Transcription
Is George Soros the evil puppet master so many people think he is? Or is he a wealthy donor who's been falsely turned into a boogeyman by his political opponents? I'm Ken Leort and that's the elephant in the room I'll try to answer as fairly as I can.
That's super tricky to do here because almost everyone is working an angle on this one. I've read tons of stories about him. I've watched documentaries and virtually all of them have a clear agenda. He's either a misunderstood philanthropist or the devil himself. I'll first explain why I think he's become essentially a perfect villain for millions of people around the world. I'll look at how he got rich, the controversies surrounding that, as well as the more controversial web of influence he's created with his money. I'll dispel a popular but wrong myth about him, as well as tell you a first-hand story of what it's like to see that web of influence from the inside. Is he just another billionaire donor, or is he something different?
So, if you invent a perfect villain for conservatives, you can't do better than George Soros. He checks every box. Huge wealth, global reach, shadowy influences, and politics that to many are aimed at undermining traditional institutions and values. And I hate to criticize somebody's looks, but the dude really does look and sound a lot like a Bond villain. Now, he may not have sharks with freaking lasers on their heads, but behind his veil, he's destabilized currencies, secretly bankrolled media, and reshaped societies in ways that few people understand. I didn't even understand it as much until I did this piece.
As I said, to many, Soros isn't just a billionaire donor, but a global puppet master. And that's not pure fantasy because it's rooted in some truth. The fantasy is in the exaggeration. Soros doesn't control the world, but he does move big parts of it. And not for nothing, many of his views are considered radical by much of the American mainstream. He pushes sweeping social changes that certainly aren't an American vision. Now, this video is more about his power than his philosophy, but I want to make very clear about his global focus. He's claimed that the main obstacle to a stable and just world is the United States. Well, most Americans would instead look at Russia, China, Iran, or maybe Islamic terrorism. He said that China has a better functioning government than the United States, and that national borders are the obstacle. That last quote is probably the best window into his worldview. He doesn't just dislike nationalism. He sees the idea of nations themselves as barriers to progress. He wants them to be essentially replaced with global institutions and a managed democracy. Concepts that to a whole lot of Americans, they find that creepy.
But again, this piece really isn't about what he believes. In America, you could believe and advocate any political philosophy you want. But his philosophy can frighten people and that fuels conspiracies that go even further than his power. So, it took me a lot of time to separate truth from fiction. Combined with the massive and usually secret influence he wields, he's become shorthand for the elite globalist cabal, which makes him a magnet for all sorts of claims. Now, many of them have a kernel of truth. And even when you try to understand things clearly, the difference between reality and fantasy when it comes to George Soros, it's often a matter of degrees. If I do my job fairly here, I'll have some people calling me a shill and others a reactionary anti-semite. And as always, if I make a substantive mistake, I'll pin it in a comment below, and I'll also link to my script sources and notes.
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So, the anti-semitic line I mentioned leads me to what I like to call the Jewish angle about George Soros that that I need to address. There's an obvious pattern. He's Jewish. So, some critics jump right into anti-semitism. Creepy cartoons, big noses, the whole nine yards. But on the flip side, there are those who claim that kind of any criticism of Soros is inherently anti-semitic, like a dog whistle. But that's just nonsense, too. I mean, CNN, for instance, has made frequent target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories essentially the first line of his biography. But despite those who really hate Jewish people, I believe if he was a Baptist from Arkansas with the same ideas, power, and secrecy, conservatives would dislike and fear him just as much.
There's one accusation against him, though, that I do want to address. That he was a Nazi collaborator. It's been repeated enough that it's accepted as a fact by many, and and it's just wrong. In 1944, Soros was a 13-year-old boy in Hungary when the Nazis occupied. His father arranged for him to pose as a Christian godson of a Hungarian official, one who was tasked with inventorying confiscated Jewish property. Soros went out with him on at least one occasion. He didn't round people up. He didn't steal, but he was there. His dad later wrote that George "Even helped with the inventory," a line that critics have seized on for decades. That paints an unfair picture of a 13-year-old boy. And quite frankly, when you look into it, his critics come out looking worse than he does in this instance. And there's enough truth about George Soros to at least raise some eyebrows. And interestingly, he's also very critical of Israel and funds a lot of Palestinian causes, which has made him quite unpopular with many people in Israel as well.
