Originally published at: Mehdi Hasan on the right's dog-whistling over DA Alvin Bragg and George Soros | Boing Boing
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What ever Soros does with his billions is no different than what the Kochs and Seid do. Except one is more liberal than the other.
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Really more of a ‘dog fog-horn’ these days. Surprise surprise, the maga crowd are largely defined via white supremacist racist christian national nazism -sigh-
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Same old stale Elders of Zion BS conspiracism is what it is.
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Is it still a “dogwhistle” when you say the quiet bits really loudly?
Actually, no, they’re really quite different. Soros gives relatively little money to overtly political causes, much of it is (in theory) pretty neutral stuff like increasing voter participation (he’s gotten overseas fascists worked up about his giving to basic pro-democracy groups), and he’s certainly not funding extremists, it’s pretty moderate. The Kochs give absolutely enormous sums of money to completely fund the creation of fake-grassroots groups from the ground up, and not only back extreme right-wing politicians and organizations, but fund all sorts of other things, like funding anti-public transportation initiatives on local levels. What they do with their money is extremely far-reaching, the impact ubiquitous and kind of insane, really. (When you hear about some weird right-wing group on the national, state or local level, the odds are good that they’re involved.) There’s absolutely no comparison.
There’s no one on the left remotely doing what the Kochs do (much less the Mercers and various other extreme right-wing billionaires), so when the right cast Soros as some left-wing boogieman, it’s hard to see it as anything but a weird form of projection. They assume there must be a left-wing version of the Kochs (et al) and that Soros is it, when neither thing is true.
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Wrong tense in some of your verbs there, David Koch died in 2019. I don’t believe his widow or children have continued with his, um, philanthropy.
Charles is still alive and kicking ofc
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Either whoever is in charge of the money is still spending it in ways in line with previous spending, or they put enough money into political groups to be self-sustaining for a long time (and probably both). I keep reading about new groups, PACs and dark money funds that are funded by Koch money.
I wish they were past tense, but they’re absolutely not.
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It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad regarding what a boogeyman the right tries to make out of Soros. I guess because he’s the only lefty billionaire? Or at least the only one anyone has heard of?
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And Jewish. That dovetails with a lot of conspiratorial suspicions about a Derp State and so on.
Never mind all the billionaires who don’t contribute to causes perceived as liberal. They earned their fortunes honestly, you see, and not in greedy, devious ways like Soros did (can you smell the antisemitism there?).
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Where “lefty” doesn’t mean he hasn’t been hoarding vast amounts of wealth and everything that comes with that, just that he’d rather keep democracy than chance another holocaust. How’s that for an Overton window. 
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LOLZ.
While we have billionaires and people starve then they’re all assholes.
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Charles’ son Chase Koch is in position. There have been some claims that he’s not interested in politics, but that sounds like the usual double-speak, like his father “distancing” himself from the John Birch Society.
In any event, normal billions are like the One Ring. Koch billions are the super-cursed version.
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Yah, I should have put scare quotes around “lefty”. It’s relative to other billionaires, I guess, which is a low bar to clear. “Not a fascist”, basically.
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The Kochs have been into that for a while - years ago they were putting together fake grass-roots organizations to try to block cities/counties from adding more buses in their communities… totally insane stuff.
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They still do that.
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… and their conflict of interest should be in the lede every time but it never is
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There’s no conflict - a “conflict of interest” presumes they have some pretense of high minded ideals or, at the very least, are advancing some interest other than their own. In the case of the Kochs, they’re openly promoting their own at the expense of, well, everything and everyone else. Anyone working with (for) them hasn’t been misled, they’re just sell-outs.
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