The Soros Thread (Retitled)

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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Apr 14, 2018 10:59 pm

What is the best hard evidence for Soros funding far left U.S. groups?
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Sun Apr 15, 2018 4:10 am

Yes, do tell, my friends.
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby Luther Blissett » Sun Apr 15, 2018 11:25 am

I’m curious about any hard evidence for anything, really, even the more moderate liberal stuff. Any claims about Soros seem to fail any kind of paper trail test, it seems.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Open Society money used liberal means to suppress / subvert the far left, if anything.
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:38 pm

Potential claims are of various types:

1. predicated on the FOX version of reality in which support for Obama or Democrats is the same as support for the "left," all protesters are on the street are in fact "liberals" out to topple the GOP figurehead of the moment

2. based on academic grants for studies of movements or social change (and a total misunderstanding of what those might mean) (Luther says: "I wouldn’t be surprised if Open Society money used liberal means to suppress / subvert the far left, if anything." Coopt, without a doubt. "Civilize." "Make more effective." Divert into accustomed models of community organizing, service mentality, electoral politics. Not far left per se, but movements like BLM.)

3. based on support for particular causes like marijuana legalization, therefore "the left" (same fallacy as in 1)

4. based on wild exaggerations of the impact of Soros initiatives in Eastern Europe. (Start feedback loop with Hungarian fascist propaganda.)

Almost all I ever see is #1. Soros (like many other rich folk) supported Obama or some such, and you can fill in the blank yourself (can't be said because of the dastardly PC police everywhere, but he's the kingpin of the world Jewish conspiracy to bring ISIS to Sweden and rape your white Christian grandma's values, etc.).
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby Elvis » Sun Apr 15, 2018 1:17 pm

It's interesting to see what 'evidence' does and doesn't come up about Soros, but as far as politically active billionaires go, I'd be much more interested in a thread about Sheldon Adelson.
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 24, 2018 5:34 pm

Viktor Orbán Versus the Enlightenment

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Orbán, the wily ruler of Hungary — and as a result of his statesmanlike endeavors, rumored to be one of the richest men in Europe, his huge fortune managed (and, formally, owned) by dummy companies and shady middlemen; his family, retainers, flunkeys, and servitors buying up ducal castles and vast landed estates, hotels, harbors, factories, restaurants, tourist resorts, shopping malls, newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations, internet journals; his firms building motorways, railway lines, sports complexes and restoring palaces and town halls at the public’s expense — achieved victory running on a very substantive policy platform. Regarding the economy, society, health, education, public transport, trade, taxation, etc. his electoral manifesto consisted of one sentence: “We’ll go on as before.” He does not give interviews and participated in no debates.

This was his message to Hungarians:

Hungary will not allow dark-skinned Muslim refugees or immigrants to enter the country, and will resist all forces of “mongrelization” (masquerading as “multiculturalism,” “internationalism,” and “cosmopolitanism”), which seek to destroy “White Christian Europe”;

Hungary will not disarm in the face of “political correctness,” which is nothing more than godless communism;

“Mongrelization,” or the dilution of Hungary’s racial stock, is pushed by the “international Jew,” George Soros, who bankrolls the anti-national, liberal-Bolshevik Hungarian opposition and who will even harm the only kind of Jew we like, the religious Zionist. Our dear friend, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, agrees with us as he, too, hates the Yids;

The European Union, the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the western press, the social-democratic, liberal, and Green parties are simple tools in the hands of George Soros — that is, of rootless cosmopolitan Jewry;

Pope Francis is an internationalist liberal Bolshevik;

“Gender madness” or “genderism,” radical feminism,” “human-rightsism,” gay marriage, the Istanbul treaty (which prohibits domestic violence against women and children) — all of these will suppress the Christian family and make “faggotry” the new model of morality;

We shall save Europe from itself, which allows Muslim terrorists and hard-left rioters to plunge it into chaos, unlike the true allies of Christianity like Erdoğan, al-Sisi, Berdimuhamedov, Aliyev, and the rest;

The Roma people — just like Muslims — cannot be integrated because they do not like to work. They ought to be disciplined, separated, segregated, and, if need be, resettled;

Freemasons, illuminati, cultural Marxists, stock-exchange speculators, anarchists, and sundry intellectuals wish to convince us to renounce anti-Romanian revanchism and irredentism because they have, of course, no understanding of our souls;

Our main enemies are journalists and human rights groups in the pay of You-Know-Who.


You may think this is a joke. But it isn’t. It is similar, in a way, to the 1930s, but it is a pastiche, a parody.

A few weeks ago, in a small town in Hungary, two Catholic nuns were stopped on the street and berated by people yelling, “Migrants! Migrants!” After pushing the old ladies a bit, they called the police, believing they had seen Muslim women in a burqa and hijab. The police saved the nuns from the Christian crowd.

