George Soros conspiracy theories

Hungarian-American billionaire businessman George Soros is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. Veronika Bondarenko, writing for Business Insider, said: "For two decades, some have seen Soros as a kind of puppet master secretly controlling the global economy and politics." The New York Times describes the allegations as moving "from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio" to "the very center of the political debate" by 2018. Professor Armin Langer has noted that Soros is "the perfect code word" for conspiracy theories that unite antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Soros conspiracies first emerged in Russian circles involving "Western anti-Kremlin civil society across the Eastern Bloc from Tbilisi to the Baltic". These conspiracies involved inverting Soros's strengths into weaknesses, a common Russian disinformation technique. Soros, a Holocaust survivor, was accused of being a Nazi. As a supporter of Eastern European democracies, Soros was accused of being behind the European migrant crisis or importing migrants to European countries. An anti-corruption advocate, he was accused of globalist conspiracies to overthrow governments.

The Soros conspiracies quickly spread across Europe and the United States, carrying antisemitic and Islamophobic overtones. This included efforts by the Hungarian government, under the current second premiership of Viktor Orbán, as part of an election campaign demonizing Soros. George Soros is cast as part of an international cabal of Jews that includes the Rothschilds, Freemasons, and Illuminati. American conservatives picked up on the thread in the late 2000s, spearheaded by Fox News. Bill O'Reilly gave an almost ten-minute monologue on Soros in 2007, calling him an "extremist" and claiming he was "off-the-charts dangerous." Online news organizations, often connected to Russian state media such as the Centre for Research on Globalization, would also publish and help spread conspiracies.