Is George Soros Behind Everything You Don't Like? – SOME MORE NEWS

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- Cracklin' Oat Bran! Blessings of Light!

Introduction!

Hi, it's Cody, your news consigliere,

here to advise you amongst the tricky,

multifaceted news mafia disputes.

Does someone need to get news whacked,

or can it be smoothed out by fuhgeddingaboudit?

Who has to sleep with the news fishes?

Man, those fishes are such harlots.

I can tell this is not a metaphor I'm

gonna be able to keep up,

so I'm going to just drop it like Joe Pesci

in "Goodfellas" should've dropped it

when Billy Batts kept bringing up his old shine box.

Remember movies? (sighs) Okay, enough foreplay.

Here's some news.

Let's say you can't just blame the mafia

for all of society's problems,

and you need another shadowy and mysterious presence,

someone you can point to as the culprit

behind any number of preconceived societal ills,

someone who hopefully has a palindromic last name.

So Daryl Hannah? Is it that fish harlot Daryl Hannah?

Harlibut?

- George Soros funds the Open Society.

The Open Society gives $15 million to these groups

that are protesting on behalf of Hamas.

- So what is Soros's goal here? I think just chaos.

- [Reporter] The reason is he's had a lifelong dream

of one world government, of elites redistributing wealth

and setting up rules for the rest of us.

- These hollowed out cities,

this is a symptom of America's decline,

and one of the biggest reasons

is 'cause you have George Soros

funding these radical left-wing district attorneys.

They get into office,

and they say they're not gonna prosecute crimes.

They disagree when the inmates start running the asylum.

- You said, "He wants to erode the very fabric

of civilization and Soros hates humanity."

Like when you do something like that, do you think about-

- I think that's true. That's my opinion.

- It's like he wants these cities to fall apart.

He wants crime to flourish.

It's almost like he's an evil person in a "Batman" movie.

- Wow, sure seems like this Juurge Surr-AHS,

I don't know, this guy is up to no good,

even being likened to an evil person

in a "Batman" movie by Joe Rogan.

Ooh, note to self,

come up with a simple term for evil person in a movie.

It's weird we don't have one of those yet.

Anywho, if you're just watching those clips,

it seems pretty hard to tell which criticisms

are legitimate and which are tinfoil hat stuff.

George Soros has been accused of everything

from helping the Nazis during World War II

to plotting the overthrow of the US government.

Without looking it up,

I'm guessing he's why the earth is secretly flat,

which it is!

So, hey, let's look into those accusations because,

even if a lot of them aren't true,

maybe he is actually secretly funding things

that most of us wouldn't care for, right?

After all, George Soros is a billionaire

whom I don't think are our friends,

and billionaires tend to put a lot of their money

toward philanthropic efforts, though, in many cases,

those philanthropic efforts don't actually do anything good,

not to mention that George Soros

has donated money to the campaigns

of progressive district attorney candidates,

which is what Ron DeSantis was getting at there

during his, cue the sad trombone, campaign for president.

You're not gonna do the sound?

Well, now it's too late, so what do, what?

(paper crumples)

Of course, those Soros donations don't seem any different

from how, for example, wealthy Silicon Valley goons

like David Sachs pumped money into recall campaigns

against progressive DAs.

For DeSantis, it seems like he's just targeting Soros

for giving money to political causes that he doesn't like

because he's expressed no concern whatsoever

over the dozens of billionaires who've donated

to his various campaigns over the years

because why would he?

So maybe the problem here

is that money has too much influence in politics,

and we shouldn't want any billionaire trying

to buy any political office,

but that's just one of the dozens

of allegations made about this old withered fart,

and it is kind of the most normal one,

which is why I started there, but, of course,

we have a lot more episode ahead of us.

Oh, look, it's the episode up ahead coming at ya!

Beep beep. Okay, so who is George Soros really?

How did he make his money? Where does he keep the money?

Is it secure or easy to access?

What kind of things does he support?

How did he become the rights boogeyman or,

if you prefer, bogeyman?

Could I get in the same room with his money,

and how much antisemitism are we going

to uncover in finding out?

Spoiler alert for this episode, lots!

(dark unsettling ethereal music)

Okay, that one was for me. Cue the real title.

(dark dramatic music)

"George Soros: What's Like His Whole Deal?" Nice.

I love a this frigging guy episode

where we talk about a frigging guy,

not like what pundits might be saying about him

but his actual background,

who he actually is and what he stands for.

