The recent announcement that 37-year-old Alexander Soros, rather than his 52-year-old half-brother Jonathan, would take control of his father’s $25 billion business empire was an important development in the financial world. But there’s more to this story than the financial soap opera in which the more considered and cautious Jonathan, the longtime favorite to succeed George Soros, was bested by Alexander, who seems to be cut from the same cloth as his risk-taking father.
The more important prize that the Soros boys were vying for was not their Hungarian-born father’s hedge fund but his philanthropic foundation, the Open Society Foundations that the business supports.
SOROS-BACKED GROUP BEHIND DEMOCRATIC DRUG DECRIMINALIZATION PUSH AMID OVERDOSE EPIDEMIC
Since its founding in 1984, OSF has operated on an epic scale. While initially primarily focused on promoting democracy in Eastern Europe, by the dawn of the 21st century, it had completely reinvented itself as the Left’s all-purpose sugar daddy, doling out tens of billions of dollars to a vast network of left-wing groups that seek to influence policy and elect candidates to political office.
The fund’s willingness to invest enormous sums in a sharply focused ambitious agenda made it the single most influential force in leftist activism and politics. It also turned the now 92-year-old elder Soros into a larger-than-life figure of almost mythical stature for both the Left and the Right. George Soros lives and operates quietly, eschewing the limelight. But his every action, from his youth as a teenage survivor of the Holocaust to his career making billions shorting foreign currencies and creating economic misery in his wake and on to his current status as a pinata for right-wing criticism that is widely characterized as antisemitic by his defenders, is a focus of intense and often-critical scrutiny and controversy.
By contrast, the American-born Alexander, who likes NFL football, hobnobs with celebrities and politicians, and dates models, is a more difficult target for OSF’s detractors. He’s also far more comfortable with his Jewish identity than his father, who has always been at pains to distance himself from both Judaism and Israel. That will further facilitate the Left’s campaign to treat the attention the Soros donations get as a contemporary version of classic memes of Jew-hatred.
Specifically, Jewish issues have never held any interest for George Soros, who has seen himself as a citizen of the world rather than as someone with an obligation to help and care for his own people. Indeed, the only aspects of Jewish life that held any appeal to George Soros were those that sought to undermine Israel and Zionism, such as his support for groups highly critical of the Jewish state like the left-wing lobby J Street and, more recently, groups that support the antisemitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that seeks to wage economic warfare on Israel and its citizens and supporters.
But the effort to depict any examination of the work of OSF as evidence of antisemitism has gone beyond being a standard talking point for corporate media outlets who want to shut down opposition to someone who donates to their favorite causes. It’s now absolutely vital for defending OSF’s operations and, given the scale of its donations, equally important to the Democratic Party, especially to those operating in deep-blue urban bastions.
The younger Soros is a frequent visitor to the Biden White House as he boosts his commitment to increasing OSF funding for left-wing causes, voter turnout programs, and Democratic candidates in the 2024 election to stratospheric levels. Given the stakes, the liberal corporate media see defending the Soros clan and silencing or shaming its opponents as their critical task.
It has now become an article of faith on the Left and within the media that talking about Soros’s malign influence on American society, or that of his native Hungary or other countries, such as Israel, where OSF has thrown its weight around, is not merely unfair but proof of their opponents’ malevolent character. They consider mentioning the name Soros in Republican campaign ads as a funder of left-wing causes to be Jew-baiting. They put down former President Donald Trump’s blaming him for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s dubious pursuit of criminal charges with the same alacrity. And they considered fellow billionaire and Twitter owner Elon Musk likening him to Magneto, a comic book master villain with a Jewish backstory, to be completely beyond the pale. The idea that all this is merely a dog whistle for antisemitism seems reasonable to those to whom the Soros name is merely a metaphor for resentment of success and liberal-minded philanthropic Jews.
And when such pronouncements come from sources like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, they would seem to be definitive. Both claim that the targeting of Soros, even when not motivated by antisemitism, helps embolden extremists who attack Jews.