A few days earlier, in another small town, a local woman left the hairdressers’. It was raining, and she did not want to ruin her new hairdo, so she covered her head with a shawl. Within a few minutes, a small crowd had gathered in the street, crying, “Migrant! Migrant!” and began shoving the poor woman against a wall. She protested loudly that she was Hungarian, that she could not speak anything but Hungarian, and that she had lived all her life in that little place. Some passersby recognized her and tried to rescue her, but to no avail. Finally the police came and people calmed down. But her hair was ruined.

There are no refugees in Hungary. The country has a zero-immigration policy, and a huge barbed-wire fence sits at the southern border, patrolled by police and the army. Would-be immigrants are kept in detention. The few black people one sees are American or French tourists.

This quotidian hysteria is taking place against the backdrop of mass hysteria launched by the state media and Orbán himself. The Orbán government’s first legislative move is the Stop Soros Act, which will force human rights groups to register as foreign agents and submit to regular police surveillance, fiduciary controls, and punitive taxes. Groups that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration — those looking after Hungarian citizens’ human rights, advocating education and prison reform, representing the homeless and ethnic and religious minorities, etc. — will be persecuted. And this comes on the heels of the shuttering of the biggest newspapers and radio stations and the shanghaiing of television and the largest-circulation internet journal.

You might expect that the opposition tried to block such moves and combat Orbán’s racist propaganda. But no. He was met with a bit of resistance, but was certainly not contradicted.

All opposition parties, including those ostensibly of the Left, have solemnly declared that they would not remove the “race-protecting” border fence and that they reject the EU’s refugee quotas like the Central European right and far right everywhere else (a far right that includes sometimes nominally communist and socialist parties). Protest against round-the-clock Islamophobic and anti-African, racist hysteria has been less and less intense in what remains of the erstwhile left-liberal press, except against the clearly anti-semitic nonsense that presents Soros as the mastermind behind the mass demographic war against white Christian Europe (and against white Israel, of course: Zionism and anti-semitism are becoming perfectly reconcilable).


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/vikt ... ightenment
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby DrEvil » Tue Apr 24, 2018 6:00 pm

Luther Blissett » Sun Apr 15, 2018 5:25 pm wrote:I’m curious about any hard evidence for anything, really, even the more moderate liberal stuff. Any claims about Soros seem to fail any kind of paper trail test, it seems.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Open Society money used liberal means to suppress / subvert the far left, if anything.


You can check who gets money and how much here:
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants-database
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:06 pm

The origins of this idea lie back in the 1980s with Gene Sharpe and the Einstein Institute, the rise of the "transitions" field of academic work, and the supposed use of Open Society and other Soros-funded organizations as fronts for CIA work to seek destabilization in China, Yugoslavia, etc. Just heard this Engdahl guy on the radio blaming the 1989 Chinese student movement entirely on this. The same Soros-connected groups or types of group appear again in the Color Revolutions, but as components, not drivers. It's not implausible, it's that it would be a major covert operations effort using NGOs as cutouts, not simply a Soros production let alone a "Zionist" wag-the-US-dog plot. Also, what this would have to do with "the left" (other than efforts to make the destabilizations appear liberatory and sympathies/solidarity from some left-liberal tendencies in the West) is rarely clarified. Plenty of regime change operations get by without need of it, furthermore, see Libya. What this really shows is the destructiveness of any level of foreign-state covert involvement or instrumentalization of social movements, even genuine and popular movements for social justice. It makes all of them suspect. It provides the basis for the Erdogans and Orbans and Dutertes and yes Assads to carry out repressive measures on the claim that all social opposition to them is actually due to foreign/imperialist meddling aimed at destroying the nation. We are now seeing the beginnings of the same kind of theatrical defamation against U.S. opposition groups such as BLM through the "Russiagate" claims -- a foreign plot to cause "divisiveness" in an otherwise healthy and placid U.S. society that would have elected Hillary Clinton.* This has a long history - the "outside agitator," or the allegation of urbanite elite fancy-thinking liberal plots to make groups unsatisfied who were otherwise going to be content and quiescent forever with their subaltern status. It is rightly criticized as a way to deny agency to the subaltern just when they start to show it. It's an automatic go-to for resentful groups of higher status who nevertheless feel precarious (i.e., lots and lots of white people, who are actually the real targets of most propaganda in the U.S.). The presence of sinister outside forces orchestrating dissent behind the scenes almost always appears as an allegation against new social movements as they arise - happened with civil rights and women's liberation right off the bat.

