There’s Been a George Soros for Every Era of Anti-Semitic Panic
"Anti-Semitism has been on the rise in the U.S. - it's no coincidence the groups who marched in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 were chanting Jews cannot replace us, and often George Soros' name comes up when the far right looks for someone to blame for their failure."
Updated 10.28.18 11:42AM ET / Published 10.12.18 11:27PM ET
It’s been largely forgotten, but when Russian military intelligence created online cutouts in 2016 to manipulate the American electorate, the Democratic Party wasn’t its only target.
Visitors to the now-shuttered site could find purported documents from the billionaire philanthropist’s Open Society Foundations, which promote liberal values and democratization. They had file names like “public health program access to medicine” and “youth exchange my city real world.” But before those curious about the leaks got there, the Russians wanted to put George Soros in a particular context.
The homepage .. https://tinyurl.com/y3fk7peh .. displayed a photo illustration of a smug-looking Soros in the midst of four scenes of street chaos whose apparent perpetrators were conspicuously nonwhite .. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-russia-exploits-american-white-supremacy-over-and-over-again?ref=author . They were taken from the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2014, the birthplace—to the consternation of many white Americans whom the Kremlin sought to cultivate—of the contemporary civil rights movement. In both the image and the accompanying text, the Russians portrayed Soros as the puppet master.
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More than two years later, the president of the United States gave a similar portrayal of Soros, though Trump left Soros’s background unsaid. Soros, Trump said on Friday, Oct. 5, had paid for “professionally made identical signs .. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-goes-full-conspiracy-nut-says-kavanaugh-protestors-paid-for-by-soros ” in the hands of women objecting to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court justiceship. On Tuesday, he followed up by implying that Soros had stiffed these hired “screamers .. https://tinyurl.com/y549a63w .” In Trump-like fashion, his accusations were a form of mirror-imaging, as Trump himself had paid for people to support his presidential announcement .. https://tinyurl.com/yxdafybj .. and denied them payment for months .. https://tinyurl.com/y2laj539 , and he appears to have misunderstood a Fox News guest who spoke sarcastically .. https://tinyurl.com/y4jd3ou8 .. about Soros paying the protesters.
But it was not Trump’s first time making sinister allegations about Soros. He did so in the final advertisement from his campaign, run at the time by the blood-and-soil nationalist Steve Bannon .. https://tinyurl.com/yxkttpxu . Its message was reminiscent of the darker periods of European history: the virtuous future of the forgotten, salt-of-the-earth people has been stolen by a predatory elite. As a shot of the Capitol Dome faded into a Wall Street sign, Trump narrated a message to “those who control the levers of power in Washington” right as the camera showed an image of Soros, giving way to a shot of then-Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen, who is also Jewish, as Trump continued speaking about “global special interests.” This followed months of the so-called alt-right transforming “globalism” into an anti-Semitic euphemism, and preceded Trump stocking his cabinet with ultra-rich financiers, Jew and gentile alike.