George Soros: The Man and His Empire By Hayden Ludwig
https://tomklingenstein.com/george-soros-the-man-and-his-empire/
He’s the universal symbol of progressive tyranny, the image of Davos despotism. He’s the immigrant who broke the Bank of England and hedge fund master who plundered Wall Street. He’s a globe-trotting globalist active in dozens of countries, yet loyal to none. He’s the embodiment of philanthropy’s decay from its biblical pedigree into cultural Marxism. He’s a narcissist out to remake the world in his own cynical image. To those familiar with his “open society” ideology, he’s a menace bent on killing the West.
For millions across the world, George Soros is simply the face of evil.
But much of the notorious mega-donor’s life and legacy is complicated and hazy. Even at 94, Soros wields enormous influence over the institutional Left — the armada of activist, lobbying, policy, and litigation groups that really run the modern Democratic Party — something he aims to pass on to his 39-year-old playboy son and heir, Alexander, who took control of his father’s hedge fund and foundations less than two years ago.
This writer began reporting on George Soros’s dark money spigot at its zenith in the early Trump years, when it seemed money could buy anything in Washington. Fast forward to 2025, and Soros’s open society vision is itself on the ropes — and that’s stunning.
For decades, Soros shaped the Left into the emerging totalitarian force Americans roundly rejected in November 2024. Billions of his dark money dollars launched Washington’s professional activist class from the fringe to the heart of the Democratic establishment. Now, however, even Democratic strategists are complaining that the party takes too many directives from the woketariat: the “college-educated elites” guilty of “placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win,” as one operative groused after Election Day.
“The only Democrat group that is not actually proud of their country to a large extent at this point is progressive activists,” says liberal pollster Ruy Teixeira, who once predicted the rise of a permanent Democratic majority. “If you are trying to sell to people the idea that…America is fundamentally a benighted, almost dystopian place that was born in slavery, marinaded in racism, and white supremacists of this very day, and, you know, runs around oppressing the world’s people[,] I don’t see why anyone would sign up with you.”
For anyone familiar with the Democratic machine’s inner workings, that’s tantamount to rebellion, and utterly unprecedented. For two decades, Beltway activists — and the multi-billion-dollar foundations behind them — have ruled America’s liberal party with an iron fist. Yet in his twilight years, George Soros may live to see that once unshakeable legacy collapse.
The Early Years
The project to fundamentally transform America may have peaked around 2020, but its most influential architect began his life in 1930 Budapest.
György Schwartz was powerfully shaped by the authoritarian climate of his native Hungary and its proximity to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In 1936, his father, Tivadar, changed the family’s German-Jewish surname to “Soros,” which means “designated successor” in Magyar or “to soar” in Esperanto, the invented international language he treasured.
By all accounts, Tivadar Soros was a remarkable and intelligent man as well as an early internationalist. In the First World War, he volunteered as an officer for the Austro-Hungarian Empire fighting on the Eastern Front, where he was captured by Russians and sent to a POW camp in Siberia. Tivadar organized a mass escape and subsequent odyssey across a nation devastated by the 1917 Russian Revolution before returning, barely alive, to his family in Budapest. Tivadar then set up shop as a small-time lawyer who dabbled in left-leaning politics, publishing an Esperanto journal.
Then came the Holocaust. As Hungary’s anti-communist regime aligned the country with the Axis powers, it passed new laws restricting the rights and movement of Hungarian Jews. In 1944, Germany installed a National Socialist government in Hungary which ultimately deported 500,000 Jews to the death camps.
During the war, Tivadar Soros courageously invented false identity papers for his and other Jewish families and helped them hide from the Nazis. Despite the hardship, however, George now calls 1944 “the happiest year of my life.” “This is a strange, almost offensive thing to say because 1944 was the year of the Holocaust, but it is true,” he explains in Soros on Soros, a candid 1995 interview made a decade before he rose to global political prominence. He continues:
I was 14 years old. I had a father whom I adored, who was in command of the situation, who knew what to do and who helped others. We were in mortal danger, but I was convinced that I was exempt. When you are 14 years old, you believe that you can’t really be hurt. For a 14-year-old, it was the most exciting adventure venture that one could possibly ask for. It had a formative effect on my life because I learned the art of survival from a grand master. That has had a certain relevance to my investment career.
