Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [77]
2. Immense financial resources for building sadistic weaponry of massive proportions
In addition to his devious plans, Soros has plenty of money to fund smear sites, political action committees, and other sadistic political weaponry. Bill O’Reilly is obsessed with the idea that certain “secular progressive” organizations are Soros tools. There is the ACLU, “the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now . . . second next to Al Qaeda.”43 There is MoveOn.org, “the new Klan.”44 And there is Media Matters, the “most vicious element in our society today.”45
Media Matters is a not-for-profit research organization dedicated to “monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”46 It was founded in 2004 by David Brock, a former right-wing journalist like Christopher Ruddy who earned renown for smearing Justice Clarence Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, and for breaking the Troopergate story that accused Bill Clinton of engaging in an affair with Paula Jones.
But in the late 1990s, Brock had a change of heart.bm Concluding that his work had been dirty politics, not good journalism, he apologized to the Clintons and to Anita Hill. In two books, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative and The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, Brock publically repudiated the tactics of the right and his own contributions to them. Media Matters is his project to expose and undermine those tactics.47
Some have criticized Media Matters for engaging in a “gotcha” style of politics similar to what Brock once did for the right. But Media Matters isn’t in the business of sinking Republican politicians or even conservative media stars—contrary to Bill O’Reilly’s megalomaniacal fantasies that the organization is the smearing arm of George Soros’s personal vendetta against him. Media Matters’ target is not the man himself but the words he speaks. The majority of its content consists of direct quotes from Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and their colleagues. Its raison d’être is not to trumpet occasional verbal gaffes or “gotchas” for political gain. It is to call attention to the frequent and widespread use of misleading, paranoid, bigoted rhetoric that right-wing commentators and politicians have been pouring into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. In essence, Media Matters’ work amounts to a transcript of right-wing persecution politics. It has been an invaluable resource to me and to others who had been trying to raise the nation’s awareness of fear and loathing in America long before the Tea Parties raised their furious cacophony.
But to Bill O’Reilly, Media Matters is just a smear machine. And he knows that there is only one man with the cunning and the resources to manufacture such a fiendish weapon of crass destruction—the man sliding down the volcano: George Soros.
The only trouble is that George Soros didn’t fund Media Matters. Soros’s Open Society Institute is unusually transparent for a secretive criminal operation, and there is no record of any donation to Media Matters for America. But as we’ve seen, Bill O’Reilly does not let mere facts stand in the way of the truth. Employing his amazing powers of superior analysis, O’Reilly followed the money and discovered that he was right all along. While OSI did not donate directly to Media Matters, it did donate to an organization called the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation then “funnels the money to a variety of radical hatchet men.” O’Reilly explained the funneling