Who The Hell is George Soros, Anyway? Part 2

through Nazi persecution and Soviet occupation. Soros later said, Popper's book is Carl Popper Open Society and His Enemies, struck me with the force of revelation. It showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common, that they both stand in opposition to a different principle of social organization, the principle of open society. So, okay, I read this, and I was like, okay, so let's go, let's go, let's go read Carl Popper's book, which is called The

Open Society and Its Enemies. And so I assumed, right, that's interesting me.

be about the communist right. No, the first half of this book is about Plato and the second half of this book is about Marks. But he spends like two hundred pages yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything he says about Plato and about why Plato is totalitarian is completely true. But like his conclusion about what totalitarianism

is is that totalitarianism is descendant. It's like the product of this thing he calls historicism, which is when like you have one thing that's the agent of history, and so he sees like like I don't know, like a great man or like the guy whatever Hegel's geist, or like one great nation, or like a great class as like those are all examples of his historicism. And if you think about history like this, you will this is

how totalitarianism is born. And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view of the way you look think about history being the origin metal talitarianism. I I don't know. It's it's a very very weird book. In a lot of ways. Paper is trying to do this thing that like a lot of kind of liberal philosophers of that period is doing, which is that she's trying to reconcile sort of like individual freedom but then also sort of

economic glitarianism. And you know, okay, so if you were actually serious about doing both of these things right, like the two things you care about on earth are protecting individual freedom and it's gieving economic calitarianism, you have two options. You either become an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values, or you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both. And Popper, unfortunately takes a second route, and.

individual weirdos. Like it's it's less a matter of like you've got these sort of you know, in that kind of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who embody the spirit of a people and more, if your system allows huge amounts of power to be invested in individual people with their weird hang ups, than those weird hang ups of this one guy may wind up defining history. I don't know, this is this this is an unrelated rant.

of extracting like labor from another class of people. But you know, if you accept that, right, you can't actually like defend capitalism on the merits of it being an

economic system. You have to like do this like circle run around dance of like defending ideas, and this all gets like gets to this point where the problem that you're talking about happens, which is that like, well, okay, capitalism is also a system where one really weird guy and he's like terrible ideas can have an enormous impact

on how society operates. Like this is this is this is this is the thing we're all suffering from from like Elon Musk, right or like what what's that guy's name, like Robert Moses, right, Like yeah, like you know, like capitalism is absolutely assistant that generates just one guy who can just fuck everyone's And that's a.

amount of power for this specific thing. How our cities are set up to be invested in an unelected weirdo because he was the only one interested enough to focus on it, and that led to this very bad situation.

that are going to haunt both Popper. Popper doesn't live long enough to see like the absolute worst this can possibly go, But George Sorows unfortunately has lived to see exactly how value this this can possibly go.

so it doesn't always work. But all right, so back back, back back in sort of the heady days of the seventies and eighties, George Soros like, okay, he has a dual thing where he at once has his kind of crisis a conscience thing where he's like, I want to actually do something with my life that's not just you know how, I want to have an impact on the world that is positive and not like I made so much money that like gods look at it and vomit

and so and so. Okay, so his solution is he sets up a tax dodge, and he's actually very explicit about those interviews that his first foundation to do charity work was set up as a tax But but this is where Soros is very interesting, right, because he has you know, for for like a billionaire, right, he has some positions that are started only very good. So he is anti apartheid and that is like not a thing you can guarantee from people in that era, like oh boy.

He also and this is only I guess gets him in trouble like to this day, is he is pro Palestine. And this is part of why like net and Yah, who absolutely hates him, he's he's not like like okay, he's he's not.

after this, which is that. Okay, So what actually happened what he thinks is going to happen, right, is what he's trying to do is he's trying to make, you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money for black kids to go to go to university. What actually happens is that the state uses his money to pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any more scholarships.

And so there's two things going on here, right. One is the obvious, this is the this is the apartheid racism right, like they don't want more like they don't

want more non white kids going to school. But then two also this is also sort of a classic dear liberal failure, which is like if you were, if you were when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists, the state simply instead of like you know, having more of the of like the resources of the services provided, the state just stops doing it and spends more money

on cops. And so he sours very quickly realizes that, like he figures this out, it is like I fuck this, Like, no, I'm not going to help you, like I'm not going

to help the apartect government do racism. And so this makes him kind of weary of this stuff because he has sort of he has sort of seen how you see what happens when you when you very explicitly try to work within a system that is unbelievably fucked up, which is that the apartheid government uses your money to as a way to like funnel more of their own life into their own pockets. And do you know who else use the system of aparthid to funnel more money into their own pockets?