He was born right here on Earth in Budapest

or Budapesht if you prefer, Hungary or Hungry if you prefer,

in 1930 or, that's it, 1930,

a time before the invention of the modern toothbrush.

Before that, people brushed their teeth

with bristles made from animal hair

or I assume just scraped their teeth up against a washboard

or whatever else was lying around at the time,

cigarette butts, probably.

His family was Jewish,

but as with many well off Hungarian Jews at the time,

they tended to shy away from their roots.

The young George Soros, quote,

"beamed when other children would tell him,

'You don't look Jewish.'

Nothing made him feel happier than to be told he

did not have the appearance of a Jew."

Later in life, he even jokingly told other people

that he grew up in a Jewish antisemitic home.

This kind of thing wasn't uncommon

among minority Jewish populations in Europe,

especially as antisemitism was on the rise at the time.

His family even changed their last name

from Schwartz to Soros in 1936.

This isn't very important,

but a childhood friend described young Soros

as "a very pretty little boy,"

a real weird ass compliment that none

of my childhood friends ever used to describe me!

I'm looking at you, Kyle Dietrich!

Was I not pretty enough, Kyle?

Was I not pretty enough for you, Kyle?

(beep) you, Kyle! I'm so, ugh, I did my best.

At any rate, Soros may not have been a practicing Jew,

but that kind of thing didn't really matter much

to the Nazis who invaded an occupied Hungary in March 1944.

For you younger viewers,

invading and occupying other nations

are things Nazis used to do before they

were able to get Disney World season passes

and run social media sites.

Instead of fleeing Hungary,

Soros and his family survived the war

by obtaining forged documents suggesting they were Christian

and he even briefly posed as the godson of a man

who worked for Hungary's Ministry of Agriculture,

no beard growing or Nazi coat wearing necessary.

Soros's documents bore the name Sandor Kiss,

and in 1944, he accompanied his phony godfather

to the estate of a wealthy Jew

who had used his influence to flee the country.

This is where we get the Nazi collaborator rumor

because that fake godfather was there

to inventory the valuables left behind for Nazis to steal

with a 13-year-old Soros along for the ride.

So yeah, not exactly a member of the Schutzstaffel.

He was a kid who was only there

because he was hiding from the Nazis,

but despite very obviously not being a Nazi collaborator,

this story has been used against him.

In 2018, Roseanne Barr would claim that he, quote,

"turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered

in German concentration camps and stole their wealth."

That didn't happen and is a very silly thing to say.

She did apologize for tweeting that

after she was fired from her show

for a bunch of other offensive tweets.

Can you believe "The Conners" has been on for six seasons?

Network TV, man. It's like another world out there.

Anyway, if you're wondering how such a falsehood

could spin out of control, I have to point out that,

in the interest of being fair like a maiden

and balanced like a balanced maiden,

that Soros himself appeared at best unprepared

for questions about that 1944 incident

during a "60 Minutes" interview in 1998.

- I mean, that sounds like an experience

that would send lots of people

to the psychiatric couch for many, many years.

Was it difficult?

- No, not at all, not at all.

- Yeah, so the reason confiscating a bunch

of Jewish property wouldn't have sent him

to the psychiatric couch is,

I'd reckon, because he didn't do that.

Again, he was 13. They didn't put him to work.

He was too busy listening to The Verve Pipe

and hiding erections.

I mean, sure, whether that clip has selective editing

or if Soros genuinely didn't recognize

how he was coming off, it doesn't make him look great,

but that one kind of weird interview

from more than 25 years ago is largely responsible

for the narrative that he helped the Nazis

or even is a Nazi, even though,

really can't stress this enough,

he was a Jew hiding from the Nazis during this time.

Remember that scene in the "Zone of Interest"

where the Nazis are discussing the logistics

of exterminating Hungary's 700,000 Jews?

That included 13-year-old George Soros,

not by name, but he was included, and don't worry.

That isn't one of those scenes

that is apparently impossible to interpret,

but let's keep going with Soros's youth

as we've got plenty of brain worms to dig from the muck!

Got one! Oh, get in there!

Oh, ha! All right, here we go.

Soros and his family had some close calls

during the Nazi occupation but survived until Soviet

and Romanian forces liberated Budapest in early 1945.

The same couldn't be said for hundreds of thousands

of other Hungarian Jews executed in labor camps

or killed during the siege.

