Jonathan P. Baird

There is a long history of people on the far right casting Jews as malign puppet masters, who work behind the scenes to manipulate both national and international events for their selfish gain. The puppet master is always fantastically wealthy, greedy and amoral.

In our era, the puppet master stereotype has been embodied by George Soros. Few people, with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, have been more vilified by the far right. Both the number and intensity of the attacks on Soros are astounding.

President Trump has tweeted that Soros had paid professionals to demonstrate against his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter posted that Soros controlled the Honduran migrant caravan. President Trump’s son, Donald Jr., retweeted a claim from comedian Roseanne Barr that Soros “was a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews”.

The actor James Woods tweeted that Soros was “satanic”. Trump attorney, Rudi Giuliani, retweeted a post calling Soros “the anti-Christ”. On Twitter, Soros has been accused of supporting both Colin Kaepernick and the mass shooter at Las Vegas.

Outside the United States, especially in Eastern Europe, Soros has achieved an even greater level of notoriety, with nationalist and authoritarian governments running propaganda campaigns against him.

So who is this alleged puppet master with his fingers in so many pies?

The short answer is that Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist. Soros was born Gyorgy Schwartz into a Jewish family in Budapest. Because of the rise of the Nazis and antisemitism in Hungary, Soros’s father changed the family name and dispersed family members to live with Hungarian people he trusted and paid for their efforts. Members of the Soros family, including George, pretended to be Christians just to survive.

Soros’s father sent young George to live with a Hungarian government official. One of the man’s duties was to inventory confiscated Jewish property. Soros once accompanied the man in the performance of his duties. He has acknowledged the incident, but the story led to a wild smear that casts Soros as a Nazi collaborator who sent his fellow Jews to the gas chambers.

In actuality, Soros’s father, Tivadar, saved not only his own family from the Nazis but also heroically saved many other Hungarian Jews. Soros’s father, with help from George,  created thousands of fake documents for people trying to flee the Nazis.

Soros was very lucky to have survived the war and survival depended on hiding identity. Two-thirds of Hungary’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators.

After the war, Soros fled Hungary and moved to England. In 1951, he graduated from the London School of Economics. While there he became a student of the philosopher, Karl Popper, who became a lifelong influence. Popper favored open societies committed to media freedom and civil rights over closed authoritarian societies.

In 1956, Soros moved to the United States, where he made a fortune on Wall Street. He was an expert at buying currencies and securities in one market that he turned around and sold legally for profit in the international market. Through his financial acumen, Soros became one of the 100 richest people in the world.

Soros went on to found the Open Society Foundation. Over the years, he has given away billions of dollars, funding organizations and initiatives that promote liberal democracy, independent media and political pluralism. The experience of living through Nazism and Stalinism shaped his world view.

Over the last 25 years, he has been a big Democratic Party donor. His Open Society Foundation has also funded many other progressive organizations.

Soros has been compared to the Koch brothers, except that he supports progressive and liberal causes. I would have to say that Soros has been an atypical member of the ruling class. Concerned about climate change, economic inequality and racism, he funds initiatives that infuriate many on the right.

While it is understandable that many on the right would dislike someone who funds the other side, that does not begin to explain the hatred unleashed against Soros. Much of the hatred directed against Soros is rooted in antisemitic stereotypes.

The classic image is the all-powerful Jewish financier who profits and manipulates at the expense of suffering gentiles. Think the Rothschilds and Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Antisemites have long fantasized that Jewish masterminds are behind international conspiracies and global plots. It was a staple of Nazi propaganda. As someone stereotyped as a shadowy and cosmopolitan globalist, Soros is continuously accused, with no evidence, of all manner of evil.

Attacks on Soros have particularly increased since the 2015 European refugee crisis. Soros did back charities that helped migrants and he supported the European Union settlement efforts which were not popular among masses of people in Europe.

The extreme right-wing Hungarian government of Viktor Orban has used Soros as a foil, falsely claiming that Soros plotted to send millions of immigrants to Hungary. Similarly in Romania, the ruling party has blamed their countries’ problems on Soros. In 2015, Putin ejected the Open Society Foundation from Russia, saying it was a threat to their constitutional system.

Ruling elites have found it useful to exploit antisemitic fantasies such as those attached to Soros. Pushing blame onto Jews like Soros and deflecting anger away from ruling classes has a long history. The pattern invariably asserts itself in times of severe economic strain or acute political conflict.

Antisemitism takes different forms in different historical periods. Once it was primarily about the religious mythology that accused the Jews of killing Christ. Now there is the populist narrative with coded antisemitic references to globalists. The absence of explicit slurs does not make it less antisemitic. Those who fail to see the antisemitism are missing the history.

The coded antisemitism about Soros is a dogwhistle for all the neo-nazis, white supremacists and closeted haters out there. It reminds me of campaign consultant Lee Atwater talking about how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves.

Antisemitism must be understood and thoroughly repudiated, whenever it shows its face. History shows that antisemitic rhetoric leads to violence against Jews. Casual assertions that Soros is a monster need to be seen for what they are: 21st century Jew hating.

This piece appeared in the Concord Monitor on 12/27/2018 under the title “The Corruption Defense”.

How does a corrupt, high-ranking government official, who is under criminal investigation, maintain his grip on power? On TV, I saw Roger Stone describe the game plan: “admit nothing, deny everything and counterattack”.

Stone was not the first in American politics to advocate such a game plan. Forty-five years ago, then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, pioneered the modern model.