Have either of you seen any of the Lethal's weapons? No, unbelievable. You're missing maybe the best Mel Gibson performance outside of that time he got pulled over in Malibu and gave a racist brant to those California State Highway Patrol officers. Uh.

money to anti communist groups and communist countries. So he funds Solidarity in Poland, which is this like very mixed record. Well we'll get the we don't need it.

goes badly for him in a number of ways. One is that the moment, like the moment the Berlin Wall falls, everyone just like suddenly forgets about all of the anti communism that he did, because you know, and this is something about there's a kind of anti communists that he is, right, Like, there's a lot of anti communists who are like who are just like Deak squad guys, right, Like this is your like your guy trained by Shan Kai Shek who's

like shooting peasants in like El Salvador. Right. There's also like another kind of anti communists in this era who are sort of liberal anti communists who like are anti communists but like also anti Pinochet, for example, like Soros give somebody to the people, you know, wh when Pinochet has this big referendum of his like should I stay

in power? He gives money to the people who are like no, and those are people who, ah, their intentions are better than the just like absolutely horrifying right wingers. But you know, it doesn't it doesn't go great for him. So Soros his initial plan, right is he's gonna you know, okay, when you're trying to like start funding anti communist group, She's gonna use this things. Like he was gonna go into Hungary and he was gonna like give Hungarian students scholarships,

and the Hungarian students were like, don't do this. Like if you if you just show up and give us money, the state is immediately going to be able to go like, hey, you were like outside funded opposition people doing like regime change stuff, and it's gonna like immediately discredit us. And so this is the point where he sets up the SOUS Foundation, which becomes opens There's a whole thing with this. This this stuff changes names like many times, the Open

Society Foundation stuff. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and so you know what we like, we just talked about what they actually do because in sort of like that.

usually costs to do a Belling Cat thing. And that program whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Colombia,

got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And so a couple of years ago when there was that massive swelling of like the police murdering people and protest crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like doing open source investigation to track down which police officers were, you know, killing folks and how this was going were a lot of the folks that John Carlow had trained.

Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the kind of things that the Open Society Foundation does.

lot of like giving students scholarships. The other thing they're really big on that doesn't get talked about much is that there were huge on like cultural events basically like like paying people money to like put on plays and like theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books, which is like, I don't know, like I actually think that's cool, Like like we as a society used to do this, Like we used to like pay people, like the government used to pay people to like write things

and like create art, and then we decided that that was bad and I've never done it again.

not he's like not very good at it. Like he's not you know, people like the sort of like thing about him is that he's the sort of like criminal mastermind who can like like bankraill revolutions and stuff. And she just like gets out maneuvered by people constantly in

ways that are like kind of depressing. Yeah, but okay, so he's spending the eighties like doing all this, you know, like doing this sort of cultural work, and you know in Hungary, right, this is there's a sort of interesting thing that happens where like he's wealthy enough that like even the Communist Party is it sort of like has to work with him because he has money and they

sort of don't. But you know, the other thing that that's I think important to understand is that he's not like there's a bunch of foundations you do, like exactly the same stuff, right, like maybe slightly worse. Like you know, there's like the Ford Foundation, there's like the Rockefellers, right, or the Rockefeller Foundation, like they all they all like at any place where open society is like doing stuff, there's like a worse version of it that the Ford

Foundation and like the Rockefellers are doing. But you know, somehow, stunningly, only one of these groups is singled out for being yelled at all the time. And I will I will leave as an exercise to the reader why specifically they picked Soros and not Ford. Huh huh.

I would lead and others would follow. But now that I look back, I find that there was practically nobody behind me. I asked myself what went wrong, and part of what went wrong is like what Soros is doing in these places. So for example, you know, he's he's involved in funding solidarity, he's involved in some solidarities negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that he does is he's one of the people who he help

like do structural adjustment in Poland. And this goes really badly because so what we were talking about, Wes just talk a little bit about what solidarity is, because he helps destroy it by accident. Solidarity is this giant sort of like social democratic e union that forms in you know, in like the early eighties in Poland. That's like the first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries.

