FOX News says he wants to destroy America. Candace Owens is scared to speak his name out loud. Mikki Willis is making a film about his assault on the American family. Dr. Christiane Northrup claims he caused the pandemic. Trump called DA Alvin Bragg a "Soros-funded animal."
Who is this billionaire Jewish banker, a man so diabolical he can simultaneously be the greatest capitalist of all time and a communist chaos agent, so deceptive that he founded philanthropic organizations in 120 countries while supposedly being the "most evil man in the world?" And how does his financial influence in American politics actually stack up against the machinations of disciplined religious right-wing powerbrokers, supercharged by dark money?
Show Notes
The right’s obsession with Soros
Soros on right-wing conspiracies against him
GOP dark money
Democrat dark money
An overview of dark money
2022 biggest disclosed donor list
Barre Seid donates $1.6B
Harlan Crow and Justice Thomas
Sheldon Whitehouse on dark money and SCOTUS
Leonard Leo and SCOTUS
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All right, so as best as I can tell, that's the real George Soros.
Or at least a more reasonable portrait.
Well, he's not a creepy Batman villain.
We can say that much.
He is a billionaire philanthropist.
We might be able to criticize him as a former hedge fund opportunist, but he is actively focusing on using his wealth to maintain human rights, education, and democratic freedoms in countries with a high risk of sliding deeper into authoritarianism or in countries where the needle can be moved toward a democracy not yet in place.
And I think that we should acknowledge, though, that our view so far has benefited from, like, credible, oscent sources.
It's still true that we don't know what Soros is really like, and there may only be a few who do, because he's also a celebrity in the age of spectacle, where most people, like, safely and rightly assume that there's more going on behind the facade.
And, you know, his apparent human story, as you've laid it out, and his respectability are just not protective against slander in the Kafka trap world of reactionary logic.
Because the more respectable he looks, the more he can be suspected of nefarious private behaviors.
And I think one of the problems we just have to deal with is that You know, what MAGA folks love to do most about Trump, well, let me go for a bit after behaviors.
I think one of the problems we just have to deal with is that what MAGA folks love most about Trump is that they think, well, is that he does not hide his cruelty, which means they think there is no facade.
I mean, why do they love Kid Rock?
Why do they love Ted Nugent and Matt Walsh?
Because, you know, these guys seem to be transparent assholes, like self-liberated ids, and so they give a kind of permission.
to regular folks to just spray emotional vomit all over.
And they are trusted because of this premise, which is probably false.
That being assholes and being honest about it means they have no secrets, right?
Yeah.
I think that the feeling is, you know, something like, well, with Matt Walsh,
what you see is what you get, which is pretty naive for someone with a record
of talking about girls in really sexual ways.
Yeah, yeah.
For talking about, like, young teenagers as being, you know, ready to bear children and to be wives.
Right, so what conspiracists really suspect are the suits, the conferences, the seemingly orderly world governed by a capitalism that What they know is obviously driving humanity off a cliff, so if they can latch on to a personality that seems to be transgressive, that seems to be contrarian, that seems to not give a shit about social mores, they have the sense that they're not being lied to, and that's incredibly tragic and naive.
Yeah, those are true observations.
I just, in terms of like my perspective on Soros, I would direct any listeners curious to expand their own picture to this documentary just called Soros that was made by Jesse Dillon.
And the reason why I recommend it is it features interviews with friends and family, as well as colleagues from over the years, over the decades, in humanitarian work around the world.
But let's return to the US.
Many on the left hold the view, as you mentioned earlier, Matthew, that campaign finance reform would radically change our politics for the better.
I mean, no Western democracy is as beholden to muddied interests as this one.
And so objecting to billionaires wielding influence in government, no matter their agenda, really is a valid principle.
And here's the thing.
It is undeniably true that George Soros has been increasingly donating to progressive causes in the U.S.
It's kind of coincided with the U.S.
increasingly seeming like it was in danger of losing its democracy.
He was the single biggest donor during the 2022 midterms, pumping $128 million into those elections
and a total of $176 million into liberal groups over the 2021-2022 cycle,
according to political contribution tracking site OpenSecret.com.
all.
So it's a lot of money and at the same time I always have a problem with scope because I think you said that his fortune, his hedge fund fortune was $44 billion?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, 128 million is, uh, I mean, what?
It's fractional to that kind of wealth.