It also has a certain relevance to his character. Part of young George’s “adventure” meant posing as a Christian to avoid detection, enabled by a family friend who told officials George was his adopted godson. It also involved helping Nazi enforcers confiscate property from Jews who had been deported to the camps, something Soros is amazingly candid about decades later in his 1998 interview with 60 Minutes.
“That sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?” asked host Steve Kroft.
“Not at all, not at all,” Soros replied, shaking his head and smiling. “Maybe as a child you don’t see the connection. But it created no problem at all.”
“No feeling of guilt?” Kroft asked.
“No.”
But Kroft presses him harder: “For example, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am watching these people go; I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?”
“Well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away,” Soros suggests contemplatively. “But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there because that was… well, actually, in a funny way it’s just like in markets, that if I weren’t there — and of course, I wasn’t doing it — but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. And it was, whether I was there or not — I was only a spectator — the property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.”
The segment is uncomfortable to watch because Kroft clearly wants Soros to confess regret about playing a role, no matter how minor or understandable, in aiding the Nazi confiscators. But he doesn’t.
After the war ended in 1945, 15-year-old Soros considered traveling to the Soviet Union because, he recalled, “I’d like to find out the nature of this new system that we have to live under. Instead, his father — recalling his own harrowing trip through the workers’ paradise — steered the boy toward the United Kingdom, and in 1947 George was able to slip past the Iron Curtain by attending an Esperanto conference in Switzerland. From there, he settled in London and enrolled at the London School of Economics under the ex-Marxist philosopher Karl Popper, whose ideas about the “open society” so colored Soros’s ideology that they later provided the name for his Open Society Foundations.
For a man who became one of the world’s great investors, Soros’s career had a humdrum start. In the early 1950s he became a traveling salesman in the U.K. before landing a clerkship at the financial services firm Singer & Friedlander. Success came slowly. In 1956, he moved to New York and entered international arbitrage, buying securities (especially oil stocks) in one country and selling them in another. Soros excelled, developing a new form of trading he called “internal arbitrage,” a way of dividing combined “stocks, warrants, and bonds” and “trading them separately before they could be officially detached from each other.”
His breakthrough came when Soros became the first analyst in the U.S. to study German banks, discovering “you could buy some of the stocks at a tremendous discount from their actual values, once the cross-holdings were figured in.” He immediately went to J.P. Morgan executives, who instructed the young trader to “start buying immediately, before I completed the memo, because they thought that those stocks could double or triple on the basis of my recommendation.”
“That was the peak of the boom in European stocks and also in my career as a foreign securities analyst,” Soros says.
Hedging His Bets
In 1969, Soros established his own hedge fund — initially called the “Soros Fund,” now Quantum Fund — with $4 million, growing to $12 million four years later and $100 million by 1980. By then, Soros was personally worth $25 million. The firm’s junior partner was future CNBC analyst Jim Rogers, whom Soros met on Wall Street. Rogers did all the analysis, but “I made all the decisions,” Soros boasts. “He never pulled the trigger. He was not allowed to pull the trigger.”
Asked to describe his investment style, Soros explained: “I do not play according to a given set of rules; I look for changes in the rules of the game.”
That financial success came with a deep personal cost. Soros and his first wife, married since 1960, divorced in 1983 amidst a crunch to expand his company. The characteristically dispassionate Soros later called the divorce, among other things, “loosen[ing] the constraints under which I had been operating up to that time.”
The result was, ironically, a period of absolutely fantastic performance. We practically doubled our money in each of the next two years. The [Quantum] Fund jumped from $100 million to almost $400 million.
