Yesterday, after Elon Musk tweeted “Soros reminds me of Magneto,” journalist Brian Krassenstein replied that the fictional supervillain and real-life billionaire George Soros were both holocaust survivors and said, “Soros get’s [sic] attacked nonstop for his good intentions which some Americans think are bad merely because they disagree with his political affiliations.”

“You assume they are good intentions,” Elon replied. “They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

The outrage was immediate. Progressive media chimped out like we’ve rarely seen since the Trump years. For the middle-brow lib, the New Republic wrote, “Elon Musk Goes Full Antisemite After George Soros Dumps Tesla Shares.” For snootier readers, The Atlantic offered a solemn and foreboding “Elon Musk Among the Anti-Semites.” Additionally, Musk was condemned by the President of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry accused him of driving up antisemitic rhetoric. 

Soros, who personally contributed $170 million to Democratic Party-aligned political campaigns and organizations in the 2022 election cycle — on top of the $140 million his non-profit contributed in the same cycle — is one of the largest funders, and most powerful political players, in America. Caricaturing one’s political opponents as villainous may not be polite, but it’s not new, uncommon, or beyond the pale. So what made Elon’s remarks “antisemitic?”

According to Greenblatt:

Soros often is held up by the far-right, using antisemitic tropes, as the source of the world’s problems. To see @ElonMusk, regardless of his intent, feed this segment — comparing him to a Jewish supervillain, claiming Soros “hates humanity” — is not just distressing, it’s dangerous: it will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.

There’s no doubt that fringe figures on the right have explicitly attacked Soros on account of his ethnicity, but the Democratic Party megadonor has been a boogeyman in standard Republican politics for decades. I seriously doubt the average Republican voter even knows Soros is Jewish; he has a rare surname that doesn’t end in an Ashkenazi-associated suffix like -stein or -witz. The conservative caricature of Soros is that of a meddling liberal, not a sinister, plotting Jew. If you turned on Fox News any time in the past decade, you’d have heard virtually the same spiel on political astroturfing in a segment about Soros that you would have heard about the Koch Brothers on MSNBC.

The difference, we are led to believe, is that the screeds against Soros are different than the screeds against the Koch Brothers because the former utilizes “antisemitic tropes.” For example, saying that Soros attempts to exercise his will over the political system by funding a vast network of NGOs, charities, schools, political campaigns, and media organizations in numerous countries across the world is an accurate description of what Soros does with his money. But Soros’ defenders can label this description as antisemitic because it invokes the old idea of a secret cosmopolitan Jewish cabal that seeks to control the world’s finances, politics, and culture. Of course, there is no Jewish cabal pulling the strings — damn near every Jew I know is a podcaster, God knows they aren’t running anything — but there is Soros. He doesn’t control everything, but he sure tries, and the fact that you can’t say so — or paint him as a villain because of it without being smeared in the media as a bigot — doesn’t fight antisemitic “tropes” about Jewish domination. It reifies them.

In condemning Elon’s tweet on the shaky premise that it covertly creates the impression of an international Jewish conspiracy, Soros’ defenders create the overt impression of an actual international Jewish conspiracy. Legitimate antisemitic conspiracy theorists won’t point at Elon’s tweet as proof of the conspiracy, but rather, the instantaneous coalescing of the media, civil society, and the Israeli government around a shared set of talking points to condemn it. 

Of course, many people are actually conspiratorial about Soros, overestimating his power or fictionalizing his motives. Surely some people who believe and promote Soros-related conspiracy theories are motivated by antisemitism. But what of the rest? Less than two years ago, people alleged that Bill Gates was working in concert with big pharma, international NGOs, and various national governments to sterilize and microchip vast swaths of the human race. Why? Because he’s a powerful billionaire with Malthusian views on human population and climate change, who founded a tech company that profits off customer surveillance, and who — without explanation or permission — appointed himself the world’s de facto COVID czar and aggressively pushed a controversial vaccine you weren’t allowed to criticize. Rightly or wrongly, but certainly understandably, people found that suspicious. USA Today called it a “witch hunt” because Gates is a WASP. If he were Jewish, they would have called it antisemitism, and there’s a non-zero chance we would have had a national, Summer-of-Floyd level social reckoning that cast anyone skeptical of the COVID vaccine as a closet Nazi.

Of course, Israel is Israel, and the ADL is a professional antisemitism-accusing organization, but one can’t help but suspect that progressive media is more motivated by Soros’ ideology than anything. As far as I can tell, criticism of the right-wing Jewish megadonor Sheldon Adelson was never off-limits. This is how The Nation described him in 2012: 

If a Jew-hater somewhere, inspired perhaps by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sought to invent an individual who symbolizes almost all the anti-Semitic clichés that have dogged the Jewish people throughout history, he could hardly come up with a character more perfect than Sheldon Adelson.

Such an article about Soros in a conservative magazine would have caused an uproar. The progressive press doesn’t label criticism of Soros antisemitic in defense of Soros the Jew, but rather in defense of Soros the Liberal. The Soros exception to criticism of billionaires, so common on the left, isn’t a “Jewish-exception” to criticism, as antisemites like to complain, but rather a “liberal exception.” There are analogs among other groups. For example, criticizing Hispanics who illegally enter the country in all but the most delicate of terms will get you called racist. Still, it’s open season on any Hispanic citizen who votes for the wrong party. “That’s the beauty of white supremacy — it is extremely adaptable,” wrote 1619 Project creator Nicole Hannah-Jones after Trump won a greater margin of Tejanos than originally anticipated. 

The Soros exception is only unique in that its cynical weaponization of antisemitism actually provides fodder for the bigoted minority it claims to oppose. If the media, the ADL, and yes, even Israel are actually interested in combating the legitimately dangerous idea that rich Jews control the world and are protected from criticism, they should stop responding in a way that looks as if that idea is playing out in real-time. To condemn as antisemitic a personal attack on one of the world’s richest men is to use Jews as a shield for him. It’s ok to think that Soros’ influence on the political system is pernicious because of its scale, his ideology, or both. It’s fine to criticize him, as one of the most powerful men on earth, in whatever terms one wants. It’s ok to hate Soros the man, Soros the liberal, Soros the billionaire, so long as you don’t hate Soros the Jew. There’s no evidence Elon does, so let it go before someone mistakes this overblown response for something bigger and more sinister than the neurotic tone policing that it is.

-River Page