On Monday, an explosive device was found inside a mailbox at billionaire political activist George Soros's suburban New York home. It was opened by a residence employee, who recognized what it was and called the police; the device was intentionally detonated later by bomb squad technicians.
There is little doubt it was intended as a hate crime—an act of terrorism. Soros, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who has devoted his fortune to promoting human rights causes, has been attacked relentlessly for his activism. It is no longer fringe white supremacist groups who use his name as shorthand for perceived Jewish influence; in the last decade, conservative Republican lawmakers and conservative media outlets like Fox News have amplified those attacks. They are incessant.
His activism has made him a villain to conservative groups and the target of anti-Semitic smears. Roseanne Barr called him a Nazi in an infamous tweetstorm, and just this month, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, falsely speculated that Mr. Soros had funded a caravan of migrants moving north toward Mexico.
Republicans have at one point or another blamed George Soros as a supposed secret force behind nearly every liberal cause and effort in America. Not a day goes by when a Democratic voice does not receive some burping social media intonation that "Soros" is their secret leader. His name has become the shorthand for every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory invented through the last two hundred years of history, massaged and filtered until Rep. Matt Gaetz bleats it out himself, supposing that the wealthy Jewish man controls world migration patterns because that sounds like something a wealthy Jewish man would do.
This raging anti-Semitism has elevated itself considerably thanks not just to Donald Trump, but Fox News, and Tucker Carlson's White Nationalism Funtime Show, and the conspiracy theories regularly peddled by Breitbart "News" and myriad other nationalism-promoting faux-conservative outlets, and just as when Fox News mouth Bill O'Reilly devoted himself to singling out a single Kansas abortion provider or when Glenn Beck, out of nowhere, started scribbling conspiracies about the Tides Foundation on his whiteboard of gibbering hate, it has once again directly provoked an act of domestic terrorism.
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Will Fox News cover this terrorist act with the same urgency that they covered members of the ruling class being denied a peaceful dinner? Will Rep. Matt Gaetz personally issue a groveling apology for his direct part in instigating yet another anti-Semitic conspiracy theory suggesting that his ideological opponent is a threat his own nation? Will even one of these cretins reconsider their personalized, relentless attacks on a single named individual who serves as their coded shorthand for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of their base?
It is not likely, because every one of them knew precisely what they were intoning every time they intoned it. The silencing of George Soros is precisely what Rep. Matt Gaetz was going for; his only concern is, like a certain Saudi prince, whether he can be personally blamed for it afterward.
We can blame him. This bomb can be traced back to the hate speech of Rep. Matt Gaetz, personally, and to every other "conservative" who spread their anti-Semitic theories in recent days. This attempted murder—this attempted act of targeted domestic terrorism—is a direct result of their own actions.