That’s when he lost money for the first time. Running the “machine” by himself had become next-to-impossible: “I realized I could not keep it up much longer because I would need a lot more ideas to feed a $400 million fund than I had needed at the beginning of this wild ride. The pressure became really almost too much to bear.”
In the end, he informed his shareholders of the loss, cut the $400 million fund in half — and came out ahead. At the time of his 1995 Soros on Soros interview, the Quantum Fund touted a 35% average annual return. $1,000 invested in 1969 would be worth $2.15 million 26 years later.
“I refused to remain the slave of my business,” Soros explains. “I established that I am the master and not the slave. It was a big change in many ways, because I began to accept myself as someone who is successful; I overcame fear of the misfortune that might befall me if I admitted my success.”
The Black Wednesday Billionaire
The Quantum Fund was well known by the early 1990s, but breaking the Bank of England put George Soros on the map. Britain was caught in a recession in 1992, with a weak economy, high inflation, and rising unemployment. The British pound was considered overvalued, and — pegged as it was to the Deutsche Mark — the Bank of England struggled to maintain a fixed rate required by the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), which attempted to stabilize exchange rates before countries adopted the euro.
Soros gambled that the U.K. would be forced to devalue its currency or exit the ERM, and his partners agreed. “If you guys really think this is such a good idea, bet the whole fund. … Don’t do it for $1.5 billion or even $5 billion. Do it for $15 billion,” Soros reportedly said.
He borrowed $10 billion and immediately sold it, shorting the British pound and gambling that the currency would plummet in value and the British would withdraw from the ERM — which they did, netting Soros $1 billion in a single day. (One odd but notable beneficiary: Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was part of the Quantum Fund team that broke the Bank of England.)
They called September 16 “Black Wednesday,” costing the Bank of England £3.3 billion ($6.75 billion in 2024 U.S. dollars) and the Conservative government a landslide defeat in the 1996–97 elections, which ushered in Tony Blair’s Labour Party majority.
It also made Soros immediately infamous, something he welcomed. The infamy helped him to “establish a platform from which I could speak out on other issues,” he later recalled. “And it worked. Suddenly I had a voice that could be heard.”
The Failed Philosopher
If Soros’s ego isn’t obvious, his contemptuous streak is: “I am both selfish and self-centered, and I have no qualms about acknowledging it,” he wrote in 2019. “I am, of course, not the only one who is selfish and self-centered. … I am just more willing to admit it.”
I have a very big ego — far too big for my mortal self. I can find sufficient scope for it only by identifying with something more enduring. Clearly, I am not a saint, nor do I aspire to be one. I cannot think of anything more unnatural and unrewarding than to be selfless.
On the Right, Soros is often accused of being a communist or radical leftist. He’s certainly a critic of “the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life,” as he argued in a 1997 Atlantic essay titled “The Capitalist Threat.” More broadly, Soros considers himself a “failed philosopher,” but he’s better described as a high priest of the liberal international order who uses his wealth to advance global elites’ interests.
Soros imbibed his worldview from the writings of Karl Popper, an Austrian Marxist-turned-libertarian whom Soros chose as a tutor at the London School of Economics “because I was very much taken with his philosophy … of open society.” The concept deserves some explanation.
After the Second World War, thinkers on both the Left and Right vowed “never again” to Hitler and the death camps. But instead of identifying the Third Reich as an aberration of European history, they concluded its totalitarian impulses are seeded deep in the soil of Western civilization — so those cultures had to fundamentally transform or risk breeding a new monster.
In The Authoritarian Personality (1950), for example, sociologists saw in America’s white, conservative, predominantly Christian middle class an army of “potential fascists” who might just fall for an American Führer. Something had to be done, and fast.
