This is commitment: Republicans are not going to drop their anti-Semitic “George Soros” dog whistles even in the aftermath of Soros being targeted by a mail bomb sent by a Donald Trump supporter and a mass shooting in a synagogue.
The National Republican Congressional Committee isn’t going to stop airing an ad slamming a Minnesota Democratic House candidate for having worked at a foundation that gets funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Florida’s Ron DeSantis used Soros as a boogeyman days after he received a mail bomb and hours before an arrest was made for that. The Michigan Republican Party is attacking the Democratic candidate for secretary of state with something-something-Soros-Hillary Clinton-Elizabeth Warren. And so on. They all deny that there’s anything anti-Semitic in the use of Soros to scare voters—but all you have to do is look at chatter on the alt-right internet to see what dog whistle they’re blowing there, and that the message is being received. For that matter, sometimes it’s less a dog whistle than a bullhorn:
Judicial Watch was a key source for a video that aired in May on the federally funded TV Martí, which broadcasts to Cuba, attacking Soros as a “multimillionaire Jew” and a “non-believing Jew of flexible morals.” The video, which Mother Jones reported Friday, is now under investigation by the U.S. Agency for Global Media after Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) blasted the segment as “taxpayer-funded anti-Semitism” and demanded answers.
But sure, when other Republican groups use Soros as a shadowy figure trying to buy elections from real Americans, it’s all an innocent reference to a randomly chosen liberal donor.
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