Recently, George Soros has made the news again. Fox News, Senator Chuck Grassley, and President Trump have all repeated the line that Soros paid protestors to speak out against Kavanaugh. Frankly, it is disgusting.
Most of the time when Soros’s name shows up online, it’s some horseshit about him paying protestors and selling out fellow Jews to the Nazis in World War II. This is, to any sane person, clearly ridiculous for two reasons: 1) how, exactly, does paying protestors work? (Do they get taxed? Is it cash? Do they get venmoed the money? Does it show up in their savings account automatically? Is it just an Amazon gift card? Does Soros secretly pay off debt?) and 2) Soros was 14-years-old when World War II ended, so he wasn’t exactly selling anybody out.
Those are just the first two reasons that come to mind. When we look a little bit deeper, it gets worse.
The idea that Jews have a secret cabal where they secretly hold all the power and run the media and the banks is an old and boring one. George Soros is a rich Hungarian Jewish man who is active in the Democratic party. Soros paying protestors is a theory borne out of very old, very boring, and very basic anti-Semitic propaganda.
Throwing the stories of him “selling out fellow Jews to the Nazis” is a fun twist, in that it is utterly illogical for a young boy to have been capable of doing that, period, but it is especially nonsensical when you factor in the prevailing Nazi attitude towards the Jewish people. Nazis didn’t hate some Jews or even most Jews. The Nazis were committing a mass genocide. There are no “good” or “token” Jews to a Nazi. This theory falls apart under any amount of scrutiny.
Furthermore, there’s something especially gross about calling a Jewish man who survived the Nazis in World War II a Nazi himself. It is a bastardization of history, a twisting of buzzwords to suit your own purposes and obscure the pain felt by actual victims.
But that’s not the point of a George Soros conspiracy theory, is it? No, a George Soros conspiracy theory cloaks itself in concern for the Jewish people (he sold out his friends!) while repeating anti-Semitic dog whistles to whip up a boogeyman and paint the GOP as the reasonable good guys.
Think about the kind of soul one has to have to spout that sort of rhetoric — to cynically insist Soros is some man behind the curtain, pulling strings, like bad SS propaganda, and then wrapping yourself up in the Israeli flag to deflect any criticism. Think about how rotten, how spoiled a person must be on the inside to repeat these ideas as if they’re worth discussing or considering.
An old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is now a mainstream GOP talking point
sleepliving 