Enter Popper, the intellectual architect of a new global order. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), he diagnosed the totalitarian threat from “closed” societies: Traditional, hierarchical, conservative, and organic. Their people support powerful loyalties to enduring sources of authority such as the family, nation, and God — the bedrock elements of the West. Popper’s goal was replacing that old order with a global order, destroying those dangerous classical virtues.
Popper’s idea of “openness” isn’t so much a competing blueprint for society as a never-ending critique of all our strongest beliefs. Soros says as much: “Our ideal of the open society is unattainable. To have a blueprint for it would be self-contradictory.” It presumes that strong loves like patriotism — or objective truth — impart fascistic impulses to blindly obey our leaders. “Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth,” Soros argues. “Therefore, we need a critical mode of thinking” to break down the core elements of closed societies:
An open society such as ours is based on the recognition that our understanding of reality is inherently imperfect. Nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. As the philosopher Karl Popper has shown, the ultimate truth is not attainable even in science. All theories are subject to testing, and the process of replacing old theories with better ones never ends.
For two millennia, the Bible provided the West with the image of a healthy nation. By God’s design, our natural love of kin starts with our family, spreads to our neighbors, and ends with our nation. While the Bible commands all people to love their neighbors, we obviously cannot love everyone globally as we do our closest neighbors: “The result is that the highest point of political sovereignty ends with the nation-state,” writes scholar Ben R. Crenshaw. Nations are the natural enemy of one-world governments.
As such, “openness” is a universal solvent that progressively breaks down existing loyalties. Its end goal is blending all sovereign nations into a single, global “we.”
In the Cold War, that meant countering Communism and deregulating the economy, which the post-war Right leapt at. Soros’s first project, in fact, was funding Hungarian dissidents in the Soviet Union, later expanding operations across all of eastern Europe as the evil empire collapsed.
But it later came to mean the Sexual Revolution, gay liberation, Antifa (“anti-fascists”), multiculturalism, open borders, identity politics, DEI, transgenderism—and most critically, dissolving the family into a mere basket of individuals, atomizing the most fundamental unit of Western culture.
Consequently, the open society tries to degrade natural collectives like nations by pretending they don’t exist. Only the individual is sacred — or even real. The “family” is just a name we give that collection of rational economic units who happen to be related. This was true of 20th century leftists and libertarians alike: “To the free man,” Milton Friedman wrote in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, “the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them.”
The system may require tolerance of transgender ideology and other absurdities, but it can’t tolerate any dissent. By the logic of the post-war consensus, we’re either headed toward an ever-more-open society or Nazism, so “racist” dissidents must be canceled. Since this globalist system is the only thing preventing Hitler’s return, its defenders are stuck living in 1939. It’s Davos or Hitler — and it always will be.
In 2019, George Soros authored his latest — and likely last — book, In Defense of Open Society, an attack on Brexit and the 2016 election using remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Open societies are in crisis,” he warns. “In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish a mafia state, but he can’t because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it.”
By “civil society,” he means himself: “My foundations, most of our grantees, and myself personally are fighting an uphill battle protecting the democratic achievements of the past” against “repressive” opponents of an open society who literally threaten “the survival of our civilization.”
Fortunately, says Soros in a prediction that’s aged like milk, Trump’s populism will prove “a purely temporary phenomenon” that will forever vanish after his (coming) defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Weaponizing Philanthropy
Soros the “failed philosopher’s” writings are dry, abstract, and aloof. He comes across as detached, even jaded, in bantering about mental constructs, economic theories of perfect and imperfect knowledge, like a benign god surveying mortals. He repeatedly mentions his own “fallibility,” but the modesty is hollow — and he clearly wants you to know it. “Having made more money than I need, I have been liberated from the law of gravity: I can afford to stand up for abstract principles,” he observes.
I have spoken about my godlike and messianic impulses from time to time. The closer I have come to actually fulfilling them, the more I’ve become aware of my own humanity. But with all these great ambitions, I am sometimes still amazed at my actual accomplishments. This is particularly true in my philanthropy. As I travel around and see the results, I find them quite awesome and very gratifying.
“I certainly don’t feel messianic about investing,” Soros once said. “I indulge my messianic fantasies in giving away money that I’ve already earned.”
Initially, he was leery of trying to change the world through philanthropy, calling it “basically a corrupting influence” because ” it corrupts not only the recipient, but also the giver, because people flatter him and never tell him the truth.” Consequently, when founding the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Soros decided they should “keep a low profile, working quietly in the background.” That worked for a time as OSF concentrated on seeding democracy and “openness” in post-Soviet Europe. But by 2000, Soros says, “it was time to do something at home.”
One of OSF’s earliest U.S. campaigns was ending the Reagan-era War on Drugs by backing California’s “Compassionate Use Act” in 1996, legalizing medical marijuana for the first time in America. At the time, Soros heaped scorn on critics who accused him of wanting to legalize drugs. Yet in 2019 his position had apparently evolved: “My priority going forward is to build support in the United States for decriminalizing drug possession as Portugal and some other European countries have done,” he declared.
California’s adoption of medical marijuana proved decisive in shifting national Democrats — who took a tough-on-drugs stance under President Bill Clinton and Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder — toward national legalization under Obama. As a U.S. senator, Obama himself clearly wanted to decriminalize marijuana; he said so plainly in 2004 at a private event. Then he ran for president, and his campaign hurriedly walked back those comments in February 2008, when polls showed him losing to Hillary Clinton, who warned the public that marijuana is a “gateway drug.”
Just two months after taking office as attorney general in March 2009, Eric Holder announced a moratorium on federal raids on medical marijuana distributors. He now supports full decriminalization of weed. By 2016, Obama was busy pardoning or commuting the sentences of federal inmates convicted of narcotics charges and recasting marijuana “as a public-health issue” akin to “cigarettes or alcohol.”
Fast forward to 2020, and every Democrat running for president endorsed some form of drug legalization — including fentanyl possession, even as opioid overdose deaths exploded from 70,000 in 2020 to 151,000 a year later. By 2024, marijuana decriminalization featured in the Democratic Party platform and Kamala Harris’s desperate bribe to bring black men back into the fold.
That new outlook on drugs didn’t arise spontaneously. It was framed 15 years prior by Drug Policy Action, an advocacy group that’s received $54 million from OSF since 2001. Soros himself sits on the group’s board.
In 2020, Drug Policy Action was the single biggest funder behind Oregon’s Measure 110, which reclassified possession of scheduled drugs like heroin and cocaine from a misdemeanor to a fineable offense. Even that $100 fine can be wiped away by calling the state’s Lines for Life treatment helpline. Voters approved it 58–42 percent. The “yes” campaign outspent the opposition by close to $6 million, nearly 36 times the “no” campaign’s meager $168,000 budget.
As a result, homelessness jumped 65 percent and crime rose 17 percent amidst a state locked down by Democrats’ Covid policies. While nationwide overdose deaths rose by 18 percent from 2020 to 2022, Oregon’s overdose deaths rose 75 percent. Deaths from opioids rose 101 percent; those involving meth by 112 percent. “It’s like an apocalypse,” one bar owner complained.
Oregonians legalized marijuana in 2015, marketing it as a way to undermine Mexican drug cartels. Instead, it created a black market of thousands of unlicensed pot farms, many of which are run by cartels employing virtual slave labor. The black market may be worth double Oregon’s $1.2 billion legal cannabis industry. It is operated almost exclusively by armed drug-runners from Mexico, Russia, China, and Bulgaria.
Measure 110 was supposed to correct America’s history of systemic racism, as the Left sees it, by cutting non-white incarceration rates. Indeed, the Drug Policy Alliance excoriates “punitive drug laws…as a tool of oppression” used to “aggressively target people of color and people experiencing poverty.”
