RightOnline: No Love for George Soros « The Washington Independent
Jul 31, 2020836 Shares139.3K Views
PITTSBURGH – The response of American for Prosperity activists to the charge that they’re using corporate money to stoke a fake public revolt has been, as I noted yesterday, outright mockery. Phil Kerpenadded a little spin to this in his speech, accusing liberals of projection.
“How many of you were angry before we told you to be angry?” he asked, rhetorically. He explained to them that “George Soros funds a group called the Center for American Progress” and explained how Soros-funded bloggers blew up the Right Principles memo on health care town hall disruption (actually, that was Brian Beutler of TPM).
Direct transcript:
“„We didn’t manufacture any of this anger. It was all out there. But I’ll tell you what was manufactured! What was manufactured was this talking point from the left that said you guys are fake.
“„Now, where did that come from? George Soros funds a group called the Center for American Progress that has a blog called ThinkProgress. And they’ve got a memo, they called it a secret memo, it was posted on someone’s website. Not a member of our organization, not a member of any other organizations I know of. And they said that all of you guys were following this guy’s memo, that you were manufactured. These Soros-funded bloggers, they put it out. As soon as they put it out, the DNC picked it up, they sent it all around town in a press release. They sent it all around town to every liberal group.
“„This was Friday. By the following Monday, the New York Times was reporting it, every Democrat in Congress was talking about it, the White House was talking about it. Now, who was manufacturing talking points? Who was manufacturing anger? They’re using George Soros’s money to manufacture this whole story.
Actually, the liberal campaign to discredit AFP and FreedomWorks resembles the long campaign to turn Soros, a well-known financier who’s donated more than $6 billion to various causes (and funds the Open Society Institute, which has given grants to TWI’s publisher), into a Nazi-collaborating, drug-legalizing, free speech-squelching man-behind-the-curtain of every liberal plot.
Kerpen closed with a surprise attack on Cass Sunstein, the president’s still-unconfirmed nominee for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein, said Kerpen, wanted to enact “notice and take-down” that would allow readers to scrub posts from the internet by alerting “the government.” It’s a strange mutation of an idea Sunstein proposed in “Nudge,” but he’s probably not surprised that a book about “libertarian paternalism” has been latched onto by the right as a blueprint for fascism.
*This post was updated to note TWI’s publisher, Center for Independent Media, has received grants from the Open Society Institute. A list of Center for Independent Media’s supporters is available here. *
Hajra Shannon
Reviewer
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