Fox Business NetworkDuring a Wednesday night interview with right-wing provocateur Michelle Malkin, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs smeared liberal Jewish financier George Soros with an anti-Semitic trope, claiming Soros’ “tentacles reach out into various non-government organizations and nonprofits.” Dobbs brought on Malkin, who recently told Fox News that Soros is funding the “illegal alien lawyers lobby,” to hawk her latest anti-immigrant book, and it didn’t take long for her to portray Soros as a “globalist” bent on destroying America’s sovereignty.“And George Soros himself… explicitly says the idea of sovereignty, something that so many of us who are children of legal immigrants, for example, respect as a fundamental precept for the survival of a country, sovereignty to George Soros is quote-unquote an obstacle,” she said. “And he has created an entire infrastructure of tax-exempt nonprofits to do his bidding.”Dobbs then took Malkin’s comments a step further.“It is extraordinary and I think most people, I’ll include myself, cannot conceive of why a man would fund efforts that would work against sovereignty,” Dobbs said. “Work against our laws—there are laws against illegal immigration—and to see his tentacles reach out into various non-government organizations and nonprofits that are working with everything from the Koch Brothers to the Southern Poverty Law Center, as you document through this book.”“It is stunning to see how pervasive and how successful he has been with his strategy,” he added.Last year, the Anti-Defamation League commented on the anti-Semitism behind many of the Soros-related conspiracies the right has spread for years, many of which have recently made their way into the mainstream. “Even if no anti-Semitic insinuation is intended, casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes has the effect of mainstreaming anti-Semitic tropes and giving support, however unwitting, to bona fide anti-Semites and extremists who disseminate these ideas knowingly and with malice,” the organization noted.Nazi propaganda, meanwhile, used images of a Jewish octopus spanning the globe and wrapping around political institutions during the 1930s. Neo-Nazi groups have continued to promulgate this trope in recent years, specifically referring to Jewish “tentacles.”A frequent guest of Dobbs’, Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell, was banned from Fox airwaves last year after he claimed migrant caravans from Central America were funded by the “Soros-occupied State Department,” parroting the anti-Semitic smear of a “Zionist-controlled government.” Two days after Farrell made his comments, an anti-Semite killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The shooter believed that Soros and other Jews were trying to replace whites through immigration.This also isn’t the first time the “tentacle” trope has been used by a Fox host. Back in 2015, then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly called Soros the “shadow puppet master” who “has his tentacles into political organizations.”Meanwhile, Dobbs—who serves as an informal adviser to the president—was seen entering the White House on Wednesday afternoon.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
