Conservatives thought they had figured out how to deflect political debate after one of the nation's routine mass shootings: Offer thoughts and prayers, claim it was "too soon" to talk about gun control, and wait for the news cycle to move on to another story. But after the Valentine's Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, this handy system for evading responsibility seemed to falter. The teenage survivors of the shooting did not go away quietly so the public could move on. Instead, the kids spoke out and organized protests that only seem to be getting bigger.
So the right-wing noise machine moved swiftly onto tactic No. 2: Discredit the messenger. With dizzying speed, a conspiracy theory rose accusing the Parkland students of being controlled by shadowy forces, instead of being autonomous near-adults reacting rationally to real trauma.
Their alleged puppet-masters were at first said to be, alternately, the Democratic Party, the FBI or antifa -- which is a bizarre grouping to begin with. But many on the right swiftly turned to one of their perennial favorites: Billionaire George Soros.
CNN commentator Jack Kingston, a former Republican congressman, has repeatedly suggested that Soros is masterminding the protests, both in a Twitter post and on CNN, where he suggested that "organized groups that are out there, like George Soros, are always ready to take up the charge". He later doubled down when pressed by Anderson Cooper, suggesting the students are being paid to protest.
Former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke, a prominent Donald Trump supporter, agreed, writing on Twitter, "The well ORGANIZED effort by Florida school students demanding gun control has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it."
Popular right-wing blogger Gateway Pundit — to whom the Trump White House has given press pool privileges — also promoted the theory with a story headlined, "Soros-Linked Organizers of 'Women’s March' Selected Anti-Trump Kids to Be Face of Parkland Tragedy."
“There’s always a George Soros connection," sighed Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters. He described Soros as "this ultimate bogeyman" that conservatives use to invalidate any "mass movement or any kind of meaningful public demonstration."
Why is it always Soros who is held out as the mastermind? Why not Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, who are also extremely rich and give handsomely to progressive causes? What is it about Soros that makes him a lightning rod for right-wing conspiracy theories?
“We should all understand that the targeting of George Soros is an anti-Semitic act at this point," said Eric Ward, executive director of the Western States Center. Ward is also the author of a June 2017 article at Political Research Associates about the role that anti-Semitism plays in white nationalist movements.
As Ward explained, there's a long and ugly history of white nationalists cooking up claims about a Jewish conspiracy to control American politics, one that he traces back at least as far as the civil rights movement.
“Imagine now that you’re a segregationist and you are raised on the idea that black people are completely inferior to you in every way," he explained. "How do you then explain their success? How do you explain that they were better organizers, and smarter in their organizing and mobilization, than you who are supposed to be superior?”
The answer that many segregationists landed on, he said, was "a global conspiracy by Jews" who are secretly pulling the strings.
The Parkland conspiracy theories of today work like the old-school white supremacist theory that Jews were secretly running the civil rights movement: Conservatives, unable to accept that people they see as inferior (in this case, teenagers) can think for themselves, have instead landed on the idea that some brilliant Jewish mastermind is behind all this. The rapid embrace of this particular conspiracy theory becomes more disturbing when one considers that five of the 17 people killed in the Parkland shooting were Jewish.
The tendency of right-wingers, especially of the Trumpian variety, to pin everything they don't like on Soros — a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust that was justified by similar conspiracy theories — is a chilling reminder of how much these kind of fringe fascistic ideas have been mainstreamed in American conservatism over the past decade. But what is even more troubling, Carusone noted, is how long right-wing pundits have gotten away with demonizing Soros without being called out for trafficking in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Part of the problem, Carusone said, is that the mainstream media's desire for "balance" makes it hard for journalists to push back when conservatives invoke Soros' name in this way. There are certainly plenty of rich people on the right, like Charles and David Koch, who spend huge amounts of money to manipulate American politics. So it's tempting to regard Soros as a left-leaning version of the Kochs, while ignoring the way right-wing pundits invoked anti-Semitic stereotypes or pushed falsehoods in order to discredit a man whose actual work has been more about humanitarianism and democratic reforms than pure partisanship.
The irony, Carusone said, is that much of what Soros is accused of doing is what the right actually does. For instance, the common claim that Soros pays protesters? Utterly untrue -- but on the other hand, Trump hired actors to pretend to be his supporters at his campaign launch. Conspiracy theorists are masters of projection, frequently accusing others of what they themselves are doing.
To be clear, Soros's main philanthropic organization, Open Society Foundation, has given money to gun control groups. But that's a quite different thing from controlling the thoughts of teenagers. More important, as Ward made sure to emphasize, giving money to worthy causes is a good thing, and should not be a source of defensiveness or shame.
“Anyone who steps up to protect children who are being gunned down in schools should not be condemned," Ward said. They should be honored."
That's why anti-Semitism is not incidental to the right's obsession with Soros. To demonize him, and therefore demonize any cause he's associated with, they have to cast him as monstrous, and relying on anti-Semitic impulses is part of that process. It's why he's the target and not the equally progressive but entirely WASPy Warren Buffett.
Carusone believes there is good news in all this, however, which is that the mainstream media is starting to understand that the right-wing obsession with Soros is about something other than his progressive politics. Both Alisyn Camerota and Anderson Cooper, for instance, pushed back hard on CNN when Kingston began spouting Soros-based conspiracy theories. But Carusone also worries that the right will keep hammering at this conspiracy theory.
“If they had to grapple with the underlying substance" of issues like gun control, he said, "then it would be really, really, really hard for them to win." A system where kids are gunned down in school on a regular basis is a system that's tough to defend. Which is one big reason why conservatives can't stop trying to change the subject to an imaginary conspiracy run by a Jewish billionaire.
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