But the truth about the Soros family and OSF can’t be reduced to a matter of swatting down conspiracy theories. Far from a libelous invocation of hate from the past, the political operation George Soros created and that his son Alexander plans on expanding is not just the philanthropic wing of the Democratic Party. It has become a uniquely toxic force in political life and society that is making life worse for a growing number of people.
OSF has stepped up its political giving, lavishing funds on groups that advocate traditional liberal causes — gun control, open borders, against voter integrity laws. But chief among George Soros’s interests is his campaign for what he calls “reform prosecutors.” And that, more than any other factor, is what makes his donations not merely wrongheaded but flat-out dangerous.
In terms of dollar figures, the $40 million that the foundation and its affiliates have spent on efforts to elect law enforcement officials who share a belief that the criminal justice system in the United States is racist is only a fraction of what OSF has spent on issue advocacy — a function of the relatively low cost of winning the Democratic district attorney primary races in several crucial cities. But the impact of putting into office a group of people who belong to a radical wing of the soft-on-crime movement is perhaps the largest sociological experiment conducted in America since President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” expansion of entitlements helped create a permanent underclass dependent on government largesse.
Soros prosecutor policies that demand the end of prosecutions for seemingly every crime short of murder, the elimination of cash bail, reducing sentences, and, in effect, forcing a top-down solution of de-policing so as to reduce the number of minority people who are in jail has produced a man-made natural disaster in the form of an urban crime surge.
There’s nothing shadowy about this effort.
George Soros boasted of it in an op-ed published last summer in the Wall Street Journal. But while he describes this “reform” initiative as an anodyne pursuit of justice that was by no means antithetical to the rule of law, a close look at the impact his pet prosecutors have had wherever he has helped them gain office paints a very different picture. And it gives the lie to the claims that his detractors are conspiracy-mongering far-right trolls.
As author Matt Palumbo has documented, George Soros has poured more than $40 million into election campaigns that have put 75 different candidates in prosecutorial posts and collectively now preside over the criminal justice system in cities and counties throughout the U.S. where approximately a fifth of the public lives.
Everywhere these people take office, the quality of life has declined and criminals have benefited from policies that are rooted in the notion that law enforcement is inherently racist.
Even a brief and partial survey of the impact of some of Soros’s most outrageous prosecutors illustrates just what OSF money is buying for people.
In Los Angeles, $4.7 million from a Soros-backed PAC helped elect George Gascon as district attorney. His version of “reform” was to end bail requirements for a variety of crimes involving theft and lower-level assaults and similarly downgrade offense thresholds to make it easier on criminals. The result was an increase in crime, especially home invasions and burglaries. So criminal-friendly is the City of Angels that not only is thievery from local businesses routinely unpunished, but it is even attracting “crime tourists” from South America who can always go home with the profits of their efforts once let out on bail. (One such group from Colombia was arrested in January.)
In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner received $1.5 million from Soros-backed groups. On his watch, the murder rate has soared, but in more than 60% of those cases, no suspects have been arrested.
In Chicago’s Cook County, $2 million from Soros groups helped elect Kim Foxx. During her eight years in office, the rates of murders, shootings, carjackings, robberies, and sundry other crimes skyrocketed. But she insists that her refusal to prosecute whole categories of crimes has nothing to do with that.
In St. Louis, District Attorney Kim Gardner received $116,000 from Soros groups before resigning after accusations of negligence from the Republican legislature. During her time in office, the murder rate hit a 50-year high while charging increasingly fewer of those arrested for felonies.
In New York City, Bragg received over $1 million from a Soros-backed fund. He has reduced penalties for armed robbery and won’t prosecute those who resist arrest, something that puts the already beleaguered New York Police Department at even more risk than it was already. Soros “reform” in the Big Apple also means amnesty for shoplifting with a vast increase in so-called smash-and-grab crimes, making life miserable for small businesses.
