This George Soros thing.

This “shadowy billionaire, influencing the left” thing.

I have already addressed the ridiculous claims that that he was a collaborator with the Nazis. I could again, here. I won’t go into the same detail I have, because I want to rush to the next bit. Suffice it to say, in summary, that he was a kid and that he most he did was sit in the room when the guardian who saved his life did a forced inventory of a home. The right has gleefully inflated this to memes of a figure not Soros but identified as Soros in an S.S. uniform, and this is what happens when you trust as your source people who not only don’t care about the truth but have absolute contempt for truth as a concept.
Moreover, while it is true that Soros has given to liberal causes and funds some liberal organizations, that is “shadowy” and “sinister” only if you find some pretext of separating it from the political contributions of the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, billionaires who gleefully fund the far right. You can’t say it’s sinister only when liberals do it, not unless that is your modus operandi for all things.

And here’s the big point.

I have heard right-leaning Jews buy into this whole Soros as devil thing. I have a relative who does.

And to underline why this is so pernicious a talking point on the right, I want to posit a change in his last name.

To Rothschild.

Starting over two hundred years ago, if you were of a certain political bent, everything you hated about the world was a secret plot of those vile puppet masters, the Rothschilds. Wealthy Jews, whose fingers were, if you believed the floggers of conspiracy, into everything, for their own nefarious purposes. The Rothschilds were responsible for everything, even the things that came before them, the fiends. This nonsense went on from 1815 onward, to the point where they were accused of having a hand in the assassinations of both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, of bankrolling Adolf Hitler, of funding Isis, and of using their super-villainous control of the weather to send blizzards against the East Coast. Honestly, these guys were, supposedly, into everything, and you can still find conspiracy theories about them bruited on YouTube.

This was all rooted, if you go back far enough, to contemporary concerns about financial interests they might or might not have had in the conquests of Napoleon, but nobody remembers that now. To the point where one conspiracy theorist actually blamed them for whales leaping out of the ocean — it’s supposedly all due to signals being sent through the water by those masterminds, the Rothschilds — they are now suspect because they have always been suspect, and what feeds it, I am here to tell you, is their very name.

Today, if you hear somebody bitching about the evil doings of the Rothschilds, you know who they’ve been listening to. It all comes down to paranoia over the secret councils of the Elders of Zion. Because Jews are scary people, right?

All this bitching, on Fox News and in the White House, about anti-Trump protesters and political activism on the left being (gasp) funded by George Soros…

I am here to tell you, it’s the same thing. In a world where the same people have no problem with the Kochs shoveling wheelbarrows of money to the opposite cause, it’s the same thing.

All this Soros hysteria is just more sucking at the Nazi teat.

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Adolf Hitler, George Soros, John F. Kennedy, Politics, Race, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics