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I would reverse this. Soros is a big supporter of progressive causes and candidates. Conservatives correctly point that out and are treated like crazed conspiracy theorists for doing so.
They aren't worked up about Murdock and Musk because they're allies. The American colonists bitterly resented the Hessian mercenaries sent to battle them. At the same time they liked Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben and made him a high ranking officer and followed his advice on professionalizing the continental army. Foreign mercenaries who are your allies are of course welcome.
I'd also point out that the Koch brothers were the equivalent for the other side. People notice motivated billionaires like them or Bloomberg funding ideological groups to influence American politics. Soros isn't special in this regard.
I'm going to roll my response into @porkpiehat here, since the thrust is largely the same.
I'm sorry, but no. A perennial problem with cranks is that they find something that is true, conflate it with something that looks kind of like the thing that is true, and then run wild with tenuous inferences from the factoid. Right-wingers don't merely claim that George Soros gives lots of money to progressive causes. There is a whole raft of Soros-related crank theories which go well beyond "Soros gives lots of money to progressive candidates" or even "Soros is the architect behind the American progressive movements" (untrue, but at least not totally absurd) and into "Soros is a global puppetmaster orchestrating civil unrest around the world."
I disagree. Yes, people get worked up about wealthy donors that oppose them and don't get worked up about the ones that support them, but Soros is not treated in a manner equivalent to Koch or Bloomberg.
-- porkpiehat
I don't really buy the argument that it's because he's a foreigner getting involved in local elections. At the very least, I don't think that's anywhere near sufficient to explain the level of paranoia around Soros specifically, which are too wide-ranging and too enduring (my friends were making jokes about Sorosbux like ten years ago, for example) to be explained by something as simple as "Soros DAs". Soros is an American citizen, so compare/contrast RW reactions to other foreign-born billionaires like Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk or Miriam Adelson. He's not the only billionaire donor quietly putting significant money into state/local elections.
I get that a lot of it is just "It's okay when Our Guy does it, but Soros isn't Our Guy," but as mentioned, he's not even the only lib doing it. No one seems to think Mike Bloomberg is hiring crisis actors.
I agree Bloomberg gets too little heat given what he does. He is distorting all of American politics through his large donations. "Why doesn't this Democratic candidate pump the brakes on the gun grabbing talk in order to win in their purple or purple-red district? Why are they literally shouting that they're coming for my AR15?" Because Bloomberg.
In my personal experience someone rightfully points out that Soros is funding something and then they get smeared as a Jew-hating conspiritard. Neutral and correct statements about his donations and their impact are lumped in with the crank theories. I don't engage with the cranks. I just notice normie correct complaints about Soros smeared as crankery.
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