In San Antonio, Texas, Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales received $1 million from Soros funds. Murders have gone up more than 50% since.
Taken as a whole, it’s clear that the Soros “reform” movement isn’t just a blow to the rule of law. It’s a singular force leading to a crime surge that has virtually erased the progress parts of the country have made since the 1990s.
As the evidence from virtually every one of the cities and counties where Soros prosecutors reign shows, the de-prosecution approach has made life miserable for ordinary citizens who must now navigate life in cities where everyone knows that crime is increasingly a risk-free profession, causing economic privation and the collapse of personal security.
And for all of the rhetoric from the Left about concern for people of color, the vast majority of the victims of Soros’s efforts are not those who can be accused of “white privilege” but those minorities who live in poorer neighborhoods that desperately need more policing and the locking up of criminals who prey on black and Hispanic people.
Nor is the “reform” prosecutor project the sole aspect of Soros’s philanthropy that is immiserating life in America.
George Soros is a major funder of groups that are promoting illegal immigration and seeking to find ways to allow those who have entered the country without permission to stay indefinitely. While, like OSF’s other issues advocacy, this is represented as social justice advocacy, the flood of economic migrants masquerading as asylum-seekers entering a country where the administration has downgraded and all but eliminated the enforcement of existing immigration laws has added to the misery of urban America.
Cities like New York, Washington, and Chicago and the border communities that are the first stops for illegal immigrants are overwhelmed by the task of dealing with the social services required to house and treat immigrants. And the chaos at the border remains a major burden on residents of those areas as well as law enforcement.
The focus on smearing Soros critics as antisemites also overlooks the way the causes OSF supports actually work to promote antisemitism and the century-old war on Zionism being waged by the Palestinians and their supporters.
Soros foundation partners are a mainstay of the left-wing NGO archipelago in Israel that aids organizations that support BDS and seek to undermine the Jewish state’s efforts to defend itself against terrorism. Just as important, the Soros family supports groups that champion intersectional ideology that likens anti-Israel activism to the struggle for civil rights, which itself results in the promotion of antisemitism. Toxic ideas such as critical race theory and the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion, now the official policy of the Biden administration, which has mandated that every government department and agency set up its own DEI indoctrination program, grant a permission slip for antisemitism in a manner that has helped it migrate from the margins of society to mainstream discourse.
It’s true that not every criticism of George Soros is fair or accurate.
In particular, the obsessive focus of many on Soros’s manner of survival during the Holocaust is unseemly. His father hid him from the Nazis’ extermination of Hungarian Jewry by placing him with non-Jews who were profiting from the dispossession of Jews subsequently sent to Auschwitz. That’s not a particularly heroic story, but he was a child. And no one now living has a right to question how anyone, let alone a child, managed to evade the death sentence that the German occupiers and their collaborators imposed on every Jewish man, woman, and child in 1944.
It’s equally true that some of the criticism aimed at him in his native Hungary by supporters of the popular conservative government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which has itself been the target of OSF’s unfair smearing of it as authoritarian or undemocratic, has employed tropes that speak to that country’s antisemitic past.
But the attempt to label virtually any mention of the way George Soros has used his money to promote left-wing causes and, especially due to his prosecutor project, made American cities safe places for criminals as antisemitic doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
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The argument from pearl-clutching centrists and liberals that people should pull their punches about George Soros because some lunatics on the fringe will use their critiques to justify antisemitism doesn’t pass the smell test. But George Soros and his apologists very much need to silence legitimate criticism, even when it is, as in Musk’s case, expressed in satire, in order to distract the public from the reality of George Soros’s agenda and how much of an impact he’s having on American life.
Putting the more attractive personality of Alexander Soros at the head of OSF doesn’t alter the facts about how one family enterprise is changing America for the worse. It isn’t going too far to assert that the Soros foundations are now endangering American and even Jewish lives as much as virtually any other factor.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor for the Federalist. Follow him on Twitter: @jonathans_tobin.