And they eventually are able to sort of like knock off the government, but they come into power, and you know, so they do on sort of so US's advice and on the advice of a lot of the sort of financial people. They're getting right, all of the people are telling them to do privatization, so they do it right. They privatize all of these giant state owned like facilities, they privatize their docks like stuff like that, and this

it turns out it just causes massive d industrialization. It destroys Solidarity's base because there's suddenly no longer all of these union jobs at all these state owned factories, and so you know, they lose an excellent actually and that solid already like vanishes forever into the midst of time. There's like six of those guys left. Yeah, and this

and this is a real sort of sorts problem. This that like keeps running over and over again, right is you know, he spent all this time being an anti communist, but then the actual anti communists who have basses and who aren't just like destroying their own bases by like doing privatization, which is something stuff he's also pushing, right are these right wingers and this is this is just

sort of a fiasco. And you know, it's like he he does, like he tries to do like a very similar thing to what he'd been doing in Eastern Europe and China, and this goes like even worse because he winds up like backing he winds up backing one of the CCP factions who gets purged after Tienemann, And so you know, sorros like as the sort of nineties go on right, Like he's sort of slowly starting to realize that like the stuff that these doings not working very well,

and one of the sort of I don't know if consequence is the right word, but okay, one of sours are sort of like principles that makes them different from a lot of other of these billionaires rights. He doesn't do humanitarian aid. His thing is that like he wants to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid, which is sort of noble. But like then then Yugoslavia falls apart, and he winds up doing a bunch of stuff in Yugoslavia, Like he winds up building like a water purification plant

Sarajevo whilside resiege. And the other thing that I didn't know he was like really heavily involved with is like he's basically the reason why the UN War Crimes tribunal that like tries some Miloshevic and stuff like happens, Like he funds it. It wasn't really like a UN thing he was. He was like, Hey, we're gonna have this tribunal.

And then the German government like arrested one of the war criminals just sort of randomly at like an airport or something, and he's able to convince sort of like Clinton and a bunch of other people to like actually turn and the un to like turn this into a real court. And this pisses off a lot of people, and like by by a lot of people, I mean, like very specifically pisses Melosa Chi cough because somewhat obvious reasons that he's trying to try him for war crimes. Okay,

so I think, gar you're too young for this. Robert, do you remember Rock the Vote?

of random people in Slovakia are also doing this. But this is this is this is sort of going to become like a pattern in in in these things, because you know, he he's sort of like like I think he's kind of like poking a lot of sort of very powerful like increasingly powerful sort of regional right wing leaders because he looks at the societies and are like, actually, it sucks to have like just dog shit right wingers who are like racist and hate everyone running a country.

really bad. And so he starts working in Baltimore, where the government is trying to do like something something like pretty like something like even now is to consider sort of like pretty radical I like harm reduction stuff. So I mean they like it. Like Baltimore in the nineties has needle exchanges. He's doing like Narcan trainings for people.

He's you know, he's doing things like funny instead of like like giving money to like he's doing he tyes these programs to like get people out of like prison faster. And he's doing like after school programs for kids and this stuff like this just like genuinely good. Like there's no like I don't know, it sucks that like it's

it's billionaire money that's like doing it. But like I don't know, like probably there's a lot of people who are alive because I didn't get HIV from needles that they were able to do exchanges for.

like I need to bring this man down. So he starts getting really for the first time, right, he starts getting really really involved in the two thousand and four election. He's doing like like these like micro targeting ad stuff.

He's like throwing money around everywhere, and you know, I mean he explicitly like the like the way he looks at it, like if he's very explicit about this is like he wants to level the like the playing field between the Republicans, who are funded by just a trillion routling billionaires and the Democrats, who are funded by not that many billionaires. The problem with this is that he has like a very weird view of what's wrong with Bush.

I'm gonna read from the people the storms again in imposing its view of freedom on both the American people in a foreign country. Quote, the supremacist ideology of the Bush administration, and it is in contradiction with the principles of open society because it claims possession of an ultimate truth, which I don't know. I don't actually think like claiming possession of an ultimate truth is like specifically the thing that like is the bason why the Bush administration is bad.

But simultaneously I don't know, Like I it's hard for me to be like too bad about a billionaire seeing George Bush and just like going, oh my god.

money from drugs. So Lynda Laruche is this like fascist weirdo who cut his teeth and running this like anti communist cult that would like physically fight leftist groups on campuses and would like give information on like student leftist groups and like other lefist groups or the government like they are they are so fedted up that like if you start reading about de LaRue sites like they were narking to federal orgs like you've never heard of before,

it's stunningly, stunningly bizarre like conspiracy cult thing. And Dennis Hastert was just straight up like reading their anti Semitic

conspiracy theories like on TV. But you know, and I think I think it's something that that's one of the things I wanted to emphasize, like in this episode, right, is like the anti Soro stuff isn't really like I don't know what you call it, like sort of organic anti semitism, Like it's not something that like comes from the Republican base, right, This is thing that this is a deliberate choice by Republican political strategists who are very

deliberately like this, this is this is a Jewish billionaire who's helping who's helping a Democratic party, like we can use this to do what to try to do like culture warship to win this election, and you know, like you we know we can see the results of this.