===

* that did elect her, actually, but for some reason the deciding factors in overturning the popular outcome, like the Electoral College ("the Dead Hand of 1787," as I like to call it), GOP vote suppression strategy, media material support and billionaire funding for Trump, and the Democrats' total refusal to concede anything to their base, don't matter as much as attributing it all to fictionalized versions of foreign influences.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Wed Apr 25, 2018 4:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby peartreed » Wed Apr 25, 2018 2:39 pm

It's also the go-to goblin of globalism - the foreign or foreign funded/infiltrated factions interfering in the Establishment isolation of Eden.
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Apr 25, 2018 4:56 pm

That prompts me to this riff: The accused members of the Russian Troll Brigade to Make America Divisive Again are, it is safe to guess, mostly "millennials" and coders who spend their days in front of screens on Microsoft or Unix-based platforms. They spread memes on social media. I shall postulate - please go ahead and object - that common pastimes among these urban dwellers include texting, gaming, consumption of Hollywood product, being sex-starved and hiding their level of porn consumption, ordering takeout, failing to meet a set exercise routine, and maintaining a positive outlook in line with New Age philosophy. I further postulate that most of them live gig to gig and maintain a simmering anger projected on some individual mix of othered identity groups. They all know decent English and will say they love their country despite its evident decline. How the hell are these people even FOREIGNERS?
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 25, 2018 5:13 pm

Yes- the world is changing and mainstream Democrats are not the ones to point out the way.


Empire - Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt

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Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that globalisation is transforming individual nation states into a system of diffuse national and global institutions of power - in other words a new type of Empire - which raises the possibility for a "multitude" of people to fight it.
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby American Dream » Tue May 01, 2018 8:16 pm

This is the anti-Soros "resistance":


Hungary’s Orbán Dismantles Checks & Balances, Fans Anti-Semitism, Draws U.S. ‘Pro-Family’ Praise

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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Image from France 24.

The April 8 re-election victory of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party was seen by many Europeans and Americans, including some conservatives, as an ominous sign, given Orbán’s dismantling of institutional limits on his power such as an independent judiciary and free press. In contrast, some U.S. Religious Right leaders celebrated Orbán’s victory as “a beam of hope for Western Christian Civilization” and called him a defender of Hungary’s Christian identity.

Orbán has positioned his opposition to Muslim immigration as a way to defend Europe’s Christian heritage. In December, he declared, “We must defend Christian culture.” At the time, anti-LGBTQ leader Brian Brown gushed over what he called Orbán’s “extraordinary essay on Christian culture, Christmas and the essence of Europe as a Christian continent.”

Orbán’s aggressive actions to consolidate his power have reportedly led some EU leaders to call him “The Viktator.” Orbán himself declared back in 2014, “‘Checks and balances’ is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt and use in European politics.” In 2015 author Colin Woodard warned about Orbán’s “dictatorial tendencies.” Freedom House calls Orbán’s Hungary the “least democratic country” in the EU. The New York Times reported that thousands of people took to the streets in Budapest to protest his victory. “Democracy is just inconceivable without the rule of law and free media,” said one protester.

But Brown and his colleague Allan Carlson at the International Organization for the Family and World Congress of Families called Orbán’s April triumph a victory for “true liberty” and “a victory for friends of the Natural Family around the globe.”

As we have noted before, many Religious Right leaders are happy to overlook a regime’s attacks on freedom of speech, press and religion as long as the government promotes policies that align with “traditional” Religious Right views on abortion, marriage, and sexuality. In their open letter of congratulations to Orbán, for example, Brown and Carlson praise Fidesz’s “exemplary” commitments to “the promotion of natural marriage” and “the protection of children from sexual radicals.”

That’s why so many U.S. Religious Right groups have fawned over Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as he restricts the rights of religious minorities. But Orbán’s case may be even more troubling because Hungary is a member of the EU. The Guardian’s Jennifer Rankin called his victory “a profound challenge for the European Union.”

Orbán won re-election with his party winning a big enough majority in parliament that it can essentially do more rewriting of the country’s constitution. Orbán had threatened “moral, legal and political recourse” against his opponents, and shortly after the election a pro-government magazine denounced 200 Orbán critics, including journalists and civil society advocates, as anti-government “mercenaries.” A further crackdown on civil society is expected to top the government’s agenda in May.

In April, a group of academics, writers and activists signed an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling for stronger action against Orbán:

Since he was elected prime minister in 2010, Viktor Orbán has turned public broadcasting stations into propaganda outlets, forced the sale of private stations into the hands of his political allies and taken effective control over the most important courts in the land.

He has also massively impeded the work of the country’s NGOs and independent academic institutions, stuffed the country’s electoral commission with his own cronies and rewritten electoral rules to favor his political party, Fidesz. As a result, leading experts believe that the recent elections in Hungary were less than free and hardly fair.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian government has, over the past months, repeatedly fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. Orbán has used public funds for a mass propaganda campaign that suggested that a Jewish banker is the puppetmaster behind an international conspiracy to destroy Hungary’s Christian culture.


