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Baptizing Breitbart: Eric Metaxas, George Barna among evangelicals promoting conspiracy theories about international Jewish financiers

Baptizing Breitbart: Eric Metaxas, George Barna among evangelicals promoting conspiracy theories about international Jewish financiers

Last updated on: September 29, 2016 at 8:29 pm by Fred Clark

Baptizing Breitbart: Eric Metaxas, George Barna among evangelicals promoting conspiracy theories about international Jewish financiers 2016-09-29T20:29:59-04:00 Fred Clark

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Eric Metaxas is a very silly man. The Bonhoeffer cosplayer, Trump-cheerleader, and Coulter-loving Manhattan Declarer continues his long descent by cobbling together yet another Manifesto-releasing right-wing “Christian” organization.

This one is called the “American Association of Evangelicals,” and I at first expected it to be more or less in line with the other white Republican culture-warrior outfits that make up the direct-mail fundraising industry often referred to as the religious right.

But it’s not. This bunch is a whole lot nuttier. And a whole lot more openly anti-Semitic.

Basically it’s Breitbart, baptized. (Their manifesto is speckled with links to that site and to other far right and alt-right media.)

This is what happens when you take the alt-right Soros obsession and mix in a big dollop of Bircher nonsense as filtered through the literary works of Tim LaHaye. And it’s some pretty vile shit.

If you’ve never heard of George Soros, then congratulations — you’re like most people. He’s a billionaire who made his fortune investing in and trading currency (or, as I like to call it, “gambling”). Unlike some other billionaires, he gives a lot of money away — some to philanthropy (he just pledged $500 million for aid for refugees) and some to politics, usually liberal/left politics. He grew up in Nazi-occupied Hungary, so he’s got a thing about right-wing politics.

Given that much information, it might be understandable for someone with generally conservative politics to resent this rich guy who writes big checks for political causes they dislike — albeit with a begrudging respect for his other charity. Conservatives, of course, have their own stable of billionaire benefactors. Rational conservatives are aware of that and so don’t see anything uniquely threatening or unsettling about Soros.

But irrational conservatives — i.e., the alt-right, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the sort of talk-radio demagogues who are too far out there even for Fox News — are obsessed with Soros. They see or imagine his fingers everywhere — his tentacles everywhere. The entirety of “the Left” that they fear and oppose, they imagine, is being secretly funded by George Soros.

Pollster George Barna, radio host Eric Metaxas, and theologian Wayne Grudem all signed their names to a toxic melange of bigoted alt-right conspiracy theories.

Because, you see, George Soros is Jewish. He’s a Jewish international financier. He’s tailor-made for squeezing into the fevered fantasy they’ve imagined for centuries. Earlier generations of Birchers and anti-Masons and tinfoil-hat Illuminati conspiracy theorists had to make do with the Rockefellers. That wasn’t nearly as satisfying for them. Baptist monopolists didn’t fit the casting call nearly as well as a bona fide Jewish international financier.

This is what we talk about when we talk about George Soros: The idea of a vast, secretive Jewish conspiracy of secretive Jews conspiring secretly to control the whole world through their cunning international finance.

This is why places like Breitbart and their more explicit comrades at Stormfront are obsessed with George Soros. Any blogger to the left of Pat Buchanan has heard from these folks repeatedly over the years — accusing us of living large on our monthly paychecks from Soros. They say this based on two key assumptions that are simply bewildering if you don’t share or understand the full extent of the anti-Semitic venom behind them: 1) That Soros is presumed to be everywhere; 2) That Soros himself, and any association with him, is self-evidently bad.

Those same assumptions are the entire basis for this manifesto from the “American Association of Evangelicals.” Their statement is soaked, start-to-finish, in those two assumptions.

It’s also full of lies debunked long ago — really off-the-wall stuff about a “growth industry trafficking in human baby organs” and “Forced refugee resettlement … in collusion with the United Nations.”

And it suggests that Black Lives Matter is just a puppet of the vast Jewish conspiracy, designed to “heighten racial divisions and tensions” and to “instigate riots.” The uppity blacks, you see, aren’t just outside instigators — they’re outside instigators paid by the Jewish international financiers.

This is some vile, dishonest, hateful, early-20th-century style anti-Semitic propaganda.

Any “American Evangelical” who freely chooses to “associate” their name with this fetid garbage is telling us exactly who and exactly what they are. We’ve seen this shit before. Never again.

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