It's easy to see George Soros's imprint on most major American left-wing organizations. All you have to do is look at their financial forms. George Soros aids hundreds of left-wing groups in America each year under the auspices of his Open Society Foundations. In just 10 years, Soros has given more than $550 million to liberal organizations in the United States.
And that's really just a beginning. That total represents about 27 percent of the $2 billion given out by the American branches of his Open Society Foundations from 2000 to 2009. (2010 forms are unavailable and Open Society staff uncooperative.) Overall, he has given more than $8 billion to those foundations since they first started in 1993, as an outgrowth of his "open society" charity efforts dating back to 1979. His foundations credit him as having given that money "to support human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education in 70 countries."
According to The New York Times, the foundation claims "it is on track to give away about $860 million" this year. If things stay true to form for Soros, much of that money will head toward liberal groups in the United States. How that money is allocated takes on a new dimension as Soros just named criminal justice expert Christopher Stone the foundations' next president, starting in July.
Stone takes over what The New York Times calls "a sprawling constellation of more than 30 organizations that operate in places as diverse as Baltimore, Jakarta, the Kremlin and Congress." The Times left out that the Soros network is laughably left-wing: pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-gay marriage, pro-drug legalization, pro-union and pro-government-funded media as well as anti-faith, anti-death penalty and as anti-conservative as they come.
It's an important time for the foundations as Soros himself just turned 81 and has decided that he wants the charity to continue after his death. The foundations have focused on influencing America since late in the first term of President George W. Bush, who Soros strongly opposed. "I have to concentrate on what goes on in America. The fight for an open society now has to be fought there," reported The Moscow Times in 2003.
And fight it he has. Cause after liberal cause gets tens of thousands or even millions of dollars from Soros. According to the foundations, their support goes to "fund a range of programs around the world, from public health to education to business development." Some of that is true, even in the United States. Soros funds after-school programs, hospitals and the arts. While some of organizations have a liberal spin, they aren't necessarily left-wing.
But much of it flows to hardcore left-wing organizations. Eighty different liberal groups have received $1 million or more of Soros's charity in that time. Human Rights Watch, The Drug Policy Alliance, The Tides Foundation, National Public Radio, social justice initiatives and more all join the lefty millionaires club - thanks entirely to Soros.
The Drug Policy Alliance alone has received more than $31 million in those 10 years to oppose the "taboo associated with drug use." That commitment has earned Soros the title "sugar daddy of the legalization movement" from conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. Prominent supporters of drug legalization - Sting, Soros himself, and former talk show host Montel Williams - are featured in a Drug Policy Alliance video that calls the drug war a "war on people."
Some of Soros's other donations go to fund his extensive network of liberal media outlets, which have received more than $52 million. Those operations include a wide range of liberal news operations as well as the infrastructure of news - journalism schools, investigative journalism and even industry organizations.
All of that is designed to create what Soros has been pushing for decades to achieve - what he calls an "open society." But what exactly is an open society? In "Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism," he wrote that the concept is "an ideal to which our global society should aspire." But his influences are more complicated and more twisted.
Soros says he based the concept on works by philosopher Karl Popper, who Soros considers his mentor. "Popper proposed a form of social organization that starts with the recognition that no claim to the ultimate truth can be validated and therefore no group should be allowed to imposed its views on all of the rest," Soros wrote in "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror." "Open Society denotes freedom and the absence of repression," he summed up.
In that 2000 book, the current head of Soros's Open Society Foundations, Aryeh Neier, listed seven conditions of an open society that sounded entirely positive. They included:
- "Regular, free, and fair elections";
- "Free and pluralistic media";
- "The rule of law upheld by an independent judiciary";
- And "a market economy."
It's a pretty fair description of the United States, the very place Soros is trying to change. Looking at that list, it would be easy to believe in the benevolence of Soros. But he's been at this a long time and his public description has changed from something monstrous to something palatable.
In "Opening the Soviet System," which came out 10 years earlier, Soros depicted a much different reality of an open society. In a section entitled "Brave New World," he tried to "carry the concept of an open society to its logical conclusion." ("Brave New World," is also the title of Aldous Huxley's frightening view of a dystopian future where the global government controlled the population through sleep conditioning and drugs.)
Soros said: "in an open society none of the existing ties are final, and people's relation to nation, family, and their fellows depends entirely on their own decisions. Looking at the reverse side of the coin, this means that the permanence of social relationships has disappeared; the organic structure of society has disintegrated to the point where its atoms, the individuals, float around without hindrance."
And from there, the description gets worse. "Choices arise which would not even have been imagined in an earlier age. Euthanasia, genetic engineering, brainwashing become problems of practical importance. The most complex human functions, such as thinking, may be broken down into their elements and artificially reproduced. Everything appears possible until it has been proven to be impossible."
Naturally, this new open society would take its toll on the people living there. "Perhaps the most striking characteristic of a perfectly changeable society is the decline in personal relationships," wrote Soros. "Friends, neighbors, husbands and wives would become, if not interchangeable, at least readily replaceable by only marginally inferior (or superior) substitutes." Even personal interaction is at risk in this "open society." "Personal contact may altogether decline in importance as more efficient means of communication reduce the need for physical presence," he wrote.
At least there Soros was a bit honest: "The picture that emerges is less than pleasing. As an accomplished fact, open society may prove to be far less desirable than it seems to those who regard it as an ideal." The added, however that any society "carried to its logical conclusion" becomes "absurd." But he adds, "nevertheless, it should be clear by now that, as an accomplished fact, Open Society may prove to be far less desirable than it seems to those who regard it as an ideal."
The ending of that section specifically mentions Huxley's "Brave New World," along with "1984," and More's "Utopia," as imagined futures that went wrong. Yet even a casual reader can see many direct parallels between Huxley's world and the one Soros aspires to.
Point by point, "Brave New World" skewers that future. Huxley wrote about a one-world government - the "World State - where drug use wasn't just legal, it was strongly encouraged. There, population was restricted and citizens wore "Malthusian belts" with a ready supply of birth control for almost mandatory promiscuity. Abortions were performed in a "lovely pink glass tower" and actual births were done in a lab under direct control of the powers that be. "Brave New World" was written as satire of the other Utopias envisioned at the time. It featured and prominent anti-individual and anti-family themes.
Religion, in Huxley's world, was one of the "monstrous superstitions" confined to savages only and "positively a crime against society," replaced by a feel-good drug called "soma." Soma, readers were told, had "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
Soros criticized Huxley's work, but it's as if he used it as a model for his charitable contributions - pro-one world government, pro-abortion, pro-government controlled media, pro-drug and even pro-euthanasia and against the very institutions that stand for traditional values such as family and faith. Imagine if someone had read George Orwell's "1984" and then tried to make it happen. That's what Soros has done, only with another, equally awful look into the future.
Soros has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding a "Brave New World" for Americans and even he admits it won't turn out well.
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center's Vice President for Business and Culture. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.