Having wealth and connections undoubtedly

helped his family survive,

and Soros wouldn't have been able to go on

to make a squillion dollars had it not been

for forged and purchased identities.

In 1947, shortly after turning 17,

he left for England and ultimately studied

at the London School of Economics,

where he was mentored by Karl Popper,

an influential philosopher who coined the phrase,

"Suck it in, suck it in, suck it in.

If you're Rin Tin Tin or Anne Boleyn,

make a desperate move."

That's the guy from Blues Traveler, I think.

Wait, is he the same guy? There's no way to know.

Anyway, along with forming Blues Traveler,

Karl Popper promoted the idea of the Open Society,

which is kind of what it sounds like,

that individuals should be free to decide

how to live their lives without being repressed

by a fascist or totalitarian government,

in essence, a pluralist liberal democracy.

For someone like George Soros

who'd spent his teen years changing identities

and fearing for his life because he was Jewish,

this sounded pretty good.

It wasn't fascism, but it certainly wasn't socialism either.

So in 1956, Soros moved to a place that seemed

to hate both of those things, the United States or,

more specifically, New York City,

the apple of unusual size for an apple.

He planned to work on Wall Street for five years,

saved $500,000,

which is more than five million in today's Simoleons,

and then go back to the UK to be a philosopher.

Ha! The frivolities of youth.

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Yes, it seems as if Soros liked money too much

to spend his time philosophizing,

or he realized perhaps he could do both,

the money thing and the thinking about stuff thing,

and he credits his remarkable success

in finance to the idea of reflexivity,

that there are feedback loops based

on economic decisions people make due to a perception

of the market that end up impacting the market itself.

Does that make sense? It doesn't to me.

Probably why I'm not rich, and the gambling.

Here's how Soros describes it.

Quote, "In situations that have thinking participants,

the participants' view of the world

is always partial and distorted.

That is the principle of fallibility.

The other is that these distorted views

can influence the situation to which they relate

because false views lead to inappropriate actions.

That is the principle of reflexivity.

For instance, treating drug addicts

as criminals creates criminal behavior.

It misconstrues the problem and interferes

with the proper treatment of addicts."

Wow. Well, he's right about that.

It's weird when a billionaire

is right about a societal problem.

It's jarring even. I am jarred right now!

And when it comes to using this idea to make money,

he wasn't just whistling Dixie,

or, as they call it in Hungary,

whistling the Mecsek mountain range.

After bouncing around as an arbitrage trader

and then a VP at various firms,

he founded Soros Fund Management in 1970,

which was later renamed Quantum Fund,

and we're going to skip ahead a bit here to the 1990s,

not just because a hedge fund manager

slowly making millions isn't that interesting

but because we don't have Margot Robbie

in a bathtub to explain how it all works.

I mean, we have Margot Robbie standing just off camera.

I just don't have a bathtub. Go home, Margot!

Margot stinking Robbie, you stink!

Go home! Get out of here!

Pee-pew, Margot!

Just, she's always hanging around in the set.

Why, like pee-pew!

See, that's why they put her in the bath,

because she's stinky.

(items clatter off set)

You smell, Margot.

But what's really important here are two events

in the Pearl Jammin' 90s that took him

from millionaire to billionaire and made him one

of the most successful currency speculators of all time.

I'm going to talk through all of this

but will not get in a bathtub!

The water burns us.

First, in 1990,

Britain joined the European exchange rate mechanism,

AKA, the ERM, which fixed the exchange rates

of European currencies to the German mark,

a step toward transitioning toward the euro,

a single currency for the entire continent.

This ended up being a bad idea for a number

of reasons we will not get into here

lest we ask this guy to crawl out of his K hole,

which we're not gonna do.

But George Soros greatly profited

by taking a $1 billion short position on the British pound.

Other investors did this as well

but none as aggressively as Soros.

Basically, his fund borrowed a jolly good trove of pounds

and sold them for other more stable currencies.

This helped drive demand for those currencies up

as well as the supply of the pound, and, before you know it,

Bob's your uncle, bagsy-skint, chinwag,

you've chuffed the (beep).

Britain can't afford to prop up its currency.

It has to withdraw from the ERM,

and the value of the pound plummeted like a dodgy old,

I don't know in it,

and Soros is said to have broken the Bank of England

on what became known as Black Wednesday.