Yet 64 percent of black Americans and 67 percent of Hispanic Americans polled demanded Measure 110 be completely repealed — far higher than the 48 percent of Asian Americans and 54 percent of whites who thought so. Reading the tea leaves, Democrat Gov. Tina Kotek quietly signed a bill recriminalizing drugs in April 2024. That year, 4 of 5 ballot initiatives nationwide to legalize drugs failed, most by double-digits, even after massively outspending the “no” campaigns.
Big Money Donor
For Soros, turning his attention to the United States also meant opening the money spigot to Democrats. From 1979 to 2003, Soros gave less than $2.1 million in political contributions even as his net worth rose from roughly $100 million to $7 billion. Most of those contributions were to Democratic congressmen and senators such as then-Rep. Chuck Schumer (NY). Presidential campaign contributions show Soros trying to boost moderate (and beatable) Republicans, with contributions to both Ted Kennedy and George H.W. Bush in 1980, and John McCain and Al Gore in 2000.
Then came the Iraq War, which Soros called “a colossal blunder.” “An open society is always in danger,” he explained. “It must constantly reaffirm its principles in order to survive. We are being sorely tested, first by 9/11 and then by President Bush’s response.”
In 2004, Soros launch a nationwide tour “to put John Kerry in the White House” with a $27 million blow-out that made him one of the race’s top spenders — and a household boogeyman. From 2005 to 2016, Soros poured over $30 million into Democrat races. Between 2017 and 2024, he personally gifted a staggering $215 million to Democrat PACs.
Soros’s two Democracy PACs collectively ranked the 10th-biggest spenders in the 2024 election cycle, pouring over $71 million into Democrats’ Senate and House Majority PACs, as well as powerful outside groups: Planned Parenthood Votes, Black PAC, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight PAC, and David Brock’s American Bridge, among others. Black PAC, for instance, spent $22 million supporting Kamala Harris and another $7 million on key Senate races in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
But Soros’s real value to the Left is the $23 billion he’s pumped through his fleet of tax-exempt “charitable” groups operating under the Open Society aegis since 2000.
This empire, branded collectively as the Open Society Foundations, encompasses at least 8 U.S.-based funders based in New York City and another dozen or so regional foundations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Their combined wealth is stunning — the U.S. groups reported over $20 billion in total assets and $2.9 billion in revenues in 2023 alone, virtually all of it tax-exempt under IRS charity laws. It grew substantially in 2017, after Soros transferred $18 billion to OSF to counter the “dark forces that have been awakened” by the 2016 election.
Remaking the World in His Image
The Soros network’s largest grantees are its own global arms: the Open Society Institute Budapest ($314 million), Open Society Foundation London ($304 million), Open Society Initiative for West Africa ($124 million), to name but a few. Over the past quarter-century the foundations have also poured $338 million into the Soros Economic Development Fund, the self-described “impact investment arm of the Open Society Foundations” bankrolling climate change advocacy, health and gender “equity,” and “independent media” abroad.
This is the open society “solvent” in action. But how effective is it?
In 2018, I co-authored the world’s first — and I believe only — academic study on Soros’s overseas grants, “Assessing the International Influence of Private Philanthropy: Open Society and Its Foundations.” We examined $1.7 billion in OSF grants to liberal groups overseas in more than 200 countries. Our conclusion: The money had “no effect” on transforming these societies.
Measuring societal “openness” through vague IRS grant data has some obvious limitations, and in the paper we acknowledged all those shortcomings. But it might also suggest that money can’t buy everything — or change hearts and minds. What it can do, however, is buy influence.
In 2018, OSF poured $160,000 into a hyper-controversial constitutional amendment legalizing abortion in Ireland, overturning a 1983 amendment that recognized the right to life for the unborn—and breaking Irish campaign finance law. The measure passed 66–34%. Similarly, a leaked 3-year plan from 2016 revealed OSF’s strategy to weaken abortion restrictions in Mexico, as well as parts of Africa:
With one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, a win there could impact other strongly Catholic countries in Europe, such as Poland, and provide much needed proof that change is possible, even in highly conservative places.
