by Carl F. Horowitz
Among paymasters of Leftist global activism, George Soros still stands out. With his nemesis Donald Trump now again president, the Hungarian-born hedge fund multibillionaire, now 94, has every incentive to continue funding organizations dedicated to erasing national identities under the guise of “diversity,” “equality” and “human rights.” Though he handed over the chairmanship of his New York-based philanthropy, the Open Society Foundations, to son Alexander in 2023, he remains in the picture, advancing multiculturalism over the liberty he claims to espouse.
National Legal and Policy Center has played a role in opposing Soros’s philanthropy empire. In May 2023, NLPC filed a complaint with the IRS against two U.S.-based groups, Disinformation Index Inc. and a sister organization, the Disinformation Index Foundation, recently rebranded as the AN Foundation. Each is a component of a London-based nonprofit, Global Disinformation Index (GDI) . The complaint details a multitude of blatant violations of IRS disclosure rules regarding the U.S. groups’ Form 990 annual disclosure reports over several years. Violations include failing to disclose funding sources, hiding officers’ identities, and paying excessive executive compensation to its president, as first reported by Gabe Kaminsky in the Washington Examiner.
George Soros is the maypole of this nonprofit-political activist complex. The backstory to this international man of mystery, familiar though not always understood, gives crucial clues about the motives of the Open Society Foundations.
Born Gyorgy Schwartz on August 12, 1930, George Soros and his brother grew up in relative prosperity in Budapest. His father, Tivadar, was a lawyer; his mother, Erzsebet, a shop owner. By the middle of the decade, the parents had a more pressing concern than their careers. The Hungarian government had been drawing close to the Nazi-controlled German government. The parents, fearing their Jewish origins would be discovered, changed the family name to Soros. The name felt right. The word “soros” means “will soar” in Esperanto (his father was an Esperanto enthusiast) and “next” in Hungarian.
During World War II, the family’s worst fears became reality. The Hungarian government rounded up about 800,000 Jews and sent them off to concentration camps. The German occupation, which began in March 1944, rapidly accelerated this monstrosity. All told, an estimated 564,000 Hungarian Jews died. That young George Soros managed to survive – it’s a complicated story – owed to following his father’s advice to cooperate with the authorities only when absolutely necessary. In 1947, after the war, Soros migrated to Paris and then to England, where he studied at the London School of Economics. He would earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in philosophy. One of his professors, Karl Popper, an Austrian émigré, as we later shall see, was an enormous influence.
Soros chose investment banking for a career. In succession, starting in 1954, he worked for (London-based) Singer & Friedlander, and then, after moving to New York City, did stints at F.M. Mayer, Wertheim & Co., and Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder. In 1970, he made his independent move. With help from then-business partner Jim Rogers, he started a hedge fund, Soros Fund Management. The pair also founded the Quantum Group, a global investment firm with large stakes in stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. Soros Fund Management would serve as the primary adviser to Quantum.
These ventures would be highly profitable, routinely delivering annual returns of 20 percent or more. George Soros grew wealthy. In 1992 he would grow a whole lot wealthier.
After researching currency markets, Soros concluded that the British sterling pound was weak relative to currencies in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (a precursor to the European Union). He surmised that the pound, at a fixed rate, would be unable to compete with the German mark. For several months, the Quantum Fund went on a short sale binge, betting that the pound’s exchange rate would take a dive. The gamble paid off. On September 16, 1992, “Black Wednesday,” the British government, boxed in, devalued the pound and removed it from the European currency system. The Quantum Fund, having shorted about $10 billion worth of sterling pounds, profited by $1.8 billion. In the process, Soros increased his personal net worth by at least $1 billion.
Soros now could devote more attention to his real passion: changing the world, ostensibly for the better. He’d been moving in the direction of philanthropy starting in the late 1980s. Now it was time to go big. In April 1993, Soros, with $12 million in seed money, established the Open Society Institute, later to be known as the Open Society Foundations (OSF). The New York City-based nonprofit would fund a wide range of organizations committed to promoting globally-based social democracy in areas such as education, criminal justice, environmental sustainability and media transparency. OSF now has offices in dozens of countries. Its web extends far wider than George Soros and his checkbook.