So, he's a villain to some, but hardcore activists of each party always hate big donors on the other side and usually see them as having not just wrong, but often evil intentions. We see that more and more these days. He's a Nazi. She's a communist. Those guys are coming out to destroy our country. But I've been involved in a fairly high level of politics and media for my entire life. And I've virtually never seen reason to believe that. The people on the other side of the aisle, even when they're dead wrong, they almost never have motives like that. They're convinced they're on the good side. Even if it's difficult for their opponents to see that. I mean, that's just how human nature works. The only time I remember hearing a guy actually describe himself in a way that creeped me out was over 30 years ago at a dinner with a mutual friend. He was a currency trader who worked for a big New York firm and basically placed bets where they would profit if a country's economy fell. That's not necessarily inherently bad, but he bragged that they also took actions to actively harm that country's economy, which to me seemed like a definition of evil. I hadn't thought about it in years until I worked on this script because that man was in the exact same business that made George Soros rich. Now, I'm not saying the two were the same, but it's worth a close look.
Because Soros didn't make his money building something. He made it by betting that things would fall apart and sometimes at least helping them fall a little faster. He essentially made his fortune by shorting entire economies. Now, shorting in simple terms is betting that something will go down in value. You borrow an asset like a stock or actual money, sell it now, and then later buy it back when it falls at a lower price. It works best when things collapse completely. And George Soros was a master at spotting and sometimes nudging economic collapse. His most famous trade happened in 1992 and earned him a nickname that still sticks, the man who broke the Bank of England. At the time, Britain was trying to tie its currency to the German Deutsch mark. Soros saw that Britain's economy couldn't support that strong of a pound. So in one huge move, he borrowed and sold more than $10 billion in British pounds, betting that the currency would tank. The pound was already wobbly, but him flooding the market helped push it over the edge. The UK government couldn't hold the value up, and when it dropped, Soros made a billion dollars in a single day. The fallout was huge. Prices surged, mortgages jumped, the British economy took years to recover. Soros called it a rational market move and critics called it sabotage. Either way, he became living proof that one private investor could force a nation to its knees. And he continued that business in country after country. The Japanese yen in 1995, the Thai baht in 1997, the Russian ruble in 1998, the Hong Kong dollar same year. He didn't always win, but he made billions and billions of dollars along the way. A number of world leaders attacked him directly, like the prime minister of Malaysia, who blamed him personally for wrecking their economy, calling him an agent of economic imperialism. In the eyes of many foreign leaders, Soros wasn't just an opportunist, he was a predator and one with no regard for the human cost that his profits made.
And at the same time he was profiting off of currency moves, he was also becoming a worldwide philanthropist. Those philanthropies though would operate through a complex network of nonprofits, activist groups, and funds that funneled money into various corners of a society. He was sometimes funding political groups while investing in the same region. And whether that was a conflict of interest or just bad optics, it cemented the image that he was a man who didn't just play the game, he rigged the board. He was driven by a particular view of how the world works. What he calls a theory of reflexivity. Soros believes that markets don't just reflect reality, they shape it. If investors think something might crash, their actions can help make it crash. It's a feedback loop. That philosophy drove him. He wasn't waiting for reality to catch up with perception. He was helping steer it there. Throughout all of it, though, for all of his controversies, he's had relatively few legal problems. He was though convicted of insider trading in France in 2002 when he bought stocks after being approached in an effort to take over a major French bank. Then in the early 2000s, Soros stepped away from active trading.
These days, he's much more controversial, not for how he made his fortune, but how he's spending it. Because George Soros didn't spend his money buying islands or naming stadiums after himself. He's spending it on reshaping the world into his vision. Since the 1980s, Soros has poured over $32 billion into his Open Society foundations, backing causes all over the world. Billion is a tricky word to wrap your head around because when you think about it, $32 billion is a million dollars 32,000 times over. And Soros didn't invest that money. He deployed it not to earn more, but to build an ideological machine. Most importantly, he doesn't just back causes, he builds ecosystems. His money flows into journalism schools, civil rights groups, bail funds, lobbying outfits. He puts money into fact-checkers, academic grants, local campaigns, media watchdogs. Each one may seem benign, maybe even noble on its own, but together they form a web of incredible, usually unseen influence that's always wrapped in the language of freedom and democracy. His early focus was largely that and in Eastern Europe. Soros helped fund Solidarity in Poland, dissident groups in Czechoslovakia, and democratic reformers across the old Soviet bloc. He bankrolled independent radio, copy machines to bypass censorship, and later scholarships for black students in apartheid South Africa. That work won him praise and it created a blueprint. Find weak points in a society's power structure then fund opposition. That blueprint never changed, only the targets.
