Various groups opposing same-sex marriage have been reduced to importing rightwing conspiracy theories to explain why public opinion does not seem to be trending in their direction. And they have been using some ideas with antisemitic overtones in order to whip up confusion and fear – the only things they really have on their side.

The Australian Conservatives are just the latest group to invoke the figure of George Soros as the shadowy string-puller behind the fight for marriage equality.

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Sifting through the lurid Islamophobic and homophobic images on the group’s car crash of a Facebook page, you can find a meme urging the group’s supporters to “Stop the Globalist Agenda: Vote No”.

Australian Conservatives Facebook post from 12 September 2017 with an anti-George Soros, anti-same sex marriage message. Photograph: Facebook

Alexander Reid Ross, Portland State University lecturer and author of the study of fascism, Against the Fascist Creep, says that the meme “is definitely antisemitic”. And it is of a piece with a long trend on the racist and radical right to scapegoat Soros, just as other rich Jews were in the past.



“Soros represents to the antisemite today what Rothschild would have represented to a fascist in the 1930s: ‘the international Jew’ who is weakening ‘our’ ethnic stock by diluting our cultural values with cosmopolitan ideas that invite a foreign invasion of immigrants and terrorists.”

He says that it’s not so surprising that opponents of marriage equality would introduce Soros into a conversation that is really about civil rights.

“The far right views the patriarchal family as the centerpiece of society and the economy. When they see it as threatened, they point to anything they can nominate as a foreign influence on that process.

“That’s how we go from marriage equality to a conversation about Jews undermining society.”

Ross also points out how a legitimate concern about the influence of money on politics is focused on one, foreign, Jewish actor as a way of funnelling people to the far right.

In a world of billionaires exerting political influence, the right just happens to spotlight the most prominent Jew.

Identifying Soros with “globalism” is a well-worn tactic on the far right. The conspiracist broadcaster and internet personality, Alex Jones, has built a career on attributing all manner of ills – from gay frogs to extra-strong marijuana – to the machinations of Soros and a shadowy cabal of globalists.

Recently, Jones and others on the far right scrambled to blame Soros for the murder in Charlottesville, even though a member of an antisemitic white nationalist group has been arrested and charged for it.

Along with Jones, rightwing media figures like Glenn Beck have also promulgated Soros conspiracy theories. In 2010, Beck aired an hour-long special entitled The Puppet Master, which was condemned by Jewish groups and the Anti-Defamation League.

On the so-called “alt right”, Soros is frequently depicted as a manipulator whose goal is to undermine and corrode western civilisation. He is accused of paying “antifa” activists, and even of having been a Nazi collaborator. The latter suggestion has been serially debunked.

And the alt right’s internet culture has eroded some of the taboos around public antisemitism that had broad acceptance in western polities from the end of the second world war.

“You wouldn’t have seen the Australian Conservatives ad if it weren’t for the antisemitic memes normalising attitudes that are even more extreme than the ones it expresses,” Ross says.

“The Overton Window has shifted”.

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Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby has brought Soros up repeatedly in relation to campaign funding. He told the ABC in August that “We don’t have George Soros’s overseas money like we saw in Ireland with the pro-same-sex marriage campaign” (they didn’t quote any evidence he might have presented about Soros’s decisive influence in Ireland). Also in August, the AFR quoted Shelton as saying: “We don’t have Alan Joyce, we don’t have George Soros, we don’t have the corporates co-opted into this”. Around the same time, Shelton appeared on Steve Price’s talkback show with the same complaint, making the point that Soros was Jewish: “We don’t have Qantas and Alan Joyce and corporate Australia behind us. And we don’t have George Soros, the Hungarian-Jewish multi-billionaire philanthropist who funds leftwing causes all over the world.”

Soros’s Open Society foundation is one of many organisations who have, in the past, funded some of the groups leading the fight for marriage equality but the fact that Soros is singled out among so many other supporters of progressive causes should make us all question why. The debate over same sex marriage has been anything but “respectful”, and homophobia is not the only prejudice it has unleashed.