Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now a Fox Nation host and cheerleader for Donald Trump’s campaign, used his account on the social media site X (formerly Twitter) to spread a dangerous antisemitic trope among his 2.6 million followers last week.
After philanthropist Alex Soros posted a photo of himself with Democratic vice-presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz, Ramaswamy reposted it with the comment, “If you squint, you can see the strings on the marionette.”
Alex Soros is the son of philanthropist George Soros, a longtime funder of progressive and pro-democracy causes. As Media Matters noted, “The ‘puppet master’ imagery is a classic antisemitic trope, and right-wing media and Fox hosts have used it for years to smear George Soros.”
It is so recognizably antisemitic, in fact, that three years ago Fox News deleted social-media posts with a cartoon portraying Soros as a “puppet master” after critics called them out.
But that hasn’t stopped MAGA activists. Last year, when a podcaster asked Ramaswamy about having received a scholarship funded by George Soros’s late brother Paul, Ramaswamy said, “I think the big question that comes up is who’s the bogey man pulling the strings. I have no tie to George Soros other than criticizing him.” Ramaswamy later said he was unaware of the podcast host’s record of peddling tropes about Jews owning “almost everything.”
Trump himself has used the “puppet master” trope to rile his followers and motivate them to send him money. Last year, Trump sent a fundraising email that attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as a “bought-and-paid-for Soros prosecutor” carrying out his “puppet master’s plot to put me in JAIL for committing NO CRIME.”
Trump and other right-wing leaders revere Hungary’s “illiberal” leader Viktor Orbán, who deployed antisemitism in forcing a university funded by George Soros to leave the country where he was born, and has continued to use antisemitic narratives—more recently targeting Alex Soros—to maintain his grip on power. Orbán’s heavy-handed moves to impose ideological control over the judiciary, media, education, and culture have made him a hero to U.S. right-wing leaders like Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who views Orbán as the model for the kind of strongman they would like Trump to be in his second term.
Often the promotion of antisemitism is more coded than overt. While Ramaswamy has publicly criticized antisemitism as “morally outrageous” and “a symptom of something that is broken in our society,” he has also participated in the MAGA movement’s embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Last year, when Ramaswamy was running for president, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer dubbed him “The new face of the ‘great replacement.’”
The BBC describes “great replacement” as “the far-right idea that a cabal of people—often named as ‘globalists,’ ‘elites,’ or Jews—is deliberately plotting to change the demographic of Western countries,” and “a version of the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory that there is a plot to entirely ‘eliminate’ white people.” Proponents of this theory—including Trump and Carlson—sometimes blame George Soros directly for this imagined scheme.
As Right Wing Watch has noted, “the theory that global elites are out to ‘replace’ white people motivated mass murderers who killed Muslims in New Zealand, Jews in Pittsburgh and San Diego, and Latinos in El Paso, Texas. It also inspired organizers of the deadly Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, where protesters chanted, ‘You will not replace us’ and ‘Jews will not replace us.’”
But none of that has stopped right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson or far-right openly antisemitic figures like white nationalist Nick Fuentes from promoting great replacement rhetoric.
The poison is spreading within the MAGA movement. Trash-talking commentator Candace Owens told Tucker Carlson in 2021 that George Soros’s philanthropy was designed to “undo American civilization.” Owens, who lost her job at the Daily Wire earlier this year, has veered into antisemitic territory that is uncomfortably close to what is spewed by Fuentes.
Owens’ antisemitic rhetoric was called out by some conservatives. Yet two months after Owens’ highly publicized departure from the Daily Wire, Ramaswamy was urging BuzzFeed, where he had just bought a significant stake, to hire her. Owens is still promoted on the Turning Point USA site, whose founder Charlie Kirk is touring colleges with Ramaswamy this fall.
Carlson, meanwhile, recently hosted Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper on his online show—a top-rated podcast—and Cooper followed up with a social media post saying that Hitler had tried to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.”
The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg cited the episode in his recent article, “The Anti-Semitic Revolution on the American Right,” which noted that Carlson was given a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political extremes, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican coalition during the Trump administration,” Rosenberg writes.
Rosenberg notes that the MAGA movement’s angry anti-elite populism “readily maps onto the ancient anti-Semitic canard that clandestine string-pulling Jews are the source of society’s problems.” That brings us back to Ramaswamy and other MAGA insiders. “Trump fundamentally refuses to repudiate anyone who supports him,” notes Rosenberg, who cites a conservative columnist who told him last year, “What you’re actually worried about is not Trump being Hitler. What you’re worried about is Trump incentivizing anti-Semites” in a way that brings them real political power.
There are other strains within the right wing of American politics that threaten to foster the marginalization of American Jews.
Among the “illiberal” and “post-liberal” thinkers that J.D. Vance pals around with is Yoram Hazony, whose Edmund Burke Foundation sponsors the National Conservatism conference at which Vance has spoken repeatedly in the past few years. Hazony believes that in a Christian majority country, “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” When journalist Katherine Stewart asked about minorities in such a society having outsider status, Hazony said, “That simply is reality,” adding that minorities would not get the same treatment as the majority, but “should be grateful for the fact that you’re not persecuted as minorities often have been in history.”
Like Trump, American religious-right groups loudly declare their support for Israel’s government and love for the Jewish people. But some of the movement’s increasingly aggressive, exclusionary, and dominionist Christian nationalist leaders declare that the U.S. is meant to be a Christian nation, with certain kinds of Christians ordained to rule. Some claim that the U.S. was founded with a national mission to advance the Christian faith. Some assert that Christian beliefs should be amended into the Constitution and that public officials should be required to be Christian. One has called for public worship by non-Christians to be banned.
Religious-right groups have also attacked Soros’s philanthropic support for progressive religious groups, calling it “evil.” A letter circulated among right-wing evangelicals several years ago portrayed George Soros as a global schemer whose goal may be “the imposition of a global monoculture” but is “at least the destruction of our national identity through demoralization, open borders, drugs, crime, law-fare and media propaganda — the ‘fundamental transformation’ (weakening) of American civil society for the leveraged power of global ‘elites.’” Signers included broadcaster Eric Metaxas, anti-LGBTQ activist and New Apostolic Reformation figure Jim Garlow, and the Family Research Council’s Jerry Boykin.
Trump himself has inflamed antisemitism on the right since his 2016 campaign rhetoric electrified white nationalists. He has routinely disparaged American Jewish voters for not supporting him more widely based on his support for Israel’s far-right government. And Trump recently threatened to blame American Jews if he loses the election. What could be more calculated to inflame the antisemitism already surging through his conspiracy-embracing MAGA movement?
People For the American Way has proudly received support from the Open Society Foundations.
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