Louie Gohmert Pushes Baseless Smear That George Soros Was Nazi Collaborator During Fox Segment

Appearing on Fox Business’s Varney and Co. this morning, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) pushed a vicious and baseless smear in which he claimed liberal financier and conservative boogeyman George Soros was a Nazi collaborator and confiscated property from his fellow Jews during World War II.

During a conversation with host Stuart Varney about Google preparing to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next week amid accusations that the tech giant is censoring conservative speech, Gohmert brought George Orwell. This led him to say that Orwell got it right with 1984 but just got the year wrong before pivoting to Soros.

“And you mentioned Orwell, it reminds me of another George — George Soros,” the ultra-conservative lawmaker stated. “Because Google is born in a free country and then they go over and oppress others, help oppress it in other countries.”

He continued, “George Soros is supposed to be Jewish but you wouldn’t know it from the damage he inflicted on Israel and the fact that he turned on fellow Jews helped take the property that they owned. This same kind of thing. Google coming from a free country, helping the oppressed but China has been oppressing for a while.”

The claim that Soros was a Nazi collaborator when he was a teenager during World War II has long been spread in conservative circles, despite it being debunked over and over. But that apparently hasn’t stopped a sitting congressman from spouting it off on live TV.

Varney, meanwhile, quickly moved on and steered the conversation back towards their complaints about Google, rather than going down the rabbit hole of alt-right conspiracies about the Jewish philanthropist.

Earlier this year, Fox banned frequent Fox Business guest Chris Farrell after he parroted the anti-Semitic “Zionist-occupied government” conspiracy theory about Soros during a Lou Dobbs Tonight appearance. Meanwhile, Gohmert told Dobbs after that banning that it isn’t anti-Semitic to criticize Soros, something Dobbs reacted positively to.

We have reached out to Fox Business for comment.

UPDATE: Varney addressed the matter in the following hour, saying the following:

“And the last hour, one of our guests, Congressman Louie Gohmert for some reason went out of his way to bring up George Soros and made unsubstantiated and false allegations against it. I want to make clear those views are not shared by me, this program or anyone at Fox Business.”

And later on in the afternoon, Gohmert released a statement doubling down on his Soros conspiracy theories, saying it is “a fact” that the billionaire assisted Nazis in confiscating property from Jews during World War II.

Watch the clip above, via Fox Business.