He made a billion dollars that day

by aggressively putting pressure on an unstable currency.

Does this mean he caused it himself?

Well, he wasn't the one who made some

of the bad economic decisions in the first place,

hat tip to Margaret Thatcher there and yeah,

tap it to the hat, cheery hat maiden,

but he did egg it all on.

He was like the Jack Nicholson nodding meme,

and he greatly profited from what would result

in high unemployment and cuts to the UK's welfare system.

Now, you could argue, as some have,

that Black Wednesday was ultimately good for the UK

in that it allowed for lower interest rates

and increased growth in the decades that followed.

On the other hand, perhaps betting on the financial ruin

of 60 million people is bad, like a bad evil thing to do,

but I guess that depends on who you ask,

for example, if you asked a billionaire or not.

(riveting music)

A similar thing happened in our second event,

the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

This was a series of currency devaluations

that started in Thailand and then spread to countries

like Malaysia, South Korea, and Indonesia,

though the causes of this crisis are less agreed upon.

Again, speculative investors thought Thailand

was over leveraged and doubted its currency strength

while fixed to the US dollar.

This time, however, the leaders of some

of those Asian countries directly blamed Soros

for what happened.

Malaysian authoritarian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad

called him a "moron"

who had intentionally destroyed his nation's economy

for financial gain.

He also incidentally called Soros a Jew a bunch of times.

Not sure how that's relevant,

but we'll put a little SS pin in that for now.

While Soros agreed that his funds focused

on these teetering currencies,

he claimed his actually gave Malaysia a softer landing

than it would've had otherwise.

Mahathir, who is also still alive at 98, by the way,

note to self to check on that before we release this video.

Put on screen if he's still alive.

He said that currency trading should be banned

to prevent these kinds of economic crises.

George Soros unsurprisingly came out against that idea.

So that's the first part of this whole story.

The guy became massively wealthy

by betting against weak currencies

and used large infusions of capital

to exacerbate those currency failures probably.

Money's fake.

I could be saying anything right now, actually.

I'll check with the bathtub.

But it's not exactly a good thing to do.

It's kind of something in like an evil person

in a movie would do.

We gotta think of a better word for that. Okay.

Of course, he has also spent $32 billion on philanthropy

through his foundation in the past few decades,

according to that foundation,

not that that's necessarily good either.

So after the break, we're gonna take a look

at what all of that money has gone toward

and how he became the right wing's monster of the week,

sorry, wait, century.

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The hook brings you back!

We were talking about George Soros,

a relatively low profile billionaire,

given that he doesn't own a platform famous

for being the place people go to write,

"She ebbin' on my neezer till I Scrooge."

At any rate, once he became very wealthy,

it was time to put some effort

into that whole Open Society dilly he had learned

from the guy from Rusted Root or whatever.

Specifically, he wanted to fund efforts

to promote open societies in Eastern Europe,

back when most Eastern European nations were either part of

or heavily influenced by the Soviet Union.

Remember, no matter what you've heard

from Timberland Crucklesby,

George Soros isn't a communist

and notably doesn't like communism.

He started his first Open Society Foundation

in his native Hungary in 1984.

1984! It's just like 1984.

Helping to improve communication in the communist country

by importing hundreds of photocopiers,

which allowed for the spreading

of previously banned literature.

The foundation funded local universities

and their student journals and even paid

for activist students to study abroad.

One of those students

was current Hungarian authoritarian strongman Viktor Orban,

a tidbit you may remember from our Hungary episode,

one of those reflexivity/unintended consequences

type things.

Foreshadowing!

Be careful who you educate

as they may just be the next Darth Sidious, et cetera.

Darth Baddo.

Soros established similar anti-communist foundations

throughout the 1980s in places like China, the Soviet Union,

and Poland, hoping to foster a new generation

of free thinkers and earning rave reviews

from many Republicans who liked that he was aligned

with final boss Ronald Reagan against communism.

(riveting music)

By the 1990s, Soros had announced his intentions

to make contributions toward domestic programs

in the United States, including drug reform

and decreasing political advertising on television.

Starting in 1994, oh my, oh!

He put tens of millions of dollars toward efforts

to legalize and decriminalize drugs,

probably because of that thing he said earlier

where criminalizing drugs doesn't do anything

except turn people into criminals.

Good idea.

We're not keeping score here, but if we were,

he'd get a Cody Buck, which is what I call points.

