Sunday, June 25, 2023

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXVII: The Wall Street Journal

We're really on a run this week, aren't we?

Savvy media observers know well that the Wall Street Journal can be pretty firmly divided into two components. There are the news sections, which are widely respected and comprised of professional reporters who do rigorous, hard-hitting journalism. And then there's the opinion section, which is the worst hive of scum and villainy in the galaxy.

This post is about the latter. But not the latter's worst work. The opinion page published a column titled "Can America Trust Modi's India?" (a good question!). This displeased Kanwal Sibal, India's foreign secretary. But he's figured out what prompted publication:

WSJ is owned by Soros. Explains the anti- Modi virulence of article. No effort to introduce any balance in it. Strings together a litany of smears. No honesty, only hate.

The WSJ is actually, in fact, owned by Rupert Murdoch. And George Soros' reach is long indeed, if he can direct the editorial choices of Murdoch's outlets. And we might also wonder why, if Soros owns Murdoch's media outlets, he hasn't done a better or more comprehensive job pivoting them towards cosmopolitan paeons to the proletariat revolution (or whatever it is Soros is supposed to be interested in), as opposed to the usual indeed string of MAGA dreck one normal finds?

But the trick is that when people talk about things being "owned by Soros", they're not really talking about percentage of stock or presence on a board. They're not even talking about some comprehensive ability to direct control. "Owned by Soros" means "entity in a public space that does something I don't like." This is why anti-Soros conspiracy theories are inevitably antisemitic in nature. The whole thing doesn't make sense unless it's leveraging belief in some inchoate, shadowy globalist conspiracy that is unbound by rules of reason or logic.

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