Lone Candle

“Donald Trump’s outraged response to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of him contained the usual mix of bombast and self-pity, with a predictable dollop of conspiracy-mongering. One line of attack stood out in particular: He accused Bragg of being “hand-picked and funded by George Soros.”
Trump wasn’t alone. The alleged Bragg-Soros connection has been everywhere in the Republican response to the indictment, including in comments from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and a host of other prominent Republicans and Fox News coverage. It often gets shorthanded into a two-word phrase: “Soros-backed.”

Soros, a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor and billionaire financier, is a longstanding hate figure among conservatives. Over the past two decades, elements of the right in both the United States and his native Hungary have engaged in a concerted campaign to turn Soros into a boogeyman — the shadowy power behind transatlantic liberalism.

Though Bragg has never been directly funded by Soros, the accusation of a link isn’t entirely out of whole cloth — Bragg’s 2021 campaign for district attorney does seem to have indirectly received some of his financial support. But the intensity of the accusation certainly doesn’t seem proportionate to the tenuousness of the connection.

To liberals, the Soros accusation smacks of nothing less than antisemitism. “Just replace ‘Soros-backed’ with ‘Jewy Jew Jewish Jewy Jew,’” the popular comedian John Fugelsang tweeted in response to DeSantis’s attack on Bragg. Naturally, conservatives have denied the charge and argued that liberals are just trying to suppress reasonable criticism of a prominent Democratic donor.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with criticizing Soros’s philanthropic work, especially his partisan donations to the Democratic Party. But it’s difficult to separate the criticisms from the context — and the last two decades of attacks on Soros have turned him into a stand-in for a certain kind of Jewish “rootless cosmopolitan” that allows politicians to appeal to antisemitism without having to do so explicitly.

In the Trump populist era, attacks on so-called “globalists” — a term long used on the extreme right as a euphemism for “Jews” — have become increasingly common on the mainstream right. The increasing mainstream flirtation with antisemitic stereotypes and rhetoric has made the subtext of the attacks on Soros harder and harder to deny.”

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“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.”

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“When Trump and his allies tried to position the so-called “migrant caravan” as a major threat to America before the 2018 midterms, the president told reporters that “a lot of people say” Soros was behind it. You heard similar rhetoric from Donald Trump Jr. and Republicans in Congress.

This was a baseless lie, and an antisemitic one to boot. The idea that Jewish money is bringing in nonwhite immigrants to menace the United States is a staple of far-right rhetoric — one that had been voiced by a shooter who killed 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.”

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“Many more thoughtful conservatives have argued that Soros is a principal funder of the “progressive prosecutor” movement, a nationwide campaign to elect district attorneys who aim to try and tackle problems like mass incarceration by (for example) refusing to prosecute certain low-level crimes. Bragg is one such progressive prosecutor, and seems to be the beneficiary of Soros’s funding: Shortly after the group Color of Change pledged roughly $1 million to support Bragg, they received roughly $1 million in funding from Soros.”

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“Conservative criticisms of Soros’s support of “progressive prosecutors” are not necessarily antisemitic. If what they were saying was “progressive prosecutors raise crime rates and it’s bad that Soros is supporting them,” that would be one thing.

But what they’re actually doing is claiming that Trump’s prosecution is illegitimate and politically motivated — and that support from Soros is proof of said illegitimacy. The same “puppet-master” implication is invoked (remember Trump’s words: “hand-picked”). And it beggars belief that these conservatives don’t know that the Trumpist faithful won’t fill in those conspiratorial (and yes, antisemitic) blanks.

So it’s certainly possible to criticize George Soros without being antisemitic in the abstract. But at this point, we know what a dog whistle from Donald Trump and his ilk sounds like, and it’s hard to ignore that the chorus of attacks on the Soros-Bragg connection hit those same notes.”