A FAMILIAR EVIL
How the vilification of Jewish philanthropist George Soros went mainstream in America
Hours after he was informedthat 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 — subsequently determined to have been part of a wave of pipe bombs targeting prominent critics of President Donald Trump — did not come up. But it was no coincidence that Soros would be facing intense opposition and threats at the same moment in two countries thousands of kilometres apart.
On both sides of the Atlantic, a loose network of activists and political figures on the right have spent years seeking to cast Soros not just as a well-heeled political opponent but also 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 Soros, 88, from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the very centre of the political debate.
“Soros is vilified because he is effective,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign strategist and White House adviser, who is trying to promote a co-ordinated nationalist movement across Europe and in the United States that explicitly aspires to mirror and counteract the influence Soros has built on the left.
“I only hope one day I’m as effective as he has been — and as vilified,” Bannon said, calling threats like the pipe bomb “the admission ticket for playing in this arena.”
In the final days of the midterm election race, in which he is spending heavily to elect Democrats, Soros is being heatedly, if implausibly, cast as the financier of the immigrant caravan, a deep-state presence in the federal bureaucracy and the hidden hand behind the protests against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
In Europe, the effort to demonize him has been both fuelled and harnessed by nationalist leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and politicians in formerly communist countries like Macedonia, Albania and Russia.
“He’s a banker, he’s Jewish, he gives to Democrats — he’s sort of a perfect storm for vilification by the right, here and in Europe,” said Michael Posner, a human rights lawyer and former State Department official in the Obama administration.
Soros has given his main group, the Open Society Foundations, $32 billion (U.S.) for what it calls democracybuilding efforts in the United States and around the world. In addition, in the United States, Soros has personally contributed more than $75 million over the years to federal candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission and IRS records.
That qualifies him as one of the top disclosed donors to U.S. political campaigns in the modern campaign finance era, and it does not include the many millions more he has donated to political non-profit groups that do not disclose their donors.
Soros’s political and public policy spending in the United States and around the world appears to exceed that of any other politically active donor. By contrast, the network of conservative donors led by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have been similarly attacked by some on the U.S. left, has spent about $2 billion over the past decade on political and public policy advocacy. Arising profile Soros initially focused his activism on nurturing the democracies that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But as he has evolved in the United States into a more traditional political operator, conservatives have become increasingly driven to discredit him — and, in turn, to use him to discredit the candidates and causes he supports — sometimes by exaggerating or mischaracterizing his role in actions taken by groups he helps to fund, and sometimes with imagery widely seen as anti-Semitic.
The closing advertisement for Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Soros — as well as Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve at the time, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” who enriched themselves on the backs of working Americans.
If anything, Soros has been elevated by Trump and his allies to even greater prominence in the narrative they have constructed for the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm elections. They have projected on to him key roles in both the threat they say is posed by the Central Americans making their way toward the U.S. border and what they characterized as Democratic “mobs” protesting the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
The National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad in October in Minnesota suggesting Soros, who is depicted sitting behind a pile of cash, “bankrolls” everything from “prima donna athletes protesting our anthem” to “left-wing mobs paid to riot in the streets.” The ad links Soros to a local congressional candidate who worked at a think tank that has received funding from the Open Society Foundations.
Even after the authorities arrested a fervent Trump supporter and accused him of sending the pipe bombs to Soros and other critics, Republicans did not back away. The president grinned a week ago Friday when supporters at the White House responded to his attacks on Democrats and “globalists” by chanting, “Lock ’em up,” and yelling, “George Soros.”
Soros’s attackers in the United States and in Europe have increasingly found common cause in recent years.
The conservative legal organization Judicial Watch, which has received funding from major conservative donors, this year began an effort to expose U.S. government assistance for what the group considers Soros’s “far-left agenda” in South America and Eastern Europe.
The group’s research director, Chris Farrell, referred last week to the “Soros-occupied State Department” on Lou Dobbs’s television program on Fox Business. Fox Busi- ness later condemned the remark and banned Farrell from further appearances. But criticisms of Soros have been amplified on both Fox Business and Fox News.
Judicial Watch’s efforts pick up a theme pushed by Republican members of Congress in letters to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development this year accusing Soros’s Open Society Foundations of using taxpayer funding to push a liberal agenda in Albania, Colombia, Macedonia and Romania. A spokesperson for the Soros group said the programs in question focus on issues that are consistent with “American ideals,” like fighting corruption and promoting the rule of law.
The conservative party in Albania is represented in Washington by a lobbyist who is close to Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, who signed one such letter, while Orban’s government has made payments to lobbyists and think tanks with connections to Trump’s team.
Soros first became a major target for Republicans when he donated $27 million in the 2004 election cycle to an effort to defeat President George W. Bush, whose administration Soros condemned for rushing to war in Iraq and compared to Hitler’s Nazi regime.
The efforts by Soros and a small band of wealthy donors to defeat Bush in 2004, while unsuccessful, later led to the creation of a network of major liberal donors that reshaped the U.S. political left, marked Soros as a leading figure in Democratic politics and reinforced his status as a perennial election-time foil for the right.
“Back then, it was a handful of crackpots; it was considered fringe; and it was contained,” said David Brock, the self-described right-wing hit man who switched sides and started a fleet of liberal groups to track conservative disinformation, including from hosts like Glenn Beck.
“But it started coming back with a vengeance during the 2016 campaign,” said Brock, whose groups have received millions of dollars from Soros.
During the 2016 campaign, Soros had expressed even greater alarm about Trump than he had about Bush, and he donated more than $16 million to groups supporting Hillary Clinton.
Soros, his allies say, interprets the attacks from Trump, Orban and their supporters as an effort to intimidate him into backing down. But the intimidation has backfired, they say.
When friends reached out to express concern for his safety after the pipe bomb news broke, Soros, who was not there when the package was delivered, changed the subject to what he called “the damage” being done by the Trump administration, said his political adviser, Michael Vachon.
Vachon said Soros in recent days has drawn a connection from the president’s rhetorical attacks on his critics to the pipe bombs and even to the killing of 11 people on Saturday at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
In an email to the New York Times, Soros said he was grieving for the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting and their families. He added: “I came to this country to find refuge. I am deeply distressed that in America in 2018 Jews are being massacred just because they are Jewish.” Abig 2018 role Soros has donated more than $15 million in this election cycle to support Democratic candidates at the federal level, according to election commission records, and he has also donated to non-profits that do not disclose their donors.
Soros’s representatives say he gave $1 million to the Democracy Integrity Project, which was established after the 2016 election to investigate foreign interference in elections and to research Trump’s connections to Russian interests. Soros is considering additional donations to the group, which has paid for research from Fusion GPS, the firm behind the controversial dossier containing salacious claims about Trump’s ties to Russia.
The scale of his activities has given Republicans an opening to portray him as a nefarious driving force behind divisive political conflicts.
Soros’s foundations have been banned from distributing funds in Russia while Open Society chose to move its offices out of Hungary this year after a smear campaign by the Orban government. The Central European University announced last week that it may soon follow.
In a campaign this year, Orban’s party ran an advertisement that depicted a smiling Soros, overlaid with the slogan: “Let’s not let George Soros have the last laugh.” Critics argued that the image was meant to remind viewers of the “Laughing Jew,” a common anti-Semitic trope.