DISINFO: George Soros denies funding the US riots but evidence proves it
SUMMARY
George Soros denied funding the US riots, but evidence refuted him. Rudolf Giuliani, Donald Trump’s private lawyer, openly accused the mega-speculator of funding the terrorist riots in the US promoted by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. It is significant that, unusually, both the spokesperson for Soros’ Open Society Foundations Michael Vachon and Soros himself came out to deny it. However, internet sites showed mysterious piles of bricks found in the main cities where protests are taking place, along with a compromising video. Black Lives Matter receives more than one-third of its funding from George Soros. And in The New York Times, a newspaper close to both Soros and the Clintons, commentator Farhad Manjoo is exultant that “Black Lives Matter is winning”.
RESPONSE
Despite what is claimed in the headline, no evidence is provided to support the affirmation that billionaire George Soros is funding the US protests. The article is repeating a baseless conspiracy theory promoted by some US conservative commentators, in line with recurrent pro-Kremlin narratives framing US protests as a staged ‘colour revolution’ and portraying Soros as an evil master behind almost every protest around the world. Unfounded claims against Soros exploded alongside US protests for racial justice after the death of African American George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in May 2020, mostly accusing him of funding Antifa and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In this case, the affirmation that one-third of the BLM budget comes from the Open Society Foundation seems to be derived from an article in the The Washington Times, which explained that several US foundations created a fund aiming to raise 100 million dollars in six years for the Movement for Black Lives coalition. The article added, without providing any source, that the Open Society Foundations gave 33 million dollars in grants to the Black Lives Matter. This last claim was later repeated in several right-wing outlets, but it has been debunked by PolitiFact and The Daily Beast. The affirmation that bricks were strategically placed in protesting spots has been widely debunked by Factcheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes, among other sites. The alleged video mentioned in the article does not prove that people are being paid to protest (despite the claim of the person who tweeted it, who, in any case, did not mention Soros). The New York Times is an independent newspaper with no links to either George Soros or the Clinton family. You can see many other examples of disinformation about George Soros in our database, such as his alleged promotion of protests in Mexico, Catalonia, Romania, Russia, Armenia or the Czech Republic (among many other places), his destabilising manoeuvres all over the world, his sponsorship of the film “Joker” as a tutorial for future ‘colour revolutions’, his attempts to destabilise Europe (mainly through the promotion of massive immigration) or his adoption of the term “conspiracy theory” to discredit those who speak the truth.