Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto pushed back on a claim by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) that progressive billionaire George Soros has funded groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
“There’s a push right now on the part of some of these institutions to negotiate with the protesters, and to go ahead and put up for a vote any measure that would sort of call for divesting of funds or investments in Israel,” Cavuto told Mace on his show “Your World with Neil Cavuto. “What do you think of that?”
“Well, they want disclosure and divestment,” Mace responded. “I want firings. I want people to be expelled. I want those who are here illegally or here on a student visa and participating in these things deported. It’s a very different, I think, scenario, if these were peaceful protests, if this were about the First Amendment, I think it’d be something very different, but it’s not.”
Mace then claimed several pro-Palestine groups involved in the student protests are being backed financially by Soros, Jewish Holocaust survivor.
“You’ve got groups that are funded by George Soros. There are Palestinian rights groups that I believe are involved, funded by George Soros, and they need to be off of our college campuses if they’re committing violence, full stop,” Mace continued.
“Alright,” Cavuto said before pushing back on her claim. “There’s no proof that these are funded by George Soros, by the way… their folks have denied that. But, we’ll see exactly where all of this money is coming from.”
“We’ll agree to disagree, I guess,” Mace said in response.
Jewish Democrats have criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for suggesting, similarly to Mace, that Soros is somehow behind the pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses.
Johnson, in an interview with NewsNation’s “The Hill,” put forth the notion that the recent university protests against Israel’s ongoing conflict with Palestinian militant group Hamas are not grassroots operations.
“I think [FBI officials] need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by, I don’t know, George Soros or overseas entities,” Johnson said. “There’s a sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a post on the social platform X that “not even 24 hours after passing a do-nothing bill under the guise of ‘fighting antisemitism,’ @SpeakerJohnson drags out one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in world.”
The Hill has reached out to Soros.
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