Dehumanizing George Soros
The duration and intensity of the far right’s negative obsession with George Soros is downright disturbing
The duration and intensity of the far right’s negative obsession with George Soros is downright disturbing. For years, right-wing media organizations and authoritarian-leaning politicians as well as their strategists have deployed viral anti-Semitic memes — as an octopus, a “puppetmaster,” Beelzebub, Sauron and even a Nazi — against the 92-year old survivor of the Nazi takeover of his home country, Hungary.
While we can agree or disagree about the ethics of how George Soros made his fortune — hedge funds; shorting the British pound — casting aspersions against his humanity is naught else but pure maliciousness. It is no longer a good faith argument when a Holocaust survivor is misidentified as a Nazi guard, it is dehumanization. Further, the constant and unrelenting vilification of Soros, from the corridors of the conspiracist right, has resulted in death threats. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his fellow travelers from increasing the amplitude on the viral anti-Semitism.
The Murdoch media and now Elon Musk are pushing a new line of dehumanizing, anti-Soros propaganda across their multitudinous platforms — print, social and cable. Musk this morning on Twitter compared Soros to the Jewish-born Marvel supervillain and mass murderer Magneto, adding, “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization." Concluding, ominously: "Soros hates humanity." Thus, in Elon’s fevered, libertarian comic-book of an imagination does that make him “Iron Man”? Kara Swisher’s take, probably the closest a non-childish reality, is that our boy Elon is peeved that Soros unloaded Tesla shares. Still, how many of Elon’s 139 million followers will even care? The damage has been done.
Rupert Murdoch’s media is just as bad. Tucker Carlson, who was until recently employed by a foreign-born billionaire, questioned the influence of George Soros, asking, “why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally?” Soros, we cannot fail to note, was naturalized a US citizen in 1961. Carlson was born in 1969.
Fox and Friends, Jeanine Pirro and The New York Post have all, in recent weeks, attacked the 92-year old philanthropist with sinister sounding tropes.
George Soros largely flew under the radar of the right in the 90s. He was, to be sure, a one-man foreign policy machine during those years, but Communism was a ruin in the distance while the authoritarian right in the West was not yet in the intimate foreground. Since the Iraq War in the aughts, however, the Soros name has been besmirched with churlish gusto on the Amero-Euro right. Soros, at that time, started donating heavily to the Democrat Party and ran ads questioning the verity of the Bush administration’s claims used to justify the Second Iraq War. History has proved Soros to be correct in that assessment. In those early years of anti-Soros propaganda, Limbaugh, O’Reilly and even Glenn Beck — all less relevant now than then — referenced him as their bogeyman, the mastermind pulling the strings behind the liberals. But it was not until the rise of Trump and QAnon that the anti-Semitic memes got turbo charged and viral.
One can see why a Steve Bannon or even a seedy East European populist leader might see George Soros as a threat to their sordid nationalist projects. Soros has spent billions of dollars on philanthropy in support of liberal, democratic causes in more than 100 countries. Hungarian nationalist-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in particular, has relished in revivifying ancient, anti-Semitic stereotypes when referencing Soros. From the ADL, in 2018:
However, such anti-Soros activity is not unique to Hungary. Soros long has been a punching bag of authoritarian regimes across Eastern Europe where resentment lingers for his work to build democratic institutions and governments after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And voices in some liberal democracies like Israel cast Soros as a central figure trying to undermine the national interest.
In the United States, Soros long has been a favored target of the so-called alt right and other right-wing extremists. Their online echo chambers reverberate with conspiracies about Soros, accusing him of attempting to perpetrate “white genocide” and push his own malevolent agenda. In a report published earlier this year that analyzed antisemitic speech on Twitter, ADL found that Soros figured prominently in a significant number of antisemitic tweets. One noteworthy allegation claimed that Soros was responsible for the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va. Other tweets referred to his Jewish heritage in pejorative terms and claimed that he’s trying to undermine all of Western civilization.
Quite the contrary. George Soros is not trying to undermine the West at all. His Open Society, created to push back against the anti-democratic geopolitical trends that forced him to flee his native Hungary, has spent $19 billion fostering "vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their people.” He is an avid defender of the liberal international order that allowed so-called “libertarians” like Musk and Murdoch to flourish.
The Open Society has a robust record of supporting freedom of speech, human rights and the free flow of information around the world. They have given thousands of grants to organizations that promote freedom of expression. While Elon Musk, of late, bowed solemnly to pressure from Turkey. And Murdoch’s Fox News just settled a $787 million settlement in a false election claims case regarding the 2020 United States Presidential election. Who, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is better defending the West’s rich ideological heritage — the Open Society, or the Musk and Murdoch media?
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