Antisemitic Conspiracies About George Soros Hurtle Towards Prosecution

Donald Trump's repeated targeting and threats of criminal charges against billionaire George Soros are again fueling the spread of antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Jewish philanthropist.

For decades, Soros, 95, has been the bête noire of conspiracy-minded actors on the far right but also on the far left and among some radical Islamist factions. He is portrayed in caricatural terms and without evidence as an omnipotent ‘globalist’ financier funding the ‘Deep State’, ‘remigration’, antifa movements, ‘The Great Replacement’, the collapse of the European Union and liberal democracy, and the overthrow of nations. Typically Soros has been painted as a hidden hand and puppet master manipulating the global economy, orchestrating protests, or engineering social unrest.

In the conspiracist ecosystem echoing Trump’s false claims—now mainstreamed through X and YouTube—Soros is routinely labeled a “Nazi collaborator,” a grotesque inversion given that Soros is a Holocaust survivor who escaped Budapest as a boy in 1944.

These depictions abound in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and former Soviet states countries like Hungary, where he was born in 1930, and in Poland, as well as in China. Antisemitic conspiracy merchants including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Stew Peters and Dan Bilzerian all join in the chorus of Jew-hating Soros bashing.

Or as European Council on Foreign Relations fellow José Ignacio Torreblanca, writing in Il Mundo outlined:  “Several world leaders accuse the Hungarian magnate of wanting to bring them down. This is the man who brings together the American extreme right and the European extreme left; who connects Vladimir Putin in Russia to Vox in Spain and the Chinese regime to Viktor Orbán in Hungary.”

The framing of Soros as a cosmopolitan criminal mastermind echoes centuries-old falsehoods about Jewish influence and clandestine power. These tropes revive medieval blood libels, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of 1903, and Nazi propaganda about sinister, octopus-like Jewish financiers. Now, as the U.S. president makes good on his stated aim of retribution against his perceived leftist enemies, the Justice Department has reportedly circulated memos ordering prosecutors to explore criminal charges against the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropy network Soros created. The allegations floated—racketeering, wire fraud, even “material support for terrorism”—read like a conspiracist wish list.

Trump has frequently accused Soros of funding the entire Black Lives Matter protests (which is false) and of being behind the President’s indictment on felony charges in 2023. Most recently, he has taken to Truth Social to single out Soros, a veteran donor to Democratic campaigns who has never minced words about his disagreements with the President. In August 2025, Trump wrote: “George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO… Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country!”. RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations charges, originally devised to tackle organized crime, and notably expose the Mafia. Trump was up against RICO-connected charges of heading a  “criminal enterprise” to illegally overturn 2020 presidential election results in the state of Georgia, however now he wants to turn the tables and transform Soros into a mafia-like character.

After the Charlie Kirk assassination by a lone wolf killer, and amid Trump-driven clamour for criminalizing specific NGOs and philanthropic foundations as leftist organizations somehow funding terrorism, Trump repeated the claims about Soros and told NBC radio that Soros “should be in jail” and was a “bad guy”. The narratives were further elaborated in the Oval Office on September 25, when Trump signed a presidential memorandum on “domestic terrorism and organized political violence being perpetrated by radical, politically motivated groups”. He told reporters: “If you look at Soros, could he be involved in this many things? He’s in every story that I read… I guess he’d be a likely candidate.”

On October 1, Trump's Attorney-General, the former Fox News host Pam Bondi told Fox News during a rant about consequences for crime: “You have these woke DAs (District Attorneys) who are Soros-appointed. A lot them are Soros-elected.” Except Soros cannot and does not appoint DAs.

Emily Tamkin, author of The Influence of Soros,  has noted that “blaming Soros, the 95-year-old Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist, financier and Holocaust survivor, for violence in America is ludicrous… It is also antisemitic and, perhaps most pressingly, has a proven history of being dangerous.”

Soros himself in an interview with US public broadcaster NPR two decades ago said: “I consider myself mainstream American of Hungarian origin. Yet the way I am depicted is some kind of an extremist that is a traitor to America and American values. But I am here to preserve those values.”

Musk turns Soros-baiting viral

Elon Musk, owner of X, has relentlessly attacked Soros on his platform since he purchased it in 2022. In May 2023, Musk tweeted: “Soros hates humanity. He wants to erode the fabric of civilization.” He added in another post that Soros “reminds [him] of Magneto,” the X-Men villain who is Jewish.

