My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election,” a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck.

John Forman wrote in his November 2 response to my last column that I used “half truths.” Now, I candidly admit to sharing “My Point of View,” as this is a space for opinions. I’m not a reporter aiming to provide a complete and unbiased picture.

Then Forman went a step further. He wrote that ”Feehan’s campaign is taking huge amounts of funds for George Soros sponsored groups which are the same groups Feehan worked for.”

The irony in Forman’s claim is that Politifact rated the attack ad against Dan Feehan linking him to George Soros as “false.” That means Forman’s reference fell short of a “half true” or even “mostly false” rating. He essentially repeated a deliberate (and effective) smear.

Let’s break it down.

The ad in question was paid for by America First Action, which spent $1.7 million on negative ads against Feehan in the CD1 race. It had received a $10 million donation from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson in mid-September. Sheldon Adelson is the same person who pledged $30 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund (a Republican PAC) after he got an enormous windfall from the Republican tax cut last year.

The group (not groups) that employs Feehan part time is the Center for a New American Security. Major defense contractor Northrup Grumman, the US government, and Charles River Ventures (a venture capital firm) all provide a far larger share of its funding than George Soros does. Retired general and now defense secretary James Mattis was a board member of the center until he was appointed to his current post.

Does this employer sound like a fringe liberal outfit to you?

Calling Feehan’s campaign “Soros sponsored” is also a stretch. Feehan didn’t receive any money directly from Soros. He didn’t accept PAC money either, but some outside groups ran ads for him and against Hagedorn. Soros donated $5 million to Priorities USA Action during this cycle, which independently ran $103,000 worth of negative ads against Hagedorn, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

To keep that in perspective, Adelson’s group spent sixteen times more on negative ads than Soros’s group did in the race. (In either case, it’s too much outside money.)

You may think it’s pointless to rehash this after the election, but a lie unanswered is a lie allowed to stand, and George Soros’s name will continue to come up.

Who is George Soros? Why is he a bogeyman for conservatives?

Soros is an 88-year-old Hungarian Jewish immigrant whose parents, fearing the Holocaust, sent him away disguised as the godson of an agriculture official in 1944. He was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi collaborator as some nefariously claim. He was a 13-year-old boy. Fortunately he and his family survived World War II.

Soros eventually moved to New York City and became a hedge fund manager, which is how he made his billions. Unlike the Koch brothers, David and Charles, who inherited hundreds of millions from their father and donate heavily to conservative causes that promote deregulation and anti-tax doctrine in their economic self-interest, Soros has poured his billions into humanitarian causes that don’t directly benefit him financially. This is perhaps his greatest capitalist heresy.

His harrowing brush with Germany’s project of genocide as a youth made him keenly interested in promoting “open societies.” He supports organizations that encourage individual liberty, pluralism, civil society, and free thought.

Being a Jewish financier in such a visible philanthropic role has made him a prime target for anti-Semitic groups. His name, like the word “globalist,” is frequently a dog whistle for white nationalism.

Tribalism and nationalism are on the rise. We see it in our neighbor Rep. Steve King’s overtly racist statements, in the Baraboo boys’ Nazi salute at prom in Wisconsin, in the Tree of Life mass shooting, in the fear mongering around the Honduran migrant caravan, and in the effectiveness of using George Soros’s name to attack Dan Feehan.

There remains deep fear of pluralism, even though being a melting pot has been key to our superpower status. We heard hostile chants of “Jews will not replace us!” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year. I’ve recently seen sanitized versions of this message show up in my Facebook news feed with memes like, “Do you open your doors and let anyone into your house?” This is the language of threat and invasion that has led to unspeakably dark places in human history.

This is part of who we are, and we must grapple with it. Lies like we saw repeated in the ad against Dan Feehan will be a potent force here again in the 2020 election.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.