J. D. Vance: “Alvin Bragg is bought by George Soros."
Donald Trump: "George Soros’ hand-picked and funded Manhattan DA"
Ted Cruz: "the Soros-funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg."
We get the point.
Guest Post author John Shutkin says there are two points. There is the denoted one, plus the subtext. The denoted one gives plausible deniability for the subtext. The overt purpose is to de-legitimize the indictment of Trump. The subtext is to tickle a suspicion and fear that remains deep in cultural memory.
"George Soros" is code. It is like a watermark on bond paper, there but not-there. Maybe there is a hidden plan to destroy Trump, led by global financiers. Maybe secret conspiracies are going on amidst us, pretending to be benign, but actually pathogens. Like tapeworms. Or termites. Or rats. Jews.
If someone outright said "Jews are tapeworms" most Americans would recoil. Some things need to be said indirectly. The people who like hearing it, hear it. The people who are offended by it don't hear it, or they hear it and dismiss it as just their imagination.
John Shutkin was a college classmate, shown here at a college football game. He is a retired corporate attorney who finished his career as General Counsel for two international accounting firms.
Guest Post by John Shutkin
I am a “cultural Jew” at best. No religious training, no Bar Mitzvah, and if I attend any religious service at all, it is likely to be an ecumenical Unitarian service at Christmas (which I have celebrated all my life) with my Congregationalist wife. And I certainly don’t blindly support everything that Israel does, particularly with Netanyahu trying to turn it into an autocracy as Putin and Trump wished to do in their countries.
But I am still a Jew, identified and comfortably self-identified as such. And, while I can be dismissive of some accusations of antisemitism as being a rush to victimization, like Justice Stewart and pornography, I think I know it when I see it. Indeed, I remember my father, who was as non-religious as I am, explaining to me years ago about the 10% Jewish “quota” in most medical schools when he went in the 30's. (That said, he decided to go to Northwestern despite knowing that he was part of that quota.) And I sure knew which country clubs would and would not accept Jewish members as I was growing up. (And, for that matter, I also knew which German Jewish country clubs wouldn’t accept Eastern European Jewish members, which I always found richly hypocritical.)
To be sure, antisemitism is less prevalent now than 50 or 100 years ago, so there is certainly that progress. And it is far less blatant – which in some ways is an improvement, but also means that frequently the antisemitism, like racism,* is in spoken and written “codes” which the more obtuse listener/reader might not catch. But, again, I know it when I see it/hear it.And one such code is any reference to George Soros, someone who is frequently referenced by Trump and other Republicans in a disparaging way – most recently in the context of Alvin Bragg, the New York D.A, who just – and properly – indicted Trump. Given the fact that Soros only indirectly financed Bragg’s candidacy, and was one of many liberals to do so, and – for better or worse – D.A.’s run for office in New York and fund raise like crazy to do so, it is really a pretty lame point.
So why mention Soros by name? Easy, he is Jewish and this is just one way of sending a code to antisemites everywhere, much the same way as “financier” and “global elite” or “globalist” do. And Trump, McCarthy, DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik and every other gutless antisemitic Republican who chooses to cite Soros by name know exactly what it means. https://americanindependent.com/republicans-antisemitic-attack-allegations-trump-crimes/
And so do I.
________
*As to racism, a racist code word Trump likes to use is "thugs." Put it this way, in MAGA World, the term does not conjure up visions of white “thugs.
White Christian nationalism demands enemies, and nonwhite, non-Christians are logical targets. As Kelefa Sanneh points out, "Christianity" is morphing from religion to identity, and--it seems to me--anti-Semitism is *worse* now than it was 50 years ago.
To wit: "... whether non-Christians are “entitled to political equality” (no), whether “political atheism” should be excluded from the bounds of “acceptable opinion” (yes), and whether “arch-heretics” can justifiably be put to death (yes)."
We are in dangerous, dangerous waters. In this Ship of Fools.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/how-christian-is-christian-nationalism