George Soros, celebrity hedge fund billionaire and darling of the left, has been a busy man the last fifteen years. While his capitalistic business ventures that began in the 1970s may have brought him his fortune and international financial fame, it’s his activities in the 1990’s that are having the most impact here in America today, on our television and Hollywood movie screens.
We’re especially reminded of this in recent times, as we see the overabundance of falsely portrayed stories on film and video, and at the same time the complete absence of other stories from the mainstream view.
That’s no accident.
Soros gained his political reputation this last decade largely by staunchly opposing the Iraq war and publicly comparing former President George W. Bush to the Nazi Regime. Drawing on his proclaimed expertise on Orwellian propaganda techniques and modern day mind-control marketing, George Soros once vowed to dismantle the conservative infrastructure, a pledge that hoisted him to the mantel of hero to the far-left wing of the Democratic Party. By 2004,dozens and dozens of Soros’ political advocacy organizations had been erected and pumped full of millions of dollars aimed at evicting George W. Bush from the White House.
Soros has devoted a great deal of time and energy to dissecting the reasons why Americans should hate America. He has convinced droves of liberals into believing that we are living in an Orwellian state, warning us that everything from the US government (preceding Obama, of course) is nothing more than propaganda, and that right-leaning news sources are not news, but Orwellian Newspeak. In numerous conferences and symposiums, including this one in 2007 at the NY Public Library, speaking about the role of media in the U.S. today, Soros deems Americans to have been ignorantly shielded by the protection of Newspeak and Nazi-like propaganda filtered to the peripheral conscious mind of Americans through television and Hollywood movie screens.
How ironic, that Soros’ own rhetoric has so often taken on the very tone of conspiracy theory for which the left so famously criticizes the right. Similar footage from 2004 sounds as though it’s literally the same script from which leftists recite today. But whenever his rhetoric is challenged even by political neutrals, Soros repeatedly cites the Bush doctrine and “market fundamentalist propaganda” as his reason for engaging so heavily in the political process. It’s in the name of protecting our open society, Soros claims. The man who’s earned his billions via Capitalism has mastered the art of portraying himself as a world philanthropist who is fighting to protect society from the ills of Nazism and other oppression that he says are inherent of our American Capitalist system.
Meanwhile, the truth is that Soros’ supposed war on propaganda did NOT begin after the US invasion in Iraq, as he says it did. Rather, Soros began his own propagandist endeavors around 1994, when he made a conscious effort to merge his political undertaking with the ultimate purveyor of propaganda – Hollywood. In fact, by his own admission, he established a strategy that incorporated the three largest influencers of human behavior: business, politics, and film and video.
But why would Soros deliberately try to blur this timeline? Why would he keep such a low profile about his early 1990’s dealings and instead use Bush’s Iraq policies to justify his conspiracy theory talk? It starts with Soros’ realization that to execute his Utopian strategy, he would first have to force public opinion to the far left. He himself has often expressed that the best medium for propaganda in the US is through the Hollywood establishment. Before he could force himself into that arena, he’d have to contend with how best to infiltrate and integrate his political beliefs into Hollywood films. To do so, he’d have to get past the conservative values-based Democrats first – by quietly dismantling and then replacing the Democratic Party without average every-day Democrats even knowing it.
The FrontPageMag ran a piece several years ago that describes Soros’ plan perfectly:
Since 1994, he [Soros] had worked with a network of leftwing foundations to fund a $140-million-dollar lobbying drive in favor of “campaign finance reform.” The campaign succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which, by outlawing “soft-money” donations, in effect de-funded the Democratic Party. As a result of the Act, the Democratic Party could no longer collect the multi-million-dollar donations from labor unions which were its lifeblood.
Soros stepped in with the Shadow Party to collect the donations instead.
Having driven the Democratic Party to the brink of bankruptcy, Soros then offered to save it.