But OSF’s campaigns also often overlap with those of the U.S. government, with OSF labeling USAID a “donor partner” in at least one international project. Biden USAID Administrator Samantha Power met with OSF leadership at least twice during her tenure. At least 5 OSF staffers previously worked for USAID; many more USAID alumni now work for major left-wing dark money groups aligned with OSF, including the Tides and Arabella networks.
“In the promotion of radical agendas in several countries, USAID has found an ideal partner in George Soros,” the Heritage Foundation argued in a 2017 report, noting their shared goal of “transnational governance that erodes national sovereignty.”
The list of meddling is vast: Decriminalizing drugs in Indonesia, legalizing prostitution globally, promoting an undemocratic peace accord with narco-Marxist rebels in Colombia, and “hold[ing] Israel accountable” for war crimes, to name a few.
Internews is a California-based NGO dedicated to subverting authoritarian governments and countering “disinformation.” It’s been accused of “promoting covert censorship and media control” under the guise of training independent journalists, with leadership from the U.S. national security state. Its Ukrainian branch, for example, has been criticized for amplifying “pro-NATO and pro-war narratives.” In the 1990s, Internews established a network of affiliates in the Balkans with OSF’s help; it later received $477,000 from OSF. In January, Wikileaks revealed Internews received $473 million from USAID and the U.S. State Department, a discovery made possible by President Trump’s decision to freeze USAID’s budget.
Similarly, USAID has poured $270 million into another Soros-funded group: the East-West Management Institute, which Soros helped launch in 1988 to transition ex-Soviet countries out of communism. Soros personally drafted a white paper titled “Underwriting Democracy” committing millions to the project. In 2018, Judicial Watch revealed the Obama administration had funneled $9 million through the institute to Albania’s socialist government to give it greater control over the nation’s courts, with Soros’s help. Soros himself was reportedly given direct access to the State Department’s strategy process, while OSF agents were tasked with assessing grant applications to the State Department.
Earlier this year, ex-Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha called for “the activities of the Soros Foundation [to be] banned by law as a real national threat.”
Soros’s native Hungary takes the threat seriously. In February, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called for the “full elimination of the Soros network” and sanctions on any group that receives foreign funding to influence Hungarian politics. The country’s immigration restriction policy, passed in 2018, is even locally known as the “Stop Soros” law.
The Soros Empire
At home, the rise of this Open Society machine mirrors the Democratic Party’s increasing reliance on nonprofits, rather than traditional party committees, to advance the left-wing agenda. Some, like the Tides Foundation — which has received $104 million from OSF — are familiar to conservative news junkies. Many more, like the Proteus Fund and NEO Philanthropy, are not.
In 2018, I exposed one of the Left’s top dark money vehicles for funding astroturf activism: Arabella Advisors and its nonprofit network, formed in 2005 by a Clinton administration insider to bankroll leftist causes — such as demanding D.C. statehood and packing the Supreme Court — while shielding donors from public scrutiny. OSF has funneled at least $105 million to the Arabella network in that time; tax disclosures detail almost none of what that money achieved.
The full list of OSF grant recipients would be endless. Instead, here are some highlights:
- $39 million to the ACLU, which sued the first Trump administration 400 times in 4 years;
- $24 million to the Center for American Progress, co-founded by Soros to be the Democrats’ answer to the Heritage Foundation;
- $22 million to Borealis Philanthropy, which lobbies against “anti-trans” and “transphobic legislation”;
- $27 million to Planned Parenthood, America’s top abortion provider, also increasingly involved in transgender surgeries;
- $19 million to the Vera Institute for Justice, which pushes Critical Race Theory and seeks to defund the police;
- $13 million to Demos, a radical Green New Deal agitation group;
- $12 million to the Center for Popular Democracy, which tried to derail Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation in 2018;
- $10 million to Amnesty International, currently railing against President Trump’s “devastating” immigration policies;
- $29 million to the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation, run by the far-left Service Employees International Union (SEIU);
- $8 million to State Voices, a major get-out-the-Democrat-vote group
- $14 million to the Voter Registration Project, which secretly registered 5 million new Democratic voters in 2020; and
- $15 million to the New America Foundation, which ran a “rent-an-Evangelical” model to convert conservative Christians into global warming voters.
