April 3, 2023

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

"Soros-backed": The GOP's favorite attack on the man prosecuting Trump, explained (Zack Beauchamp, Apr 3, 2023, Vox)

[T]he crucial event, the one that truly popularized Soros demonization, was the election of Barack Obama. By that point, Soros had become a major funder of progressive causes -- and Obama's victory had driven the conservative movement off the rails. Conspiracy theories, like the notion that Obama was born in Kenya, became increasingly common in right-wing media.

Glenn Beck's show on Fox News, basically a primetime conspiracy theory hour, focused its fire on Soros. In a 2010 three-part special titled "Exposing George Soros: The Puppet Master?" Beck accused Soros of being the secret hand behind a slew of coups and revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc. "So, what is his target now? Us. America," Beck told his viewers.

This, in case you're wondering, very clearly crossed the line into antisemitism. It's true that Soros supported pro-democracy activists and civil society groups in former communist states -- but that doesn't make him the "puppet master" secretly getting people out into the streets to demonstrate against dictators. The idea that a Jewish financier is secretly masterminding global events against the interests of rooted local conservatives -- it doesn't take a scholar of antisemitism to see what Beck was drawing on here.

Around the same time, the knives were coming out for Soros in Hungary.

Posted by at April 3, 2023 11:40 AM

  

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