Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [78]
After our report on Monday, the vile Media Matters outfit is denying receiving funding from any of George Soros’ outfits. Well, that is a total lie. As we laid out for you, the smear website received more than a million dollars from the Tides Foundation alone in 2005, and just by coincidence, Soros’ Open Society Institute donated more than a million dollars to Tides in 2005. Figure it out.48
In case his audience had trouble figuring it out, O’Reilly also offered the following helpful diagram. It demonstrates the diverse ways in which Soros covertly funded Media Matters through the Tides Foundation and other front organizations:
O’Reilly’s diagram pioneered the development of the Fox News conspiracy chart, a formidable weapon that overwhelms secular progressives and other hostiles with a massive onslaught of arrows—like the Desert Storm shock-and-awe campaign, only with prettier graphics and fewer explosions. Overcome by this new form of superior analysis, Media Matters could only sputter that Soros’s donations to the Tides Foundation had been earmarked for other programs, not Media Matters. One staff writer grumbled that if Soros wanted to fund Media Matters, he could simply write them a check.49 But that would have been far too obvious a ploy for Soros’s cunning mind.
3. A Crew of Villainous Collaborators
Having irrefutably established that Media Matters is a team of “paid assassins by George Soros,”50 O’Reilly could focus on the next element of James Bond villainy—Soros’s crew of evil collaborators. The last arrow on the conspiracy chart points to Mainstream Media. This is a very important arrow because MediaMatters.org only gets a few hundred thousand visitors per month. That’s not too shabby for a website, but compared to NewsMax.com’s 3 million viewers or FoxNews.com’s 10 million viewers, it’s not particularly scary.51 So O’Reilly demonstrated how MediaMatters.org feeds its propaganda to the big guns:
Media Matters is an Internet site, but directly feeds its propaganda to some mainstream media people, including elements at NBC News, columnist Frank Rich and Paul Krugman at The New York Times, columnist Jonathan Alter at Newsweek, and Bill Moyers at PBS.52
That said, O’Reilly does not believe that the entire mainstream media supports Soros’s secular-progressive agenda—only 75 percent of them:
The online character assassins also make good use of the mainstream print media, which are about three-quarters progressive, by my estimation. The level of ideological commitment of the leftist media varies. Leading the way, you have the most enthusiastic secular-progressives, the New York Times and other committed left-wing papers, but you also have legions of quieter S-P [secular-progressive] sympathizers. These mainstream media enablers provide aid and comfort for the frontline troops and are invaluable in getting their message out to an even wider audience.53
These mainstream media enablers are part of Soros’s nefarious network. Unlike the ACLU and Media Matters, he doesn’t control them directly, but he’s able to coordinate with them through his paid assassins. The media enablers broadcast Soros’s message to a wider audience. They also shield him from scrutiny. On the O’Reilly Factor, Fox News commentator Monica Crowley said to O’Reilly, “This is an incredibly well-oiled, brilliantly orchestrated machine . . . This guy has been able to fly under the radar for a long time before you just exposed him because the mainstream media protects him, because they’re on the same ideological page.”54
Finally, in addition to the mainstream media enablers, O’Reilly has also implicated a few other rich secular progressives to round out Soros’s crew of villainous collaborators, such as insurance mogul Peter Lewis and Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell, who have also donated to liberal causes. If Soros is the secular-progressive equivalent of James Bond’s nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, then Lewis and Buell are the subordinate members of SPECTRE, a fictional global terrorist consortium made