The Anti-Soros Strategy at the Heart of Trump’s War on Progressive…

On September 15th, five days after a gunman killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance guest-hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from his White House office. In his monologue, Vance baselessly blamed leftists for Kirk’s killing and vowed to investigate liberal nonprofits, specifically naming the Open Society Foundations (OSF)—the George Soros-funded philanthropy that gives money to promote democracy and human rights—as one of the White House’s targets. “They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer,” Vance said. “And how do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family.” Vance’s remarks were part of a campaign initiated by right-wing media outlets, conservative think tanks, and Republican politicians to blame progressive funders for Kirk’s assassination. President Donald Trump himself joined in, telling NBC News that Soros “should be put in jail.”

Two days after Vance’s remarks, the Capital Research Center (CRC), a conservative think tank dedicated to investigating progressive philanthropists and advocacy groups, published their own attack on OSF. The report, authored by CRC investigative researcher Ryan Mauro, advances a series of incendiary—and, experts say, dubious and inaccurate—claims about OSF. Many of them center on the allegation that OSF funds “terrorism” through its grants to organizations working on Palestinian human rights, which the report accuses of supporting Palestinian militant groups. Other parts of the report focus on OSF’s funding of domestically focused activist groups that support protests against police brutality and action against fossil fuel companies, which the report attempts to link to criminal violations using vague chains of connection. For instance, it tries to tie the environmental group Sunrise to alleged arson at Atlanta’s “Cop City” police training center, all because Sunrise raised bail money for those arrested for protesting the site. “There’s a lot of baseless claims, and they don’t use facts to back them up,” said Ashleigh Subramanian-Montgomery, the acting director of the nonprofit-focused resource center Charity & Security Network. In a statement sent to Jewish Currents, OSF said that “the claims in this [CRC] report are false and reckless,” and that they “unequivocally condemn all forms of violence, especially terrorism.” “All our activities are peaceful and lawful, and all our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and be in compliance with the law,” a spokesperson for the organization wrote. (Disclosure: OSF has given grants to Jewish Currents.)

Despite the report’s thinly-sourced claims, Mauro has referred to it as “the smoking gun that we believe that President Trump, if he’s informed of it, can use to go after Soros’ network of hate in various ways”—and has succeeded in his goal of reaching the federal government. The report caught the attention of the Department of Justice last month, when senior department official Aakash Singh instructed multiple US attorneys to draw up plans to investigate OSF on a number of possible charges—including material support for terrorism and arson, according to the New York Times. The DOJ directive cited the CRC report, with Singh requesting that the attorneys determine whether the report’s allegations were enough to justify a criminal investigation. But even the report’s authors say the report does not point to a specific crime: In an October 10th interview with The New York Times, CRC president Scott Walter noted that “they [OSF] have to have funded something bad and they have to have known they were funding something bad [to prove a criminal case]. We actually did not make either of those claims that a prosecutor would need to make.” Still, Walter told the Times that he supported federal prosecutors investigating OSF, saying that attorneys might turn up something his organization had not. A DOJ spokesperson told Jewish Currents the agency does not comment on “potential litigation or investigations,” but added that “if organizations threaten the safety of Americans and violate US law, we will pursue every lawful avenue—investigations and prosecutions to hold them accountable. Terror has no place here.”

The plans to investigate OSF are the latest instance of right-wing targeting of Soros, who for decades has been portrayed by conservatives as a shadowy and nefarious influence on societies around the world. This anti-Soros narrative, which often makes use of antisemitic tropes, has been taken up by authoritarian leaders around the world—from Hungary to India to Turkey. Many of these regimes have portrayed OSF’s funding of pro-democracy groups in their countries as a bid to foment instability, and have used such accusations to justify crackdowns on their opposition. The resulting climate of repression in Hungary and Turkey led OSF to stop its operations in those countries.

This strategy is now being pursued by the Trump administration, forming a key plank of its broader effort to crack down on progressives. In particular, the administration has used the aftermath of Kirk’s killing to push multiple federal agencies to scrutinize and investigate liberal and leftist institutions, including pro-Palestine ones. “There have long been attacks on Soros and Open Society by those who want to shut down the left, and there have long been attacks on the pro-Palestinian movement using false accusations of terrorism as a way to discredit critics of Israeli policy. This report marries those two attacks,” said Emily Tamkin, a global affairs journalist and author of the book The Influence of Soros. In doing so, this strategy seeks to justify the launch of a wide-reaching investigation with chilling consequences for progressives across issues who rely on philanthropists for funding. “The bone-chilling part,” according to Tamkin, “is that the federal government is now taking up this cause.”

In recent months, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly turned to the CRC to amplify their campaign against progressives and the pro-Palestine movement. “Capital Research is a main node in the right-wing network targeting progressive funders—and they’re becoming more and more influential,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, the co-director of Funding Freedom, a group organizing philanthropic support for Palestine. On December 10th, 2024, CRC president Walter gave testimony to the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, where he accused those protesting Israel’s bombardment of having ties to “foreign powers” and of being in thrall to a “violence-soaked ideology.” In March, The New York Times reported that Walter had “briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques” as part of a Trump administration push to investigate Democratic Party-aligned nonprofits. In July, Walter gave testimony again, this time to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, now inveighing against groups that defended immigrants and trans people and criticizing the federal government for awarding such groups grants to provide legal services, job apprenticeship programs, and worker safety training.

