A Villain To Many, Not Just The Fringe
WASHINGTON — Hours after he was informed last month that an explosive device had been delivered to his suburban New York home, George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, got on a call with colleagues to discuss yet another threat: the authoritarian Hungarian government’s crackdown on a university he had founded.
The attempted attack in New York — later determined to have been part of a wave targeting prominent critics of President Donald J. Trump — did not come up. But it was no coincidence that Mr. Soros would be facing intense opposition at the same moment in two countries thousands of kilometers apart.
On both sides of the Atlantic, a loose network of activists a nd pol i t i ca l figures on the right have spent years seeking to cast Mr. Soros as the personification of all they detest. Employing barely coded anti-Semitism, they have built a warped portrayal of him as the mastermind of a “globalist” movement, a left-wing radical who would undermine the established order and a proponent of diluting the white, Christian nature of their societies through immigration. In the process, they have pushed their version of Mr. Soros, 88, from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the very center of the political debate.
“Soros is vilified because he is effective,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former campaign strategist and White House adviser, who is now trying to promote a coordinated nationalist movement across Europe and in the United States to mirror and counteract