[ad_1]
George Soros is the lightning rod of the Internet.
He is an 88-year-old billionaire hedge fund manager who supports liberal-minded causes and politicians. He was a major contributor to a super PAC for Hillary Clinton's presidential race. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars on refugees. He has financial ties with dozens of media companies and has already spent millions of dollars on media programs to defeat George W. Bush in his run for reelection. He is one of the leading funders of progressive causes and organizations in the country and has donated more than $ 18 billion to the network that shares its wealth, called Open Society Foundations.
According to his interlocutors, Soros is either a philanthropist or the omen of the end times. It has been the subject of criticism and conspiracies, both due and unjustified, for decades – since it managed to wager a billion dollars against the pound sterling in 1992.
Today, especially on the Internet trolls side (from 4chan to your aunt's Facebook page), it has become the Trump era's hitting bag, the master of the puppet who finances everything he despises.
Choose any conspiracy theory under the sun, and discussions often lead to Soros. The darker parts of the internet have claimed or misstated that it was related to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and his allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh ; Soros organized the event on his knees by Colin Kaepernick …
… that he paid dogs to protest against the Romanian government; that he has his share in every theory of QAnon conspiracy; that he funds Black Lives Matter, Women's March and Antifa; the list continues.
In various tweets and speeches, President Donald Trump has fanned the flames of the Soros plot by claiming that there is a ghost behind various news events. This ghost always ends up becoming Soros, whether true or not. Recently, the president said that "a big sum" was given to a caravan of migrants heading to Mexico and the United States, which led the New York Times to write an article entitled "The Did the Democrats or George Soros finance the migrant caravan? Despite the pretensions of the Republicans, no. Trump also claimed that Kavanaugh's protesters were paid and waiting for their checks, another common thread that led to Soros online. This list is also long and the GOP has followed suit by publishing antisemitic ads featuring Soros as a Jewish donor behind each non-white protest.
As the Atlantic has said, Soros embodies the demonization of philanthropy of that time – as if a billionaire was openly giving money to causes and social justice organizations had never happened before.
The demonization of Soros seems to have reached its climax. On Monday night, the police responded to a bomb in the mailbox of the home of Soros in New York. The authorities have ruled the device "not a hoax" and the motives of the bomber are still unknown. Soros was not at home at the time of the discovery.
The conspiracy theorists – especially the QAnon crowd, obsessed with Soros – have already called the discovery a "false flag".
As reporters of the extremist group have already noted, Soros conspiracy theories have recently become calls for violence in their own right. The darker parts of the internet had called for "the assassination of George Soros last week".
[ad_2]
Source link
