Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

‘Lou Dobbs’ Show Yanked By Fox For Anti-Semitic Dog Whistle On Night Of Synagogue Massacre

(JTA) — Fox Business Network announced that it is pulling a recent broadcast of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” featuring a guest commenting on the “Soros-occupied State Department.”

“We condemn the rhetoric by the guest on Lou Dobbs Tonight,” said Gary Schreier, the network’s senior vice president of programming, in a statement. “This episode was a repeat which has now been pulled from all future airings.”

The episode in question originally aired on Thursday Oct. 25, and featured Chris Farrell, a director of the conservative group Judicial Watch. In an interview with Dobbs, Farrell claimed that the highly publicized caravan of migrants traveling through South America was being illegally organized by leftist groups who are receiving money from the “Soros-occupied State Department.”

Farrell made the comments, and the Fox Business Network aired them, three days after an explosive device was found in the mailbox outside of the New York home of Jewish billionaire George Soros, a favorite target for activists and politicians on the right for his deep spending on liberal and pro-democracy causes

The decision to pull the episode comes just days after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R.-Calif., took down a tweet accusing George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg of trying to “buy” the upcoming elections for Democrats

Criticism of the “Lou Dobbs Tonight” episode erupted on social media after it was rebroadcast Saturday night, the same day as the shootings at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh.

Soros has come under intense fire recently from Republicans and the right in the United States. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and President Donald Trump claimed that Soros funded the protesters at the recent demonstrations in Washington, D.C., over then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani retweeted a Twitter user who called Soros the “anti-Christ.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.