AMAC EXCLUSIVE
The news that billionaire philanthropist George Soros, along with the heads of other munificent nonprofits like the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, has been financing the increasingly violent demonstrations by Hamas supporters on American college campuses appears to confirm, in an ironic way, an oft-repeated myth about the operation of America’s Constitutional order. The myth is that by using their wealth through campaign contributions or the promise of future employment, rich people induce government to adopt policies that favor their economic interests, at the expense of the poor and middle class.
Of course, the allegation that the wealthy benefit disproportionately from government policy is belied by such phenomena as our graduated (“progressive”) income tax system, corporate taxes, and the plethora of government programs that allocate funds to the poor and middle class – effectively redistributing them from the wealthy.
The reality is, in a democracy like ours, no amount of campaign donations can overcome the fact that the poor and middle classes outnumber the rich (however one defines them), encouraging politicians, especially since the New Deal, to “buy” votes through government giveaways – and also through sometimes demagogic attacks on “big business.” Witness, most recently, Joe Biden’s attempts to cancel college student debt, and his FEC chair Lina Khan’s growing assaults on large corporations.
There is a sense, however, in which our political and economic system does offer opportunities to rich people to enjoy disproportionate influence over the character of our society and government. But that influence is commonly exercised not in the pursuit of economic gain (once you’re rich, how much more money do you need?), but through philanthropic and political donations aimed at reshaping American life in ways designed to fulfill the tycoons’ particular visions of what a just society looks like.
No individual better exemplifies this phenomenon than the mega-wealthy Soros, who in 1979 founded the Open Society Foundation, ostensibly to promote the cause of democracy. (Soros recently passed control of the organization to his son, though he doubtless remains involved in its programming.) Soros borrowed the term “open society” from his mentor at the London School of Economics, the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who used it to denote a polity that promotes freedom of inquiry and the open-minded expression of varying views.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Soros’s foundation has donated $700,000 to an organization called Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, a group that finances disruptive pro-Hamas demonstrators on American college campuses.
Here’s the irony in Soros’s support of the terrorist movement that aims at Israel’s destruction: Soros is a Hungarian-born Jew who narrowly escaped death in the Holocaust when the Nazis seized power in his native land. Subsequently, having earned a degree at LSE, he earned billions in hedge-fund management and currency speculation.
As he gained wealth, Soros turned his attention to movements of political reform, both in Europe and the United States, though he is not known to have contributed to movements that promote Judaism or the welfare of Israel.
In 2007 Soros wrote, “I am not a Zionist, nor am I am a practicing Jew,” though he professed to “have a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and a deep concern for the survival of Israel.” (It is not apparent how one can claim such a concern without being a supporter of Zionism.)
But in the same essay, Soros criticized the “pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,” charging the pro-Israel lobby with being “closely allied with the neocons” and “an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq” — and claiming the group’s behavior lent “some credence” to the anti-Semitic belief in an “all-powerful Zionist conspiracy.” Four years earlier, he attributed the “resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe” to “the policies of the Bush administration and the [Ariel] Sharon administration [in Israel].” (It was Sharon who had proposed and then executed the withdrawal of all Israel forces from Gaza, two years before Soros’s remarks.)
Soros’s allegation elicited justified outrage from mainstream American Jewish leaders, including Abraham Foxman, then the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who called them “a simplistic, counterproductive, biased, and bigoted perception of what’s out there. It’s blaming the victim for all of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s ills.”
To Soros’s credit, his foundation originally provided valuable assistance to former Soviet satellites in making the transition to regimes of political and economic freedom. Unfortunately, neither his domestic political activities nor his foreign policy priorities have subsequently displayed a serious concern with promoting and preserving the political, moral, and legal prerequisites of constitutional liberty.
A recent report from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides legal support for police officers who are believed to have been wrongly prosecuted for lawful actions they performed in the line of duty, identifies some 70 “soft-on-crime” prosecutors who received $50 million in campaign donations over the past decade from Soros. These include such notorious opponents of punishing criminals as New York’s Alvin Bragg (who only seems to care about prosecuting cases where the defendant’s name is Donald Trump), Los Angeles’s George Gascon, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, and San Francisco’s (subsequently recalled) Chesa Boudin (the son of 1960’s terrorists).
As the New York Post put it in 2021, “for the last several years” Soros had been “quietly financing a revolution in criminal justice reform, doling out tens of millions of dollars to progressive candidates in district attorney races throughout the country amid movements to abolish bail and defund the police.”
Another of Soros’s pet “progressive” causes has been drug legalization. As reported by the Post, in recent years the Open Society Foundation has poured millions of dollars into a push for Congress to pass the so-called Drug Policy Reform Act through an organization called the Drug Policy Alliance. Amid the nationwide plague of deaths from overdoses, the bill – sponsored by “Squad” members Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib – would eliminate federal criminal penalties for possession of heroin, cocaine, and other hard drugs, thus encouraging their use.
Soros’s expenditures on behalf of Hamas demonstrators thus reflect a pattern of ill-advised policy judgments embodying what can only be described as an egotistical belief that he knows far better than ordinary, law-abiding citizens what is best for his country (and the world), and a determination to use his billions to impose his vision on the rest of us.
Regarding Soros’s support for anti-Israel protestors, the Post reports that at three colleges, a Soros-funded group, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, provides “fellowships” of between $2,880 and $3,770 for students to spend eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations” and training them to “rise up, to revolution.”
The forcible repression of opposing views, the seizure of campus buildings, and the forthright advocacy of the elimination of the nation of Israel (as in the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will All Be Free” – that is, free of Jews), all indicate that Hamas’s supporters at American universities represent the very opposite of the “open society” that Soros’s teacher Popper sought to promote.
Soros exemplifies a problem common to wealthy and “sophisticated” Americans who come from various (or no) religious backgrounds: seeking a sort of earthly salvation by demonstrating an extreme sympathy for supposedly oppressed people (terrorists, felons, drug purveyors) while exhibiting little knowledge of the problems they purport to be addressing.
In fact, you don’t even have to be rich, or a student, to get in on the fun: on May 1, the New York Times profiled a 63-year-old woman named Lisa Fithian, “a longtime activist and trainer for left-wing protestors,” who was pleading with “counter-protestors” not to interfere with Hamas supporters who were engaged in blockading Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, so as to protect their “occupation” of the campus building. As she explained to the young men trying to halt the blockade, “This is ridiculous… We’re trying to end a genocide in Gaza.” (A less leisured figure who actually belongs at Columbia, a middle-aged, black janitor, interviewed on Fox News on May 8, explained how the violence of the demonstrators had led him to flee his job at the building, and to fear returning until the demonstrations end.)
Had she lived in Germany in the 1930’s, it is doubtful that most such protestors would have lifted a finger or spoken a word to prevent an actual genocide. (That would have entailed real personal risk.) But such, in our media-driven and undereducated time, is the easy path to glory.
As for Soros, how much better for him to have emulated a philanthropist like Andrew Carnegie, who devoted his later years to giving away his fortune to finance the construction of public libraries throughout America. Instead, his support of pro-Hamas demonstrators – many of whom, like Ms. Fithian, aren’t even students – only promotes the vitriol and hatred now filling our TV screens and endangering the causes of lawful freedom and of classically liberal education.
David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.
