Democrats Slam Johnson for Suggesting George Soros Behind Campus Protests

Jewish Democrats are warning President Mike Johnson (R-La.) this week after the Republican leader suggested that George Soros is behind the pro-Palestinian protests roiling college campuses across the country.

Democrats – many of them highly critical of anti-Israel demonstrations, which they say cross the line into anti-Semitism – are accusing Johnson of the same offense for advancing baseless theories that Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, is funding student protesters to foment social unrest.

This baseless argument fits into a broader narrative long promoted in some conservative circles: that Soros used his prodigious wealth to manipulate global events for the sole purpose of advancing personal interests.

The irony, Democrats note, is that the Soros portrayal is itself a patently anti-Semitic trope. By suggesting that Soros is fueling campus confrontations, Democrats say, Johnson and other Republicans are promoting hostility toward Jews in the name of fighting it.

“You can’t fight anti-Semitism with anti-Semitism,” said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.).

Rep. Jerry Nadler (DN.Y.), another prominent Jewish lawmaker, made a similar complaint.

“Not even 24 hours after passing a bill banning anything under the guise of ‘combating anti-Semitism,’ @SpeakerJohnson drags out one of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in the world,” Nadler wrote on social platform X.

The backlash comes after Johnson, in an interview with NewsNation’s “The Hill,” advanced the notion that the campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are not grassroots demonstrations launched by students and faculty upset about rising civilian deaths. civilians, but rather part of a broader global scheme to undermine Israeli influence. He suggested that Soros could be involved and that the FBI should investigate.

“I think [FBI officials] We need to look at the root causes and find out whether some of this was funded by, I don’t know, George Soros or foreign entities,” Johnson said. “There’s kind of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be followed on a lot of these campuses.”

As evidence, Johnson said that he and a group of Republicans, during a recent visit to Columbia University, the site of one of the country’s fiercest protest demonstrations, noticed that many of the tents in the protesters’ camp were identical.

“They were the same color, make and model,” he said. “Hmm, did someone buy this and send it? It seems quite orchestrated to me.

Johnson’s visit to Colombia was part of a broader campaign to condemn pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the way universities handled the situation. In Manhattan, he called for the school president to resign, and in Washington, he launched a House-wide investigation into anti-Semitism in the US.

Democrats rejected the suggestion that the school protests are part of a broader international conspiracy to undermine Israel’s political power. And even if that were the case, they are perplexed by the accusation that a prominent Jewish figure would be leading this attack.

“Starting a conspiracy theory about George Soros is a very smart way to be against anti-Semitism,” said Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), another Jewish lawmaker.

Johnson’s office did not respond Thursday to multiple requests for comment.

Baseless Republican attacks on Soros are nothing new. Conservatives have, for years, hounded the billionaire philanthropist and his Open Society Foundations – which promote democracy and human rights around the world – because the tens of billions of dollars he has donated over decades have been largely part for left-leaning groups.

That track record — and the enormous amount of money involved — has made Soros a frequent target of right-wing voices, who have accused him of everything from financing the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, to being “the antichrist.”

And Johnson isn’t the only Republican who has invoked Soros when theorizing who is behind the college campus protests.

“Obviously, I think Soros is part of this,” Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) said Wednesday on Fox Business. “The FBI should be investigating this too. They should be investigating Soros. He’s inciting, you know, violence, you know, and inciting, like, hate crimes… I mean, these things need to be looked at.”

“I think a lot of this is being funded by outside forces, including George Soros, those who are determined to disrupt and bring chaos to our country and divide our great nation,” Rep. Mark Alford (R-Mo.) said Monday. -fair. same network.

The theory appears to trace back to tenuous money trails between Soros-backed organizations and Palestinian groups that conservative media – Fox News and the New York Post Officefor example – they highlighted.

Last month, for example, Fox News highlighted that the National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been speaking out amid pro-Palestine protests on campuses, is overseen by the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation (WESPAC), which has received money from a Soros-supported non-profit organization.

Fox News previously reported that, according to a watchdog group, WESPAC received $132,000 from the Tides Foundation, a group that, according to The Washington Post, received millions of dollars from Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

The Washington Post, however, reported that Students for Justice in Palestine denied receiving any money from WESPAC and noted that there is no public indication of the contribution.

A representative for the group told the newspaper that the company “does not fund or influence our organization’s political activity, but instead extends its legal tax-exempt status to us in order to support our mission.”