Religious Right leaders from the U.S. and around the world have lavished praise on Orbán’s government, which hosted the World Congress of Families’ global summit in 2017. WCF called Orbán “the hero of pro-family and pro-life leaders.” Brown’s colleague E. Douglas Clark wrote at the time, “Hungary’s heroes are lighting the way for the rest of the world as they protect and strengthen the family, the foundation of their nation and all nations everywhere.” A year before, WCF ally Luca Volontè wrote for Public Discourse, “Hungary has seen a refreshing return to traditional values.”

Peter Sprigg and Travis Weber from the Family Research Council, who were also in Budapest for the World Congress of Families Summit, noted approvingly that the location “was partially chosen because of the pro-family policies of the country’s current Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose government helped organize the World Congress.” FRC wrote about Hungarian evangelicals, “Like us, in addition to working against secular cultural forces, they have to contend with those like George Soros—who is of Hungarian ancestry and continues to push his destructive notions of sexuality through Gender Studies degrees at his Central European University in Budapest.”

A 2017 petition on CitizenGo, a right-wing social media platform on whose board of trustees Brian Brown sits, urges European governments to follow Hungary’s lead and “sweep out” non-governmental organizations funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

Among those on the U.S. right celebrating Orbán’s most recent victory was Breitbart, which celebrated Orbán’s win as a defeat for globalists, bureaucrats and George Soros. The Washington Times editorialized on April 17 against the “unelected Eurocrats” and their “politically correct positions.” At National Review, Jack Fowler hailed Orbán’s “Euroweenie-shocking sweep” and said Orbán “can now claim to have the moral and democratic authority of the Hungarian people and others behind his quest.”

In contrast, Yascha Mounk, a senior fellow at New America, called the election “a milestone in the decline of democracy,” saying that Hungary’s trajectory has disproven many political scientists who believed that democracy was “safe” once a country has experienced a few peaceful transfers of power and achieved a measure of economic stability. Mounk writes that too many observers have interpreted the election as conferring democratic legitimacy on Orbán’s regime when in reality Orbán has turned Hungary from a liberal democracy into an illiberal democracy and now “it is effectively a dictatorship with a thin electoral veneer.” Making Mounk’s point at National Review, John O’Sullivan said the size of the victory (just under 50 percent of the vote in multi-party election) “more or less destroys the arguments of his opponents and critics that his governing Fidesz party could win only through authoritarianism, gerrymandering, and the dominance of the media by Fidesz and its business allies.”

Mounk warns that “Orbán’s anti-Semitism is already finding eager imitators in Western Europe.” Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan picked up on Mounk’s theme in a New York magazine article titled “A Democracy Disappears.”

Orbán is a former liberal who attended Oxford on a scholarship funded by philanthropist George Soros, but he moved to the right to get and maintain political power.

James Kirchick, a conservative who supported Hillary Clinton over Trump, wrote about the Orbán government’s Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation in his book The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick writes that the monument is an example of Hungary manipulating its history for political purposes. “This distortion of history obscures both the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Holocaust and the Hungarian state’s active collaboration in mass murder.” Orbán, in defending the memorial, said that the victims of the Nazi occupation, “whether Orthodox, Christian, or without faith, became the victims of a dictatorship that embodied an anti-Christian school of thought.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Orbán was an early supporter of Trump. For his part, Trump admires strongmen like Putin and Orbán. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright notes in her warning about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, “Mr. Trump appears to like bullies, and they are delighted to have him represent the American brand.”

Among those admiring Orbán’s moves are populist leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic. Slovakian Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini slammed the EU for considering some kind of punishment for Hungary after the election.


http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hung ... ly-praise/
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby JackRiddler » Tue May 01, 2018 8:35 pm

We will have reached Full Onion on the day the Kochs explicitly condemn Soros (instead of merely funding the condemnations anonymously).
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby Jerky » Tue May 01, 2018 8:45 pm

Indeed.

It's kind of like that billionaire asshole who dragged his wife out of the White House Correspondents' Dinner complaining of "being insulted by ELITES" when Michelle Wolf has probably never had any years where her taxable income entered into six digit territory.

J.

JackRiddler » 02 May 2018 00:35 wrote:We will have reached Full Onion on the day the Kochs explicitly condemn Soros (instead of merely funding the condemnations anonymously).
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Re: The Soros Thread (Retitled)

Postby American Dream » Tue May 01, 2018 9:03 pm

Yeah, that shit is everywhere:


"And Soros brags he's funding 'em"




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjoFzpRlY5o
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