[I am moved to repost this essay from 2023 upon refreshing my memory about how Taylor Lorenz, the scummy journalist featured in the previous post, habitually accuses critics of misogyny and bias against women whenever they accurately call her what she is, a vile, corrupted hack. I also have been getting quite a few attack emails of late stemming from Ethics Alarms posts, and this is a window into my world.—JM]
I had a strange experience last week. After posting Paul W. Schlecht’s estimable Comment of the Day regarding “Do something!” hysterics regarding gun control, I received an off-site email from a reader who complained that Paul mentioning “Uncle George Soros” in a list of the “Who’s Who of Climate Criminal Lefties” employed a “a “phrase universally understood to be an anti-Semitic slur” and that “it is horrible and unforgivable to amplify bigotry in any form but under the banner of Ethics is even worse.” honest, irresponsible and disgusting habit of defaulting to racism, sexism, xenophobia, ageism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of bigotry to deflect legitimate criticism and intimidate as well as demonize those who oppose them. This reflex has become the predominant weapon of the Left in recent years, instead of, you know, things like facts, logic, common sense, history and reality. It has to be broken of this habit, by patriots of good faith and courage who aren’t afraid to say, “F..sorry… Bite me!“
People often write me directly when they are too timid to present a dubious opinion before the tough crowd here. I was very polite and even grateful to the hitherto unknown lurker, and confessed that if “Uncle George” was truly “universally” known to be an anti-Semitic slur, I had missed it, and I asked the guy to enlighten me. He then sent a link to an ADL opinion piece suggesting that conservative and Republican criticism of the billionaire’s copious funding of various progressive groups and causes was all motivated by anti-Semitism.
This ticked me off, and I wrote back,
I assumed that “Uncle George” had some special meaning: clearly, you just mean deriding Soros itself is anti-Semitic, which is, frankly, bullshit. He’s a billionaire who supports progressive causes, some of them Far Left. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s the flip side of the Koch Brothers. It’s his money, and he can do what he wants with it; much of what he wants to do with it is bad stuff in my view, but I don’t see how that has anything to so with his ethnicity. This line in the ADL piece—“A person who promotes a Soros conspiracy theory may not intend to promulgate antisemitism. But Soros’ Jewish identity is so well-known that in many cases it is hard not to infer that meaning”—discredits the whole article.There’s nothing sinister about Soros supporting the campaigns of really bad prosecutors, but they are still really bad prosecutors. There’s nothing sinister about his spending so much supporting radical environmental groups either, though it’s a waste of money.I know all about Soros and how he’s the Right’s boogeyman, but attributing that to anti-antisemitism is lazy and intellectually dishonest.Did you bother to check to see what I’ve written about Soros? Not much, because I haven’t seen him do anything unethical. I did write one long defense of Soros, at the very beginning of the blog, however. I defended him, and praised him. I wouldn’t change a word today.
This jerk then writes back, “Your first response to me was that you were “at sea” when it came to Soros, but in your second you said, ‘I know all about Soros’. Sounds disingenuous to me.” I quit reading after that, and also quit being nice. I am happy to engage with fair, serious, sincere readers on my private email account, but oddly, a disproportionate number of those who avail themselves of the opportunity abuse it. So I wrote,
I get it! You’re an asshole.I SAID that I was “at sea” regarding how “Uncle George” was somehow an anti-Semitic slur. I do know all about Soros, and never said I didn’t.You can apologize for this “gotcha!” crap, or stay out of my inbox. I’ve tried to respond to your concerns fairly and politely, and your response is to falsely accuse me of lying.Jerk. Fuck off.
I have to confess that I probably used “fuck off'” as opposed to my usual “Bite me!” because I had been streaming “Succession,” the rich family/cut-throat business politics drama in which literally everyone says “Fuck off!” in almost every conversation, even friendly ones. The bon mot in not really in my repertoire, but after hearing the phase about a thousand times in the span of a few days, it momentarily felt right to me, and it was certainly well-earned. (He did, by the way, indeed fuck off).
I wasn’t going to mention the episode until I saw that my old pal, the Washington Post’s biased-but-conflicted-about -it factchecker Glenn Kessler had issued issue a “Factchecker” column declaring that “incendiary” claims that Soros had “funded” Manhattan’s political hit man qua prosecutor Alvin Bragg (focusing on a tweet by Donald Trump to that effect) were lies. Kessler also asserted that such critiques were motivated by anti-Semitism, writing,
Ethics Alarms 