The organization’s name reflects George Soros’ admiration for his London School of Economics mentor, Karl Popper, and particularly Popper’s magnum opus, The Open Society and Its Enemies, a two-volume set originally published in 1945. Soros’ interpretation of Popper – more accurately, misinterpretation – defines his mission.
Sir Karl Popper (1902-94) was an Austrian-born British philosopher in the rationalist mode of Locke, Hume, Smith and Spinoza. He ranks up there with his fellow Austrian, Friedrich Hayek, as a giant of 20th-century classical liberalism. Born and raised in Vienna, he briefly moved to England in 1935 amid the growing appeal of Nazism and then accepted an academic appointment in New Zealand. He would stay there until 1946, when he returned to England for good.
Soros, like Popper, despised communism. In their view, the Soviet Union, run by people who fit facts to preordained conclusions, had created a closed society, not an open one. Inevitably, that led to tyranny. So why did Soros, unlike Popper, embrace the egalitarian Left after the Soviet empire fell? And why has he persisted? Is not obvious that the eclipse of national sovereignty by controlled global “cooperation” has created its own regime of dogma?
Arguably the best explanation for this, as expressed by Soros in his books, is his fear and loathing of the nation-state as an institution, an attitude seared into him during the Nazi roundups in Budapest. For him, any patriotic defense of national interest is a prelude to dictatorship. A chill runs up his spine when he sees immigrants deported or nonwhite street criminals thrown into prison. George Soros believes that open minds require open borders. When a wealthy country invites newcomers, regardless of origin, creed or motive, it promotes equality, understanding and creativity. This, of course, is delusion on a grand scale. But Soros believes in it, as do his beneficiaries.
In a real sense, Soros was always on the Left despite his alleged fealty to classical liberalism. He may revere Karl Popper but it is doubtful that Popper, if alive today, would revere him. Not surprisingly, Soros sees Donald Trump as a mortal threat to democracy. Back in January 2017, he branded Trump “an imposter, a con-man and a would-be dictator.” It’s hard to imagine that he’s changed his mind since.
As such, Soros believes that the Open Society Foundations should be run by people who share his views. A year ago, for example, when current OSF President Binaifer Nowrojee, a Kenya native and a lawyer, was unanimously approved for the position by the executive board, Soros was elated. “When I established the Open Society Foundations, I wanted them to be truly global,” he said. “At the outset, that was merely an aspiration. But now I feel this ambition has been fulfilled with Binaifer Nowrojee as president of the foundations.”
George Soros, whose Forbes magazine-listed net worth as of last fall was $7.2 billion, has the means to support Ms. Nowrojee and Open Society Foundations operations. It’s not as if he hasn’t given generously already. In 2017, he transferred $18 billion – a sum representing around three-fourths of his then-net worth – to the foundation. Through 2023, OSF cumulative expenditures were $23 billion.
Where has all this money been going? OSF cites four priority areas: Rights and Dignity; Democratic Practice; Equity in Governance; and Future Worlds. The terminology alone suggests a rainbow Left perspective. The organization’s rhetoric on media censorship doesn’t reflect the reality.
George Soros, on the surface, opposes media censorship. Debate, he believes, should be open to all. Yet in practice, Soros, top OSF officials, and beneficiaries appear to take the view that only certain people should participate. Those who spread “disinformation” – almost inevitably, they are on the Right – should be sidelined. The long list of grantees in the Open Society Foundations’ IRS Form 990 for 2023 provides a wealth of insight into Soros’ goals.
In 2023, the Open Society Foundations donated $250,000 to Disinformation Index Inc., a San Antonio-based nonprofit. Founded a few years earlier, the grantee assesses the degree of public “harm” posed by certain web-based media outlets. Researchers there assign a rating to each outlet corresponding to the level of disinformation in its content. Disinformation Index makes these ratings available to advertisers in hopes that they will avoid “high-risk” websites. Offending websites thus could be starved of ad revenue unless they change in a positive direction.
