One of the favorite tactics of the MAGA-AntiVax-Deep State-Trump zealot crowd is to call anyone who challenges their biased and unsupported positions “sheep.” The irony lies in their behavior. They post, repost, and share nonsense without a shred of validity, engaging in the practice without a modicum of actual deliberation or originality.
Thus emulating the behavior of sheep.
Blinded by their veneration of Trump as some sort of savior, they cannot even see themselves as they are. Anyone not in the fold they call suffering from what they call TDS. The reality is that the real TDS, Trump Devotion Syndrome, runs like an antibiotic-resistant bacterium coursing through their blood, driving them like feverish whirling dervishes of blind obedience.
Here’s one example.
A viral meme calls George Soros an “ex-Nazi billionaire,” and the claim collapses on contact with a calendar. (The image is included below, but I purposely left it off the initial post shares; it doesn’t need any more exposure.)
Soros was born in Budapest in August 1930. When Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, he was thirteen years old and Jewish. His father, Tivadar, a lawyer who had survived one war and a Russian prison camp, bought false identity papers and scattered the family across the city.
When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Soros was fourteen, and he turned fifteen that summer. He was a hunted child, not a Nazi, and nothing in the record suggests otherwise.
Jewish Nazis did not exist in any meaningful number. The ideology aimed at the annihilation of Jews, and the regime murdered roughly six million of them, including about half a million Hungarian Jews, most of them deported within weeks in the summer of 1944. Soros lived in that city while it happened. The meme takes a survivor and recasts him as a perpetrator, and it counts on readers too incurious to notice.
The rest of the meme deserves the same scrutiny.
It says Soros “swore to destroy the USA,” with no source, date, or quotation, because none exists.
It says he “owns” Antifa, a loose label for decentralized activists, not a corporation with shareholders.
It says he owns “most of the members of congress (sp),” a claim that would rank as the scandal of the century if a shred of evidence supported it. And, of course, they didn’t even know how to properly use the word “Congress.”
It says he paid for the “spontaneous” protests after the 2016 election, and no investigation has produced proof. It cites ACORN, an organization that dissolved in 2010.
Notice what is missing. There are no documents, no witnesses, no dates, and no dollar figure.
No evidence.
Twenty years in law enforcement taught me to ask how a claim gets supported, and this one has no support at all. It has a photograph and a mood. The meme works like a rumor, making the reader feel as if someone is exposing something sinister.
Legitimate criticism of Soros exists, and it looks nothing like this. His Open Society Foundations fund political and civic causes, and the grants appear in public reports.
Anyone may dislike where the money goes, just as liberals may dislike what the Koch network or Sheldon Adelson funded.
Wealthy donors shaping politics is an old American story, and people should argue it with facts and figures.
The meme skips all of that in favor of an older story: a wealthy Jew secretly controls governments and movements while a gullible public fails to see it. This is the plot of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, forged over a century ago and recycled by people who have never heard of it.
The “Nazi” label is the cruelest flourish because it pins on Soros the ideology behind the effort to exterminate his family.
The final line accuses everyone else of ignorance: “Your ignorance is a great source of his power.” The author is projecting, albeit they may be onto something, just not what they intended. The ignorance on display belongs to the author, who did not check a birth date, and to the reader who shares the post without doing the arithmetic.
Sharing is the only power this meme has. Nobody must be a bigot to pass it along. All it takes is trusting a stranger’s certainty over a thirty-second search.
Ignorance is often passive, but this kind is active.
Someone cultivates it, weaponizes it, and monetizes it, and it thrives because outrage feels like knowledge. The remedy is unglamorous: ask who said it, when, and where the proof is. Do the math on a birth date.
If anyone who knows a birth year and a war date can dismiss a claim, and it still spreads by the millions, the problem is not the billionaire in the picture.
Joe Broadmeadow retired as a captain from the East Providence Police Department after twenty years of service, having commanded the Investigative Services Division and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force with the FBI and DEA. Since founding JEBWizard Creative Media in 2019, he has written crime fiction, the Josh Williams and Hawk Bennett series, and co-authored true crime, YA fantasy, and literary fiction, bringing an investigator’s evidentiary eye to both his novels and his opinion writing. A 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, a grandfather, and a Cumberland High School graduate with deep roots in the town, he attended Providence College and lives in Rhode Island, or wherever his travels take him.
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