And this isn't even you know, we're gonna get this in a little bit, but like this this isn't even the only time this is gonna happen where like the specific like Soros like anti Semtism stuff for dreaming against is like it's cooked up by like like very specifically cooked up as a targeted thing by political strategists.

shitty like pro Russian government in Georgia. But like that guy, that guy has like a wild arc that you could do his own fucking movie series on. He's now a victory a close ally of Victoria Bond. So it's going great, how do you actually pronounce his name? For some reason, it always just like pings off my brain.

like protest movements in Eastern Europe. Ifuse the sort of two thousands, and you know, as the two thousands go on and turn in two thousand and eight, thing, the world economy goes to shit. A bunch of right wingers started taking power, and one of Victor Rabond's like political consultants,

who's this guy? Who he that through net and Yahoo like specifically like this is this is another consultant guy very specifically cooks up the idea for how you know, he's trying to fend off like a right like a sort of another sort of right wing challenge. He trying to fend off like the rest of our political establishment. And or Bond's consultant like very specifically is like what

if we go after Soros again? And you know, and so he does and this is this is another one of those things like this is literally the anti Semitism is fucking cooked up in a pr lab in in in order for these people to win elections. And I don't know that that that just sort of just sort of like cynical cold bloodedness of it, like of these people, like this political consultant, by the way, like is also Jewish,

right like, and he just doesn't give a shit. He's like a fuck it, like well, you know, like I I'm like one of Netanyahu's guys net and Yah, who fucking hates this guy too? Like why don't we just use him as a punching bag and so they you and you know this is this is part of a big part of the reason like why Sorows turns into the sort of enemy number one is that in two fifteen they start blaming him for the influx of refugees

from Syria. And this bread is like fucking wildfire. Suddenly like every single right wing leader on Earth is like, oh shit, I can blame all of my refugee stuff

on this guy. And they start doing it. And you know, so suddenly like like air Dowan is blaming him for like the gutsy part protests and he does at thirteen, like Trump gets on this, and you know, this stuff sort of like it's it spreads really quickly, and once it's sort of out of the bottle, right like you know, like people look like there are the people who sort of first start this right are doing this sort of

like you know, like incredibly cold, cynical political calculus. But once once that once this like incredibly high level that is sent and he Sentism gets out of the open, it starts turning into just like Sorows of Satan shit. And you know, and and part part of what happens here is is that like this is this is one of the things, like that the sort of campaigns against Soros is one of the things that he is responsible for, like our current like migrant policy, like why it's so bad?

Like why like half our episodes next week and are gonna be about like just horrible shit happening at the border, which is that Like Soros in the in the like the late the nineties and two thousands found out that like Clinton was funding his welfare reform by cutting legal immigrants off from food stamps and like SSI benefits, and he's like, wait.

brutal sort of right wing backlash about immigration politics. That is, you know, it's one of the things that drives the Obama administration.

on like deportation shit. It's you know, just utter horror, and all of that stuff continues, and all of these right wing people figure out that if you can just pin like like Trump starts with Trump pins the migrant caravent on Soros and they figure out, like, this is the This is like the specific combination, right It's like the the the anti semitism of like the Jewish banker bringing immigrants into your country is just like the sort of one way shop driving your entire country into like

a like fascist right wing frenzy. And it works. And now, you know, like the cycle that we're in now is like anytime something happens, uh, like the right blames h

for it like this. So the the the the current right wing panic is that George Soros was funding some like pretty moderate like reform DA people because he's a criminal justice reform guy, and the Republicans are now all talking about how this is like a scheme by Soros to like cause crime and like destroy the entire country, and unfortunately, like this is just like this is this is just this is just reality now all of these like really bleakly cynical political leaders and they're like polsters

and pr consultants, where like we could use anti Semitism to win elections and they did and now we live in hell.

the the relative levels of influence that these people have. No.

it sucks. And also rich people do it even though they're they are the actual like the actual yeah, in in so far as anything even remotely like what they're hypothesizing could even potentially exist. It's fucking these people, so yeah, they're bad.