Leaving aside the sheer moral self-righteousness, the task of defining “disinformation” and “risk” is murky. Matthew Savare, an attorney with the New York-based Lowenstein Sandler, explains how censors take advantage of this confusion. “Unfortunately, no one defines what ‘disinformation’ is,” Savare said. “This vagueness often leads to the censoring of opinions and uneven application of the policies, which has had a chilling effect on certain types of content and viewpoints, materially decreased revenue for certain outlets, and resulted in a less free flow of ideas.”
Significantly, the Disinformation Index Inc. and a related San Antonio-based organization, the AN Foundation, formerly the Disinformation Index Foundation, were on the government dole during the Biden years. According to the Washington Examiner, the two groups received a combined $665,000 in grants from the U.S. State Department and the (government-subsidized) National Endowment for Democracy during 2020-21.
Magnifying these organizations’ capacity for disruption of online media is their close affiliation with the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which also has developed a media risk classification system. A couple years ago, GDI listed its 10 “riskiest” news websites: the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason and the New York Post. Each is on the Right. GDI’s 10 “least risky” online news outlets, by contrast, were: National Public Radio, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, HuffPost and the Wall Street Journal. All, save perhaps for the Wall Street Journal, lean (or have come to lean) leftward. This cannot be a coincidence.
The Global Disinformation Index, established in 2018, should serve as evidence that the British Left is as determined as the American Left to control the flow of news. In evasive, self-important language, the group explains its mission:
Disinformation has become a business. Today’s internet business models reward engagement above all else. These models monetise attention without considering the quality of the content garnering that attention, or the harm that may result. There is a robust and growing community of industry, policy and civil society advocates pressing for reform of this ecosystem. They all need data to inform their actions.
The Global Disinformation Index was born out of this need for data, specifically for the need for transparent, independent neutral disinformation risk ratings across the open web. GDI’s founders recognized early on that in order to disrupt the business model of disinformation, commercial companies, researchers and policymakers alike need access to independent ratings of news sites’ disinformation risk. These risk ratings are then used by advertising technology companies to ensure brands do not end up supporting high-risk websites. Stakeholders also need strong and consistent leadership to help navigate the ever-changing disinformation landscape.
There is nothing “neutral” about how this organization operates. Censorship is the main purpose of its existence. GDI’s co-founder and current executive director, Clare Melford, in fact, is an alumnus of the Open Society Foundations and a former CEO of the London-based International Business Leaders Forum. The Oxford-educated Melford pulls no punches about her desire to cancel “harmful” media. In a November 9, 2021 video presentation sponsored by the London School of Economics, she cited four sources of media threat that need to be dealt with: state actors; private influence operators; grassroots trolls; and financially-motivated rent seekers. It’s no coincidence that the London School of Economics is George Soros’ alma mater. Nor is it a coincidence that in 2023 the Open Society Foundations contributed more than $4.6 million to LSE.
In George Soros’s ideal world, the priorities of the United Nations, the European Union, the ACLU, the World Bank, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Amnesty International, the Aspen Institute and the World Economic Forum take full precedence over the priorities of sovereign nations. Soros isn’t the only globalist philanthropist around, but he is the most potent. Indeed, various prominent nonprofits on the Left, such as the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, have received large grants from OSF.
George Soros has lived on this earth far longer than most people do. Yet he’s not going to let old age get in the way of his mission. He often has stated for the record that he intends to keep bankrolling social justice groups until his money runs out. Tough-minded and knowledgeable opposition is needed. That is why National Legal and Policy Center is going forward with its IRS complaint and why it anticipates this article to be an introduction to the workings of the Soros network. There is much work ahead.
Carl F. Horowitz is an NLPC Senior Fellow.
(AP Photo/Francois Mori)
