On Monday, someone sent a pipe bomb to the home of George Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund manager turned global philanthropist, in Westchester County, north of New York City. A caretaker discovered the bomb—“about six inches long filled with explosive powder,” according to the Times—while collecting the mail. On Tuesday, the Secret Service discovered a similar bomb, this one in a package sent to Hillary Clinton’s address in Westchester. On Wednesday, a third bomb was found, addressed to Barack Obama, and CNN’s offices in New York were evacuated for a suspicious package.
Clinton, Obama, and CNN need no introduction, but Soros, who has spent his fortune supporting liberal causes in the U.S. and abroad, is someone who most people have never heard of. If these bombs were indeed sent by the same person or group, Soros’s inclusion in this mail-bomb spree suggests who the sender—whether mentally unwell or a committed doer of political violence—might have been paying attention to. Recently, Donald Trump blamed Soros for the protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, when asked if he believed that Soros was paying the protesters, said, “I tend to believe it.” Just last week, Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida, blamed Soros for the migrant caravan travelling from Central America to the U.S.’s southern border. In May, on Twitter, the comedian Roseanne Barr falsely called Soros—a Jew who was born in Hungary, in 1930, and who survived the Holocaust as a child in part by posing as the son of a Hungarian government official—a Nazi “who turned in his fellow Jews.” Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted her. For more than a decade, ever since he donated large sums to John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential campaign against George W. Bush, Soros has been a reliable bogeyman for the American right. At the height of the Obama years, on the Fox News program where he spouted his conservative fever dreams, Glenn Beck used to call him “the puppet master.”
Anti-Soros hate-mongering is an international phenomenon. On Tuesday, I spoke with Elisabeth Zerofsky, who has reported on political movements in Europe for The New Yorker and has lately been reporting in Hungary, where Soros is from, and where, in 1984, he established his first “open society” foundation, which has since become an international network of organizations and groups funded by Soros’s billions. In May, the group announced the closing of its Hungary operations, citing “an increasingly repressive political and legal environment.” Soros had been an enemy of the right in Hungary—and elsewhere in eastern Europe—for decades, but the turn came in 2015, during the migrant crisis. Rumors flew that Soros was funding groups that were instructing migrants on how to find refuge in Europe. Since then, Zerofsky told me, the line among right-wing Hungarian groups has been that “George Soros, the Jewish banker, wants to make Europe Muslim.” Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister and a hero of nationalist movements around the world—including the Breitbart right in the U.S.—found Soros a convenient foil. “This became a politically expedient thing for Orbán,” Zerofsky said. “He just grabbed it and he used it, essentially.”
The myth of Soros, shot through with anti-Semitic stereotypes, has obscured his complex history, and the cause he put his fortune into. In 1995, Connie Bruck wrote a Profile of Soros for The New Yorker, describing how he made his fortune in the gray areas of global finance, speculating in markets, and then turned to philanthropy, becoming a brash “stateless statesman,” as he liked to call himself, encouraging the development of civic society and open markets in countries including Ukraine, Poland, and Macedonia. But that real history was long ago left behind by the conspiracy theorists and panic inducers on the right who have encouraged their followers and supporters to see Soros in every shadow. As we wait and hope that whoever sent these bombs this week is caught, now is a time to think about how ideas spur actions. That was a premise behind Soros’s open-society initiatives. And even if whoever sent these proves to be an unwell person, the ugly, dehumanizing ideas that have been circulating about Soros—and Clinton, Obama, CNN, and others—will remain.