Right under the noses of the working-class salt of the earth voters that once came from coal mining and farming families, and blessed by Republicans, Soros and his political partners eventually killed off the Democratic party as our grandparents knew it- cunningly replacing it with a new progressive version, installing a new establishment sponsored by liberal investors and Hollywood elites, like Progressive Insurance mogul Peter B. Lewis, Hollywood producer Stephen Bing, and actress Jane Fonda.
From the 7th Floor of the Motion Picture Association of America headquarters in Washington, DC, Soros convened with Shadow Party partners Hillary Clinton and Harold Ickes to map out the support network of their new progressive party, which relied (and still do) most heavily upon ACORN and the public sector labor unions.
In parallel, Soros turned his attention to powerful Hollywood – where his money could be well-spent on integrating his influence into the mainstream.
In 1996, one of Soros’ first Hollywood endeavors was to embrace the power of documentary film. Through his Open Society Institute, he created the Soros Documentary Fund to provide financial support to produce “social justice and human rights documentaries.”
Among the goals of this program is to raise public consciousness about human rights abuses and restrictions of civil liberties, to engage citizens in debate about these issues, and to give voice to diverse speech–all which are crucial to an open society. SDF started awarding grants in 1996 because the visual medium of film and video has enormous potential for effecting social change, increasing awareness and debate on significant human rights issues.
Soros has always fully understood the power of film and video for “effecting social change”, or more accurately, for influencing people’s minds. More recently, Soros described the power of this medium as a propaganda tool:
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“…the techniques of deception have been really perfected since [George Orwell’s book] 1984. It’s partly the advertising industry that has really sort of [guided], it’s a commercial use that was eventually transferred to politics. And actually, the art of deception has become a science. Because there is cognitive science now, which has some very interesting findings about how the human mind works.
“And these findings actually justify or give a scientific basis for techniques that were sort of developed more as an art. The two key findings of cognitive science [are] that reason and emotion are intricately interconnected, that in fact, there is no reason without emotion, and you can actually overcome reason by appealing to the emotions. And there you have of course the television, which appeals to the emotions much more directly than the linear written word. So the appeal to the emotions is easier than it used to be.”
“…Another element I think is that because of this industry, [the] communications industry, we have become very used to pre-packaged thought. And so we actually use only information that is pre-packaged for us. And when it has been used in politics, there is now a packaging industry. And it does have some similarities to the institute where Winston, the hero of [Orwell’s] 1984 worked, the Ministry of Truth.”
“And while you have pluralistic media, you have a parallel method of propaganda which parades as pluralistic media. FOX News is a prime example of that. And because it parades as a mainstream media, it’s accepted as a mainstream media. And deliberate untruths are accepted as one of the pieces of information that you have to consider. So you have FOX News which is ‘Fair and Balanced’ and that of course is Newspeak. And then you have the mainstream media that tries to be fair and balanced, and therefore information coming from Newspeak sources is accepted as one of the ideas that have to be presented. And you have a number of institutes that deliberately manufacture such information.”
We see this today in almost scripted fashion to Soros’ words – categorize something as “Newspeak” and you no longer have to treat it as a real story. The stories that harm the liberal agenda can simply be ignored and need not be presented, rather than introducing them into the content cycle for viewers to filter in or out for themselves. Case in point, the New Black Panthers story. At the same time, outlets that once accused some of manufacturing war propaganda have themselves become the manufacturers of propaganda. Case in point, the left’s portrayal of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s Anti-Illegal-Immigration Bill that was enacted into law earlier this year.
Politics and propaganda make an ugly yet powerful combination.
With such success in the medium of film and video from 1996 to 2001, Soros recognized two things. First, the need to place a buffer between himself and his politically charged documentaries, especially after 9/11, as he was about to embark upon injecting massive financial sums into the political campaign system. Secondly, the opportunity to take this success to the next level by bringing in a Hollywood heavyweight name to headline the program.
Enter Robert Redford.
To be continued in Part 2.
To view Soros’ session from “There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America” on video in its entirety, it can be found on three videos: Section 1, Section 2 and Section 3.