It takes him more than a thousand words to get to it, at least in the updated version now online, but The Washington Post’s Philip Bump basically calls our own Isabel Vincent an antisemite for reporting on how the Soros family foundation and other lefty charities have been funding the campus protests.
The connection, he argues, “is so tenuous as to be obviously contrived,” as he lays out how the payments Vincent actually traced (via various intermediate nonprofits) only account for a tiny percentage of known cash that various protest leaders actually pocketed, and anyway those intermediaries (like Jewish Voice for Peace, the Tides Foundation, Education for Just Peace in the Middle East and the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation) get lots of money from lots of places.
But readers, Bump insists, are “meant to think” that “Soros is a nefarious figure bent on using his wealth to reshape the world”: It’s all “vague insinuations leveraging well-worn rhetoric and a preexisting visceral response to the Jewish billionaire,” and: “There’s a term for allegations like that.”
The basic piece went online within six hours of Vincent’s report, a rapid turnaround enabled by the fact that Bump isn’t a journalist, but a stenographer for Soros.
Yes, the Soros camp always insists that any criticism of his giving is nothing but antisemitism — whether it’s the latest news, or his quiet, yearslong, all-too-successful effort to transform the justice system by helping radicals win election as district attorneys.
Heck, the avowed purpose of his Open Society Foundation is to change the world, albeit for what Soros believes is the better.
Those of us who see much of that work as instead tearing the country apart don’t care about his religious heritage, and the Bumps of the world know it.
But “it’s all antisemitism” is the first, middle and last line of defense that the OSF public-relations staff always go to, and they know which “journalists” to feed with that response.
And when agitprop to please the left is your job, it’s a lot easier to just use the script the gazillionaire’s minions hand you.