In the US, Soros's influence is harder to see, but substantially larger. Because here he's not just supporting underdogs. He's working to alter the machinery of society. Now, I'll come back to that a few times because it's the single most important aspect to understand about him. Take media. Soros doesn't own any outright, but he often funds the people who work inside them and who monitor them. He's poured money into news outlets like ProPublica, even Vice, investigative journalism grants, and institutions that train future reporters, fact-checkers like PolitiFact, who make a big pretense to be nonpartisan, but I often found them to be anything but. And I'm not saying that every story that comes out of this ecosphere is wrong or even improper, but it shapes the national narrative in ways that are difficult to see.
Let me give you a real-life example that I was involved with personally. When I worked at Fox News, there was a writer at New York magazine. His gig was to expose conservative media, which many mainly wrote about Fox News. When he decided to write a book that would exclusively go after Fox, he took a leave of absence from his magazine, and he became a fellow at the New America Foundation, which had received at least a million dollars from Soros. Now, in fairness, the writer later said that the amount of Soros money was minuscule compared to their overall budget and that the foundation was nonpartisan and it was all a conspiracy theory. Things I'll address later in a broader way. Now, did that make his book false or unethical? Not at all. But that infrastructure of funding and public relations and the clear signs to the sympathetic news outlets to promote it after it was written, that's huge. And in this case, the web even got broader. Many of the author's stories were also promoted over the years by Media Matters, a multi-million dollar nonprofit group that monitors right-wing disinformation, which meant they mainly wrote about Fox News. Not coincidentally, they also got millions of dollars from the Soros machine.
During the Obama years, one of that author's articles caught the attention of a federal prosecutor in New York who opened a far-reaching grand jury investigation into Fox. Now, I may do a full video on that someday, but it was essentially a fishing expedition that never found or charged anyone with any wrongdoing. But investigations are deadly serious. I'd already left Fox, but was subpoenaed along with many of my former colleagues to turn over thousands of emails and go to New York to testify under oath. I wasn't worried since I'd never done anything remotely illegal. But having lawyers go through decades worth of emails I wrote and work with me to make sure I didn't accidentally lie on stand, that takes a lot of time and a lot of money. My lawyers wouldn't even let me talk to my friends at Fox who were also subpoenaed for over a year during that investigation so I didn't get accused of collusion. And when I was first handed the subpoena at home, I immediately Googled the people who signed it. I immediately discovered that the lead prosecutor was a Soros fellow. Literally, the Soros family helped send this guy through law school. Now, I don't think there was any kind of coordination there. But seeing one man's money behind a journalist, the activist group that made him popular, the prosecutor, and often the people and groups that would report about it later, that was an eye-opening experience.
Now, none of this is illegal and possibly not even immoral, but it's clearly effective and secretive. And the people in that world usually offer up two main arguments to diminish the role of Soros money. First, they argue that in the grand scheme of things, Soros donations were relatively small, that he was one of many liberal donors. The other is that many of these groups are nonpartisan organizations that they're not trying to change politics, just help the world.
Okay, so first, tracking the donations are tricky because the structures make them largely secret. You can uncover some of them through public records, but not most. No matter how good of an investigative journalist you are, and that's because they're legally protected. I spent months trying to uncover who was funding Media Matters. They have to disclose how they spend their money, but as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, they're not required to disclose their donors, and they don't. And while all sorts of rich people use structures like this, Soros has mastered the use of incredibly complex organizational structures that they donate to one another. Sometimes they even share the same leadership and staff members. Some groups like the Tides Foundation are explicitly designed to keep donations hidden, a kind of laundering house for ideological cash. Donors like Soros give to Tides, which then regrants the money to other groups, keeping the original sources hidden. Defenders call it privacy. Critics call it legalized dark money. But when someone asks, "Gee, did Soros help fund those violent protests or did he help pay for those migrant caravans that came to the country?" It's virtually impossible to answer correctly. Again, not just difficult, but literally impossible without a subpoena or an inside mole. And when a man operates this way and also says things like, "Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle," you know, you don't have to wear a tinfoil hat to suspect that something might be up.
Another defense of these groups is the whole nonpartisan angle. Now, I won't spend much time on this, even though I could write a book on it, because a whole lot of nonprofits are all about political power. Let's take something as innocuous as voter registration. I mean, who could be against encouraging people to get out and vote? I mean, I'm a big fan of democracy. Then we see these multi-million dollar groups like Rock the Vote or Vote.org who say that they're nonpartisan and that you can even get a tax deduction for donating to them because they're nonprofits. But they clearly don't try to register everyone to vote. They focus instead on young people, racial minorities, low-income communities, urban centers, all people who are very likely to vote the same way as the big donors do. And that's not a lucky coincidence. This happens a lot. Again though, I don't want to pretend as though this is only the behavior of one man or one party. People on all parts of the political spectrum do these very things, but the scale and effectiveness of George Soros may very well be unmatched.