Soros famously spent $50 million electing scores of “social justice” prosecutors across the nation. At their peak, Soros DAs represented over 70 million Americans — nearly 20% of the nation — in cities from Los Angeles to Orlando. Among them was Alvin Bragg, backed by $1 million in Soros funding, who led the corrupt lawfare campaign to pin 34 felony counts on Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election.
The goal was to fundamentally transform the justice system by promoting ideological district attorneys who would choose not to prosecute alleged criminals on social justice grounds — his so-called “de-carceration” and “de-prosecution” strategy. The scheme unleashed a tidal wave of crime that made America’s cities ungovernable — and it could have gone on for years.
But the plan quickly backfired. As of this writing, at least 21 Soros DAs have been voted out and replaced with tough-on-crime prosecutors since 2022, including in Chicago and California’s Alameda County.
Passing the Torch
At 94, George Soros probably isn’t long for this world. But even after his death, the empire will continue under new management.
In June 2023, Soros handed control of the family hedge fund and Open Society Foundations to his 37-year-old youngest son, Alexander. When Joe Biden awarded George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom two weeks before leaving office, a dour-faced Alex accepted it on his father’s behalf.
He’s vowed to use this inherited fortune to fund abortion activism, drug decriminalization, “gender equity,” and Democrats’ election policies. “We think alike,” says George — but “I’m more political,” says the junior Soros.
It’s too early to tell how being “more political” will manifest itself, though he’s given a few specifics. “As much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it, too,” Alex told the Wall Street Journal. He also thinks the Left is too restrictive with free speech rights on college campuses, citing Bill Maher as an inspiration. He’s retweeted attacks on “unelected billionaire” Elon Musk’s assault on the bloated bureaucracy.
But where George preferred to remain somewhat in the shadows, Alex Soros seems keen on playing kingmaker for the Democrats. In August, he met with a close adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about “countering Russian aggression and upholding democratic values.”
In the U.S., he spent tens of millions of dollars boosting Democrats and funding Democrat ballot measures in Arizona, Nevada, Montana, and Florida in the 2024 election. In September, Alex Soros hosted vice presidential nominee Tim Walz in his Manhattan penthouse. Senior Democrats, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, sought him out at the party’s Chicago convention in August. And there’s his upcoming wedding to ex-Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin in June 2025, ex-wife of disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner.
With photo after photo showing him posing with decrepit senior Democrats, one X user joked that Alex Soros “is collecting Democrats like Pokémon cards.”
And if anything, the junior Soros’s politics seem more aligned with the Democrat establishment than his father’s — and his philosophy more sophomoric. “For my father, it was, how do you succeed in getting closed societies to become open?” Soros said days before the 2024 election. “I think now the question is, how do you keep societies from becoming closed?”
Under Alex Soros, OSF itself has undergone major restructuring, firing 40% of its 800 global employees and hiring a new president—ex-Human Rights Watch attorney Binaifer Nowrojee, originally from Kenya—in July 2024. She immediately launched a $400 million campaign, reportedly under the younger Soros’s direction, to promote “green economic development.” “The idea of free markets cannot solve everything, particularly it cannot solve the climate crisis,” Nowrojee announced, so OSF’s grants will cajole business into adopting stricter climate policies.
It’s a sign that the Left is doubling down on the agenda that earned the Democrats such a thrashing in 2024. If true, conservatives should celebrate. Increasingly, money is the sole advantage Democrats have left over Republicans — and money can’t buy everything.
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