In case you missed it, the Financial Times this week named George Soros Person of the Year for 2018 because, the FT reporter writes, “the philanthropist has become a standard bearer for liberal democracy, an idea under siege from populists.”
The FT’s nomination, which reads like a hagiography, shouldn’t come as a surprise, really. The paper has long been a great admirer of the currency speculator and remains incapable of writing anything critical about him. The editors are entitled to their opinion, but one would expect a little more objectivity from such a supposedly august news organization. Soros is their Achilles’ heel.
To the FT, Soros is a philanthropist, period. You know, the charitable, selfless kind.
The FT and much of the liberal, mainstream media just cannot talk in any depth about Soros as the ambitious political actor that he is, a man with an ideologically-driven agenda who puts money behind people and causes that are highly political in nature. He talks and writes candidly himself about his political schemes, plots for which he has zero political mandate.
The irony here? The “standard bearer of liberal democracy” funds political movements to undermine democratically elected governments and decisions – like Brexit – taken by popular referendum.
Sometimes their blindness to the radical, political player is downright comical.
Remember, for example, the time in September 2017 when one of the FT columnists mocked PM Orbán for alleging that Soros has plan to bring a million migrants to Europe when, according to the FT, “there is no such plan”? Except, of course, there is a plan. The billionaire financial speculator published an article in his own name entitled, “George Soros: Here’s my plan to solve the asylum chaos.”
He has also spoken openly about his “active engagement” to oppose the work of the Orbán Government. “We are actively engaged with everyone, particularly in my native Hungary,” said Soros in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, “where our approach is in direct opposition to the one advocated by the current prime minister, Viktor Orbán”. Again, he has no democratic mandate to do so.
A while back, I posted on a Hungarian media report about an astonishing revelation that George Soros spent tens of millions of USD in 2017 lobbying the US government against Hungary. We’ve also called attention repeatedly to his Open Society network’s lobbying efforts in Brussels (here and here). Mandate from the citizens? Nope.
Soros and the NGOs that rely on his funding for survival continue to back a radical, open borders, pro-immigration agenda at a time when the migration crisis is putting difficult strains on states to protect Europe’s borders and posing serious security concerns. That stands in stark opposition to what the citizens of Hungary – and those of many European countries – want.
I could list many other examples – from his funding of so-called civic groups in Macedonia that worked to defeat the democratically elected government to his financing of anti-Brexit groups working to overturn the results of a popular referendum – his ideological zeal to push for an open society that seeks to undermine national sovereignty and run roughshod over the will of the citizens knows no boundaries.
But whatever, he’s democracy’s standard bearer.