This prompted Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League to respond: “Soros often is held up by the far-right, using antisemitic tropes, as the source of the world’s problems. To see Elon Musk, regardless of his intent, feed this segment — comparing him to a Jewish supervillain, claiming Soros ‘hates humanity’ — is not just distressing, it’s dangerous: it will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.”

In April 2025, during a West Wing shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, formerly of Soros’s hedge fund, Musk accused him of being a “Soros agent.” Musk’s platform has become a hub of antisemitic hate—much of it focused on Soros. Far-right conspiracy websites like ZeroHedge hailed his 2023 threats of lawsuits against Soros-linked NGOs in Ireland. In France, far-right figure Florian Philippot celebrated Musk’s attack with a triumphant “Excellent!”

While X hosts a cacophony of Soros hate it has more broadly become the most powerful vector of antisemitic conspiracy theories online according to a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

The Open Society response

The Open Society Foundations, today chaired by Soros’s son Alexander, fund civil society projects across the globe: media freedom, Roma rights, academic scholarships, rule of law initiatives. Critics claim this amounts to “meddling in sovereignty.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, though once a beneficiary of a Soros university scholarship, built his authoritarian project by vilifying his onetime benefactor as the arch-enemy of the nation. Orbán’s 2017–18 campaign plastered Hungary with anti-Soros billboards, accusing him of orchestrating mass immigration. The “Stop Soros” law, passed in June 2018, criminalized assistance to asylum seekers. This drove OSF to close its Budapest office later that year.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recycled this rhetoric, attacking Soros for funding NGOs critical of his government. In July 2017, Netanyahu’s son Yair posted on Facebook that Soros was behind protests against him, language later amplified by the Prime Minister’s office. This alignment of nationalist leaders against a Jewish philanthropist has helped launder antisemitic myths into mainstream political discourse.

Alexander Soros has warned for years about that the demonization of his father. In a 2018 op-ed, when George Soros was targeted with mailbombs, an attack described as a threat to US democracy, he highlighted the conclusion of Trump’s 2016 election campaign as “dripping with the poison of antisemitism.” “With Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, things got worse. White supremacists and antisemites like David Duke endorsed his campaign. Mr Trump’s final TV ad famously featured my father; Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs – all of them Jewish – amid dog-whistle language about ‘special interests’ and ‘global special interests,” Soros wrote. “A genie was let out of the bottle, which may take generations to put back in.”

That genie is even more on the loose seven years later. Just last week, as the Trump administration appeared on the brink of announcing charges against Soros and his foundations, Alexander Soros told a panel in New York that his family’s $23 billion organization had not done anything wrong and would retreat from its work on human rights “over my dead body.”

When Soros gives ammunition

As Franc-Tireur reported, Soros has sometimes made choices that his enemies exploited. In 2012, OSF supported the now-banned Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), whose campaign posters reimagining the iconic French revolutionary painting by Jacques-Louis David of the Tennis Court Oath with bearded men and veiled women provoked outrage before being withdrawn by railway authorities. Such decisions have occasionally blurred universalist principles in favor of a naïve multiculturalism, offering critics an opening.

But these episodes do not remotely justify the tidal wave of hatred. As Conspiracy Watch’s Rudy Reichstadt and David Medioni wrote:

“A figure vilified by the conspiracist far right and hated by both Putin and Elon Musk, George Soros is the object of every fantasy — much like Baron Rothschild before him. He is accused of encouraging mass immigration and manipulating nations with his billions. In reality, while one may fault him for a naïve anti-racism and for at times funding Islamist associations, he has devoted his life to defending pluralism and individual freedoms.”

They added:

“The name Soros has become a rallying cry — that of the great International of conspiracists and populists. ‘The Jew Soros… has extended his tentacles into European and American politics,’ one could read not on some obscure antisemitic blog, but in an article by Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, the main Dutch public broadcaster, before the phrase was later removed from its site. The ‘tentacles’ of Soros? An unmistakable allusion to the octopus, a totem animal of conspiracist iconography. Countless memes depict him as a shadow puppeteer or as clutching the globe, in the style of the covers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish plan for world domination.”

Civil society and democracy as the true target of conspiracists

The real danger of the calculated proliferation of conspiracy theories is not just to Soros personally. Responding to Trump’s threats to use the Department of Justice to attack Soros and his Open Society Foundations, historian Timothy Snyder commented:  “This is, without any exaggeration, exactly how Putin and Orbán proceeded—using antisemitism to discredit the idea of civil society and political opposition, and as an excuse to undo the rule of law.”