Anyway, I find the numbers very confusing, but you've got more for us, don't you?
Yeah, it can be confusing.
And when you bring up scope, so yes, he can certainly afford to make that kind of donation and probably not even really feel it in terms of his personal net worth and in terms of how You know, all of the money that he does have is probably earning money for him all the time anyway.
Right, right.
But the scope thing is important in terms of when we start playing on this big field of American campaign finance.
And remember, him being the single biggest donor during the 2022 midterms, I should just add here as a little Easter egg, the single biggest disclosed donor during the 2022 midterms.
So let's pause there.
If we look at that same list, the OpenSecret.com list some more, we see that there is a combined $255 million from the donors in positions 2 through 5.
So Soros is at number 1 for this particular cycle.
From 2 to 5, if we add up all those donations, there's $255 million.
$255 million.
And if we look at the first 25, the top 25 donors, 17 of those are donating to conservative
groups.
That's a total of roughly $534 million.
Left-leaning groups brought in $340 million or so by comparison from their just eight
donors in that top 25, including Soros.
So, here's the important part, though.
That's just disclosed donations.
So, we have to talk now about the new-ish phenomenon of dark money.
Now, when I say new-ish, this dates back to the Citizens United versus FEC Supreme Court decision in 2010.
And what happened here is that there was the reversal of a century-old law that limited corporation and outside groups spending on elections.
In simple terms, and you've heard this before, the case turned on the argument that corporations have the same rights as people and money is their inalienable free speech.
Therefore, limiting corporate political contributions is just plain unconstitutional.
Uh, yeah.
Okay, so the just mind-bending absurdity of that aside, am I right in thinking that while this made like unlimited donations possible, it also Like, paved the way for, you know, corporate interests to maintain anonymity because they could fund outside groups that kind of serve as shell companies to, you know, disperse big donations to campaigns and political activist groups.
You can't really sort of trace it back to the source.
Is that how it works?
Yeah, essentially my understanding is it created this loophole.
So if corporations are now free to donate as much as they want to, well let's set up some shell groups that we can funnel our money through.
And what this does is it creates the situation in which voters are kept in the dark about the source of the money, but the candidates still really know to whom those items go.
They know, right?
Sure, sure.
And the IOUs just keep getting bigger and bigger.
So I would direct anyone who's really curious about this stuff, because we can't go into it in detail, and I'm not an expert on it, but Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has campaigned vigorously to overturn Citizens United, and specifically to get dark money out of politics.
He's spoken about it on the Senate floor, I think, close to 20 times.
And he's written a book about it called The Scheme.
He points out that while Democrats have to play the same game to be competitive, his Disclose Act nonetheless couldn't get a single Republican vote in the Senate, but it got all of the Democrat votes.
So all of the Democrats know we're also involved in this system of campaign finance and undue influence, but we want to figure out how to regulate it better.
And all the Republicans say, no fucking way.
So they actually vote to self-regulate though?
Yeah.
So they're saying they, yeah, I mean that seems uncharacteristically honest, right?
Yeah, well they see that the principle is sound and they also know that they're being outmaneuvered in this particular area.
Exactly.
So they can play the game, but not as well as the GOP.
Let me be really clear here that Democrats are not without fault.
They've been directly to blame for the dark money arms race escalation.
And in fact, ProPublica and the New York Times have shown that Democrats raised more dark money in 2020 than Republicans did.
Having ramped up from earlier cycles in which they saw the GOP so effectively exploiting these new possibilities.
And George Soros and other big Democrat donors are involved in that dark money fundraising as well.
But again, notice how both House and Senate Democrats have voted for the Disclose Act each time Sheldon Whitehouse has tried to get it passed, only to then be thwarted by Republicans who know that anonymity protects donors who don't want to be associated with specific causes that, for example, damage the environment or perpetuate poverty.
Now, White House has even joked that perhaps now Republicans will be more interested in the DISCLOSE Act because Democrats are playing hardball in the dark money game, too.
Now, Senator Whitehouse has also raised the alarm about how Federalist Society Vice President and National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Board member Leonard Leo, who is now going to be an important figure in our story, has used dark money groups to become himself a kind of judicial kingmaker.
Get this, Leo has been directly involved in the appointments of six of the current nine Supreme Court justices.
And it's not hard to guess which ones.
Well, let's just run it down.
So it's got to be Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett, right?
