has become a part of conspiracy theories around the world. Investigators have concluded that the pipe bomb was probably hand-delivered, and it was “proactively detonated” by a bomb squad without causing injury to anyone at Soros’s home in New York’s Westchester County.
Motives for the incident remain unclear. Law enforcement authorities have suggested that the same person who sent the device to Soros was also responsible for pipe bombs later sent to former president Barack Obama, former president Bill Clinton, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the CNN bureau in New York.
But it’s no surprise that Soros would wind up as a target. He’s become the subject of escalating rhetoric on the right — including from President Trump — that posits Soros as a nefarious force, fomenting social dissent and paying members of a migrant “caravan” that has been the subject of intense right-wing fearmongering leading up to the November midterms. And that rhetoric draws on old, and deep-rooted, anti-Semitic ideas that have been deployed by the right for decades.
On Oct. 5, Trump theorized on Twitter that Soros was behind vocal protests against Brett M. Kavanaugh’s appointment as a Supreme Court justice, stating that “the very rude elevator screamers” were “paid for by Soros and others.” More recently, extreme-right Rep. Matt Gaetz pointedly raised the question of whether Soros was paying members of the migrant caravan. More bizarrely, a top lobbyist for Campbell Soup Company was chastened by his patrons for suggesting on Twitter this week that Soros’s Open Society Foundation controlled the migrant caravan — “including where they defecate.” (I work at Media Matters for America, which received a $1 million donation from Soros in 2010, eight years before I joined.)
The far right has ecstatically embraced the spectacle of elected political figures such as Trump and Gaetz theorizing about Soros. After Trump’s Soros tweet about Kavanaugh, the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer echoed and surpassed Trump’s assertion that anti-Kavanaugh dissent was a nefarious, paid-for plot.
“It is impossible to deny that subversive anti-American Jews were the primary force involved in a sinister plot to destroy Kavanaugh,” Lee Rogers wrote on the site a couple of days later. “These Jews do not represent the interest of America. They represent the interest of their diabolical and evil race first and foremost.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/24/conspiracy-theories-about-soros-arent-just-false-theyre-anti-semitic/
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