And what I believe he does better than anyone is find ways to get the biggest bang for his buck. Nowhere was that more evident than how he changed the criminal justice system in America's biggest cities. He realized that you don't need to change those laws. You just need to change whether and how they're enforced. And there's no better way to do that than to change the prosecutors. And that's exactly what George Soros did in a way that no one else had ever done in the history of the United States. Over the last decade, he's poured over $50 million that we know of into district attorney races across the country. Up until then, these have been largely low-budget, often obscure down-ballot races that some voters barely noticed. But DAs decide which crimes get prosecuted, which ones get ignored, and what kind of justice a city actually gets. He identified cities where progressive prosecutors could win, sometimes with a small number of votes. He'd often flood the race with money, sometimes more than all local donations combined. And that's not counting his opaque organizational support. The common thread for these DAs, there were over 75 of them, was that they were all essentially the opposite of a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, who promised to end cash bail and stop prosecuting low-level crimes. Kim Fox in Chicago, who dropped charges in thousands of cases and is probably best known for giving Jesse Smollett a pass. George Gascón in Los Angeles, who told prosecutors to stop filing sentence enhancements, even for violent criminals. Alvin Bragg in New York City, who immediately announced that he'd no longer prosecute certain kinds of theft and drug crimes. He did prosecute Trump, though. Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, a former public defender who stopped enforcing all sorts of crime. All told, Soros-linked money helped elect prosecutors in over 75 jurisdictions. The pitch was always the same. Reform the system. Make it more equitable. Make it less racist. Rethink punishment.
And in city after city, crime ticked up. Theft, burglary, assault, murder. They routinely surged under these new DAs, as well as the policing fallout from George Floyd's death. Of course, a lot of media rejected these and claims that COVID or more guns around were the culprit of the rising crime. In fact, you can even fact-check that right here in PolitiFact. In fairness, Soros and his supporters can point to their own successes, like a teenager who got a second chance because he was either not prosecuted or because he went to treatment instead of prison. On the other side, many can point to a murderer who was on the streets despite numerous convictions or who was out on a no-bail incident days after a violent assault. Now, there's been a backlash to some of these prosecutors. The guy in LA lost re-election and the one in San Francisco got recalled, but Soros has said that he's not backing down. This was one area where the "he's just another billionaire donor" argument started to crack. Because here, Soros didn't just support causes. He was singularly instrumental in changing America's justice system through elections where most people had little idea what was actually happening.
But overall, is George Soros just another billionaire with strong opinions and a big checkbook? I mean, it's a fair question. Elon Musk has the Twitter empire. The Koch Fund libertarian think tanks. Michael Bloomberg spent a billion dollars trying to buy the presidency. Rich people playing politics isn't new at all. But Soros is something different. Most ideological billionaires pick a few issues. They support candidates who share their views, maybe fund a think tank or two. Soros builds infrastructure, the scaffolding that decides which causes even get heard. And when you can't follow along how much of his money built that scaffolding, how can you really evaluate its size? In a very real sense, you could argue he bypasses democracy in order to reshape it. Now, his spending may be unaccountable, but it certainly isn't illegal. And he's not bound by public opinion or voter backlash, often because they never connect the dots. Now, that doesn't mean he's evil, but it does mean he's operating on a different level than pretty much anyone else in the world.
Now, whatever you think of George Soros, it's important to know his machine's not going to end with him. He's over 90 years old and has begun to hand over his empire to his son, Alex. He's said to be even more political than his father and visited the White House at least 25 times during the Biden administration. The Soros ideology and structures he built will go on long after he's gone. But that doesn't mean they'll always win. And the older I get, the more I see how the pendulum of politics works. As I said, his criminal justice changes are already starting to crumble and get pushback. But there's a lot to fix with that system. To me, the most shocking statistic I discovered about it was how easy it is to get away with murder. In fact, most people do. In 62% of murders in the United States, no one's ever convicted, which means every year about 13,000 people commit murder and never get punished. It's a wild story. Hey, I hope you got something out of this. I tried my best to be fair, but I'm sure I have my blind spots, so let me know. Until next time.