But CRC’s influence has reached new heights after the Kirk assassination, as evidenced by the DOJ’s use of the group’s report as the justification for an investigation into OSF. “There is a right-wing movement that has dreamed of smashing these groups for some time, and they see in Trump someone that will let them do so,” said Chip Gibbons, the policy director of the civil liberties group Defending Rights and Dissent.

The CRC report casts disruptive protest as “domestic terrorism,” while simultaneously claiming that OSF is funding grantees that support “terrorism” in Israel/Palestine. “Open Society’s philanthropy blurs into complicity” by “fueling groups that celebrate violent uprisings, train militants, and endorse terrorist movements,” it says. In addition to implying that OSF is violating counter-terrorism laws and calling for federal investigations into its grantees, the report suggests that its findings could be used by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to revoke the “tax-exempt statuses of Open Society and its grantees.” Further, it offers the administration a list for who to target with such measures—naming dozens of organizations funded by OSF, from the anti-war group Dissenters to the Arab American Association of New York—and alleging that some of the groups have engaged in illegal activity. For instance, it claims that the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance “took part” in a “crime” of “economic sabotage” “by encouraging people to participate in a picket at an Oakland port as part of an effort to prevent the Israeli shipping giant ZIM from docking and unloading goods. (A spokesman for the port told The New York Times the protest was peaceful, consisting of “just a bunch of people holding signs.”) Vilkomerson said the CRC report and associated efforts are part of an effort to create “a fun-house world where standard progressive funding for movements is nefarious, if not criminal, all while right-wing funders like the Koch brothers are beyond reproach.”

Analysts say that the CRC’s focus on OSF’s support for Palestinians appears to be a strategic gambit to use existing counter-terrorism laws to target law-abiding domestic nonprofits. The US government maintains a list of foreign terrorist organizations, which include Palestinian political groups with armed wings; US groups and citizens are legally barred from supporting such entities. After 9/11, laws against providing “material support” for such organizations were used to prosecute and convict those who sent humanitarian aid to Palestinians—most prominently in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which five men were jailed on the charge that they were financing Hamas. Federal prosecutors did not allege that the foundation sent money to support violence, but instead successfully argued to a jury that the Palestinian charities the fund sent money to had helped Hamas win the “hearts and minds” of Palestinians. “The anti-terrorism apparatus built up after 9/11 around foreign terrorist organizations is the easiest legal way to try to pin things on progressive networks,” said Vilkomerson. “They’re clearly trying to jam through as much as they can on the flimsiest of possible pretexts to see what they can get away with.”

The White House is now threatening to use both counter-terrorism laws and the IRS to cripple OSF. On September 25th, Trump issued an executive order directing law enforcement to “investigate” and “disrupt” domestic terrorist organizations, including their funders. And, according to an October 9th Reuters report, the Trump administration is now explicitly aiming to investigate the “financial networks” behind what it calls “domestic terrorism,” planning to “deploy America’s counter-terrorism apparatus”—including the FBI, the DOJ, and the IRS—to do so. The White House also sent Reuters a list of nine organizations it accuses of financing or planning protests where alleged incidents of vandalism or “violence” occurred. OSF is included on that list, alongside Jewish anti-occupation groups IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), both of which are also named in the CRC report as OSF grantees. “The Trump administration is using the murder of Charlie Kirk to consolidate authoritarian control as much as possible and accelerate the Project Esther playbook, which we understand as a path for dismantling civil society by focusing first on Palestine solidarity organizing,” said Stefanie Fox, executive director of JVP, referring to the Heritage Foundation proposal released ahead of the 2024 election to provide a blueprint for anti-left repression. “Now these tools are deployable against the wider swath of anyone opposed to Trump’s agenda.”

While there is no “domestic terrorism” category that can be used to charge people for federal crimes, Gibbons told Jewish Currents the federal government has nevertheless used the category historically to encompass “activity far beyond just the type of violence one associates with terrorism,” using it to investigate and spy on left-wing movements. For example, in the early 2000s, the FBI used counter-terrorism resources to spy on School of the Americas Watch, a faith-based group dedicated to scrutinizing militarism in Latin America. In 2014, the FBI investigated over a dozen environmental activists after classifying them as national security threats. “By labeling his opponents terrorists—a view clearly shared by many within the counter-terrorism bureaucracy—Trump not only demonizes them, he opens the door for an escalation of spying by the likes of the FBI,” Gibbons said.

For now, it remains to be seen whether the IRS will, in fact, strip the tax-exempt status of OSF or its grantees, or if the DOJ will obtain indictments against the group. But Tamkin noted that the consequences of the terrorism accusations alone are severe. “Of course, it’s scarier if there are indictments and they make good on their threats. But the threat itself is a problem,” she said. “These organizations are one of the checks that we have against aspiring authoritarians. When they are discredited as being threats to the nation, it makes it so much more difficult for them to do their work.” Furthermore, Subramanian-Montgomery warned that while the Trump administration is beginning with OSF, the threat they are posing goes beyond the philanthropy group. “They want to scare many funders across the progressive spectrum away from continuing to support the groups they give money to,” she said. “All of this is being used to kill dissent at every step.”