Bowers directly posted a comment referring to “the overwhelming jew problem.” He spoke of the U.S. having a Jewish “infestation,” and reposted another user’s anti-Semitic comment: “Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.”

The Soros/caravan theory dates to late March, when an earlier wave of migrants was heading north, according to an extensive blog post on Medium by Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. One Twitter post, which had no factual foundation, stated, “Caravan of 1,500 Central American Migrant Families Crossing Mexico to Reach U.S. Border All organized by Soros groups to cause more division.”

The rumors circulated on closed Facebook groups and various right-wing websites, as well as on left-wing sites seeking to debunk them. They cropped up again in recent weeks when a new caravan started receiving attention among conservatives. President Trump warned without evidence that people from the Middle East were among the Central Americans. A Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz (R), posted a video on Twitter of someone supposedly handing cash to migrants to “storm the US border,” and he asked: “Soros?”

Lou Dobbs, host of a show on Fox Business, tweeted on Oct. 23, “Do you think the Radical Left is working with Central and South American socialists and leftists to organize and support the migrant caravan?”