For those who may not remember or were not around yet, Agnew was Richard Nixon’s Vice-President. He is the only vice-president in U.S. history forced to resign the position. The story of Agnew’s fall is brilliantly evoked in Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Bag Man. It is a story with historical resonance.

President Nixon plucked Agnew from obscurity and put him on the national ticket in 1968. At the time, Agnew was a political unknown. He had served as Baltimore County Executive and he had a two year stint as governor of Maryland.

Agnew quickly became extremely popular with the right wing base of the Republican Party. As Maddow says, he created the mold for confrontational conservatism. Agnew played the role of attack dog. I still remember vintage Agnew, lambasting Nixon opponents as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals”.

Agnew had a way with words. For those who lived it, who can forget “nattering nabobs of negativism” or “pusillanimous pussyfooting on law and order”. Agnew was a bomb thrower on the stump. He particularly loved attacking anti-war student demonstrators and the press.

For those on the political right, Agnew was the blunt and honest outsider, willing to speak truths no one else would speak. He was adored for trashing liberals, radicals, and minorities. Agnew played a moralist, devoted to the silent majority. He presented himself as a pillar of rectitude and conservative integrity.

What no one knew was that contrary to the image, Agnew was a criminal and his criminality was long-standing. Since the start of his political career as Baltimore County Executive, he was on the take. Agnew received kickbacks on contracts he had the power to control. For years he took illegal bribes and payoffs. He had two bag men in his employ.

Shockingly, Agnew continued the bribery and extortion as a governor and even when he was in the White House. Agnew regularly received visitors at the White House and in his office in the Executive Office Building who passed along thousands of dollars of cash stuffed into plain envelopes. In exchange, Agnew steered federal contracts to the paying-off businessmen. Until the investigation into his criminal activities, Agnew never stopped taking bribes. He put the federal government up for sale.

If it were not for three federal prosecutors – Barney Skolnick, Tim Baker and Ron Liebman – Agnew might have gotten away with his crimes and he might have become president when Nixon resigned. The prosecutors decided to follow the money. They quickly assembled a solid case with multiple witnesses and documents. Participants in Agnew’s shake-downs started singing to the prosecutors..

When news of the investigation became public, Agnew fought back. He famously said, “ I will not resign, if indicted”. Agnew alleged he was the victim of a witch hunt and he smeared the investigators as biased and corrupt. He attacked the Justice Department for leaks and he said the press and liberals were out to get him.

Agnew’s P.R. strategy was to change the story by making criminal misconduct by Justice Department leakers, not his own crimes, the focus of public attention. Agnew’s lawyers sought to force the press to testify about sources. They subpoenaed nine reporters.

At the same time, Agnew had a private plan to obstruct his own investigation. He tried to use his political power to smother the investigation into his crimes. Agnew enlisted Nixon’s inner staff, Bob Haldemann and John Ehrlichman, in the obstruction effort.

They devised a plan to have Maryland’s senator, Glenn Beall, pressure his brother, George Beall, the United States Attorney for Maryland into dropping the Agnew investigation. Senator Beall owed Nixon because Nixon helped him win back his senate seat in 1970.

On the Nixon tapes, you can hear Nixon ask about Senator Beall, “Is he a good boy?”. Completely independent of Watergate, Nixon, Agnew, and the inner circle of most trusted White House advisors made a robust effort to obstruct the Agnew investigation.

Agnew wanted the U.S. Attorney to fire the prosecutor, Barney Skolnick, who Agnew said was a Democrat. Much strategizing went into the best scheme to stop the investigation. Agnew himself had personally lobbied Senator Beall many times to ask him to lean on his little brother. When that failed, the plotters decided to use later-President George H.W. Bush to reach out to Senator Beall. Bush was then chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Bush participated in this criminal scheme and he did try to influence Senator Beall but Beall would not go along.

When the obstruction effort failed, Nixon turned on Agnew. Nixon began to see Agnew as a threat to himself. Nixon wanted Agnew to resign but Agnew refused. Agnew actually wanted to be impeached. Agnew worried more about criminal indictment and doing jail time than impeachment which he thought he might beat.

Things totally fell apart between Nixon and Agnew. Agnew believed Nixon was threatening to have him murdered and he wrote about that repeatedly. He publicly worried he might have a convenient accident.

Agnew pled to a felony count of tax evasion. The IRS had also been investigating Agnew and his unusual spending. It turned out Agnew had a secret life with mistresses, sports cars and jewelry he bought. Prosecutors could have brought multiple criminal indictments against him but for the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, immediately getting Agnew out of the line of succession to the presidency was the highest priority.

Back then, no one knew if you could indict a sitting Vice President. Initially, Agnew, like Nixon, took the position that they could not be indicted because of their positions.

Agnew never showed a shred of remorse. Until the end and after, he argued his innocence, saying he was railroaded by the Justice Department and the press. He never stopped stoking his supporters. Even after Agnew’s resignation, his hardcore supporters believed he was a victim.

Under the terms of his resignation, Agnew did no jail time nor did he have to pay back bribe money. He did have to resign the vice-presidency immediately. Prosecutors did place in the record a forty page statement that detailed the factual allegations against Agnew.

It was not until years later in 1981 that a taxpayer lawsuit brought by George Washington University law students forced Agnew to pay back the State of Maryland $268,482 for the kickbacks he had received.

Denying everything, smearing prosecutors, obstructing justice and screaming witch hunt did not ultimately work. The problem for Agnew was that in spite of his best efforts, he could never bury his crimes or explain them away.