Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [75]
A few months after LaRouche’s exposé, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia blamed Soros for deliberately creating the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Like the new Hungarian anti-Semites, Mahathir was careful to avoid alleging any Jewish conspiracy: “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews.” Then he added, “But in reality, it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew.”24 Even more coincidentally, Mahathir’s party handed out translated compilations of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent at a political conference a few years later.25
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., anti-Sorosism occupied itself quietly on the fringe for the next few years. Other than Soros’s progressive position on drug policy—he supports needle exchanges, methadone treatment, and medical marijuana—most people did not associate his politics with liberalism, and Soros described himself as a moderate Republican. 26 Engdahl even accused Soros of aligning himself with former president George Bush Sr. and former conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
Right-wing Journalism
In 2003, everything changed. Infuriated by the policies of George W. Bush, Soros decided to send his political philanthropy homeward, telling the Washington Post, “America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”27 He gave $23 million to political action groups during the 2004 election, including the brash liberal grassroots organization MoveOn.org.28
But Republicans have their own rich guy—Richard Scaife, heir to the Mellon fortune and owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, whom the Washington Post has called the “Funding Father of the Right.”29bi Having sponsored efforts to impeach Bill Clinton in the 1990s, Scaife knows a thing or two about taking down presidents. But his tactics differ from those of Soros-supported organizations. While MoveOn.org’s antagonistic political ads have invited criticism, the organization’s approach of buying ads and fundraising for liberal candidates is fairly conventional. Scaife, by contrast, uses his media holdings to back scurrilous investigations of his political opponents. For instance, in 1994 Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review hired reporter Christopher Ruddy to investigate the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. Ruddy’s ill-founded conclusion that Foster might have been murdered nurtured a torrent of right-wing paranoia about homicidal White House conspiracies.30
After his success in smearing the Clintons, Ruddy founded the magazine NewsMax in 1998. Richard Scaife soon bought out the original investors; he and Ruddy now own 100 percent of the company.31 Forbes magazine has called NewsMax “a news powerhouse and a must-read on the conservative media circuit.”32 Sarah Palin has called it “very valuable, very helpful,” adding, “I appreciate all that you guys are doing to get a good message out there.”33 (I wonder why Palin didn’t mention NewsMax when Katie Couric asked her what newspapers and magazines she read.)
NewsMax has been a frequent source of bogeyman stories and other speculative attacks on liberals. It often repackages conspiracy theories from the paranoid fringe and presents them to right-wing politicians and commentators, who in turn circulate sanitized versions of them to the general public. So when George Soros announced his opposition to President Bush in 2003, NewsMax used its standard bogeyman method to go after him. Only this time, the strategy carried the distinctive odor of persecution politics. The successful demonization of George Soros would provide a model for subsequent witch hunts of Jewish, Latino, black, and homosexual bogeymen in the years to come.
This is how it worked. One of NewsMax’s contributors is a self-described “award winning journalist” named Richard Poe.bj In 2004, Poe applied his outstanding investigative