Fox News Shuts Down Newt Gingrich For Linking George Soros to Violent Protests

Former GOP congressman Newt Gingrich was cut off by a Fox News panel after linking Goerge Soros to the instances of violence that have happened at Black Lives Matter protests.

Gingrich was talking on a segment focused on the cost of the damage caused by some violent protesters, which according to Fox News, has meant that more than $1 billion has been paid in insurance claims.

He claimed that the "number one problem" in cities like Portland, New York and around the country which have seen protests against police brutality since late May due to the killing of George Floyd, is "Goerge Soros-elected, anti-police, pro-criminal district attorneys who refuse to keep people locked up".

"You cannot solve this problem, and both Harris and Biden have talked very proudly about what they call progressive district attorneys, progressive district attorneys are anti-police, pro-criminal and overwhelmingly elected with George Soros money and they're a major cause of the violence we're seeing because they keep putting the violent criminals back on the street," he went on to say.

The Fox News host Melissa Francis then said: "I'm not sure we need to bring George Soros into this. I was going to say you get the last word, speaker...", to which Gingrich continued to claim that Soros paid for the protests, asking why couldn't the "millions of dollars" be discussed on the panel.

"No, he didn't," said one of the other panellists. "I agree with Melissa that he didn't need to be a part of this conversation".

Gingrich then said: "Okay... so it's verboten."

Some of the reactions to Gingrich's claims being silenced have come from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate for Congress from Georgia, who retweeted a post from conservative activist Jack Posobiec:

Another GOP candidate for Congress, David Dudenhoefer from Michigan, also tweeted about the incident, saying he had not realised "how left Fox News has become until this very moment":

On September 9, Gingrich himself tweeted: "Why are some in the left so afraid of our mentioning George Soros' name that they scream anti-semitic? It IS his name. He IS funding pro-criminal, anti-police district attorneys. Why is the left afraid of the facts?"

Who is George Soros?

Goerge Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist, who has founded and donated more than $30 billion to the Open Society Foundations, a grantmaking organization focused on social justice and public health, amongst other aims.

In August, Soros said in an interview marking his 90th birthday that the Black Lives Matter movement "really matters."

"This is the first time that a large majority of the population, other than Black people, recognizes that there is systemic discrimination against Blacks that can be traced back to slavery," he stated.

Soros has frequently been targeted in anti-semitic ways by conservatives due to his funding for such progressive causes and Democratic politics.

Donald Trump Jr. once shared a conspiracy theory accusing Soros—a Jew who posed as a Christian with his family to survive Nazi-occupied Hungary during World War Two—of being a Nazi himself.