It's an imperfect system. I should change the name of stuff.

He was still not a mainstream name

to conservative media folk,

but this is where the rumblings began.

In the late 90s, eight-time presidential non-factor

and conspirator fascist Lyndon LaRouche put out a series

of articles referring to "Soros the Golem"

and calling him "the queen's drug pusher."

Now look, we will be here for a long time

if I start going through every example

of antisemitic imagery and speculative skull

and bone style connect the dots theorizing.

So let's just say that LaRouche repeated the Soros

was a Nazi lie and devoted several paragraphs

to the Rothschild connection,

and you could purchase a full report on him

for the low, low price of $100 for a report on Soros!

God, that's in 90s money!

You could've bought like nine Spin Doctors albums for that.

Around the same time,

Soros himself was getting more involved politically,

not just donating to causes and starting foundations

but meeting with and attempting

to influence politicians himself.

But far from being a puppet master pulling all the strings,

he was initially viewed with some skepticism,

especially when it came to his opinion on foreign relations.

According to one Clinton administration official in 1995,

quote, "Sometimes his speeches

and articles are overly idealistic.

In that sense, people take him with a grain of salt."

The image you that from reading about Soros in this time

is of a guy who desperately wants to have the amount

of influence that people in later decades

would attribute to him.

Kinda like Elon Musk today, he got super rich,

was credited as one of the world's great financial analysts,

and wanted others to know his ideas.

Remember, he wanted to be a philosopher

like Socrates or Descartes or Nietzsche.

He's written a bunch of books trying

to spread these ideas to the masses.

The fact that he's been at it for decades

and our country is still teetering on the brink of fascism

is kind of evidence that he hasn't been nearly

as influential as all those people

at the beginning would have you believe.

It's also kind of interesting how,

when a person gets really rich,

they think their opinions are suddenly important,

even if they're bad opinions,

like the opinions of an evil person in a movie,

and I guess it's a little reassuring that these people

don't have as much power as we seem to think.

It's also worth noting that the early criticism

of Soros's public activities weren't all from the right.

According to "Reason" magazine books editor Jesse Walker,

quote, "I first started encountering anti-Soros invective

in the 1990s.

Interestingly, it was coming from the left.

People were worried that he was buying up the movement or,

in a less conspiratorial vein, that the possibility

of chasing Soros dollars

would distort the independent left's activities."

In hindsight, it may have been a good idea to tell activists

and political groups on the left

to take as much money as you can!

In the future, we lose all of our journalists,

and right-wing media has a seemingly endless supply

of money.

Like we joke about cashing the Soros checks now,

but please, 90s leftists, take the Soros money!

Also watch out for 9/11.

I will let you guess what that means.

But as we inched into the current Willennium,

we got closer to the right-wing boogeymanification

of George Soros,

the transition from ordinary piece of (beep) billionaire

to the fantasy of a murderous demon (beep) billionaire

intent on world domination.

Think of George Soros as Walter White

in season one of "Breaking Bad"

and the American right-wing's conception of him

as Walter White in seasons three through five.

Season one Walter White was not exactly a good guy,

but season five Walter White is an all-time evil guy

in a movie, in a TV show, an evil guy,

an evil character like the opposite of the good guy.

(beep) We'll get there.

George's most direct entry into US politics came

in late 2003 when he committed more than $15 million

towards efforts to defeat the reelection of George W Bush.

After reexamination, maybe that money

would've been better spent building a giant cannon

and firing whatever was left over directly toward the sun.

Bush ended up winning reelection since his opponent

was tragically a half sentient jar of mustard.

He gurgled, but we simply couldn't hear his words.

Alas, if only he gurgled more articulately.

Nevertheless,

Republicans did not like some billionaire elite

waving his money around trying

to influence a presidential election.

That's their job, which they did very well

by financing a discredited group

to say the dry mustard jar was bad at war.

The Republican House speaker, Dennis Hastert,

a man whose name you really should Bing

if you don't know it, went on Fox News at the time

to (beep) talk Soros, saying,

"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money.

I don't know where, if it comes overseas

or from drug groups or where it comes from."

(laughs) Drug groups.

Very odd thing to say

since the source of Soros's money wasn't a secret.

We talked about it earlier in this video.

Also, again, drug groups? What are drug groups?

Just seems like Dennis Hastert is just admitting

that he doesn't know how to look stuff up.

Hey, what was the source of your money, Dennis?