Most media organisations focused on George Soros’s comments about social media and the oligarchy of information arbiters following his annual appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.
But the Open Society Foundations chief gave away some key information about the playbook the hard-left and the Democrat Party will be using in the next few years. Here’s what you need to know about what their most important billionaire backer told the crowd in Switzerland this week:
1. Trump is Trying to Turn the U.S. Into a Mafia State
This is a pretty rich claim from a man who has undermined nations and institutions in pursuit of his get-richer-quicker schemes. From uranium interests to breaking the Bank of England, Soros has never given two hoots about the nation state nor its integrity. So imagine my surprise to hear him opine this week:
I attribute [the length of my speech] to the severity of the problems confronting us today… I find the current movement in history rather painful. Open societies are in crisis and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States President Trump would like to establish a mafia state but can’t, because the Constitution, the institutions and vibrant civil society won’t allow it.
In case Georgey boy hadn’t noticed, it is his side that is at war with the Constitution of the United States. From his sponsorship of open borders organisations seeking to circumvent the rule of law for illegal immigrants, to his support for Second Amendment adversary Hillary Clinton, and Barack “the Constitution is just a piece of parchment” Obama, the beneficaries of Soros’s largesse are those who would prefer the U.S. as a mafia state.
Take the Uranium One deal, the still unreleased FISA memo, the attacks on free speech from groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and lets not forget his quote from his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism: “the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions”.
Soros — demonstrably — wishes he were the godfather of an international mafioso. In fact, he is.
2. The World Must Accept a Nuclear North Korea
Soros’s geopolitical theories aren’t borne out of ideals of national defence or global security concerns, but rather, his own selfish motivations. That’s why a nuclear North Korea appears to please him. Anything to bust American hegemony, per the aforementioned quote, is a plus for him. That means elevating China, too. His insistence that the world accepts a nuclear North Korea, tossing out decades of deterrence theory is evidence of that. He said this week:
The rise of leaders such as Kim Jong Un in North Korea and Donald Trump in the United States have much to do with this. Both seem to be willing to risk a nuclear war in order to keep themselves in power. But the root cause goes even deeper.
This level of analysis intentionally ignores the increased likelihood, under a Trump presidency, of North and South Korea talks.
It also reveals a stark hypocrisy surrounding a new migrant crisis in Asia:
The threat of nuclear war is so horrendous that we are inclined to ignore it. But it is real. Indeed the United States is set on a course towards nuclear war by refusing to accept that North Korea has become a nuclear power. This creates a strong incentive for North Korea to develop its nuclear capacity with all possible speed, which in turn may induce the United States to lose its nuclear superiority preemptively. In effect to start a nuclear war in order to prevent a nuclear war. An obviously self-contradictory strategy.
The fact is North Korea has become a nuclear power and there is no military action that can prevent what hasn’t already happened. The only sensible strategy is to simply accept reality, however unpleasant it is, and to come to terms with North Korea as a nuclear power. This kind requires the United States to corporate with all the interested parties. China foremost among them. Beijing holds most of the levers of power against North Korea but is reluctant to use them. If it came down too hard on Pyongyang, the regime could collapse and China would be flooded by North Korean refugees. What’s more, Beijing is reluctant to do any favors for the United States, South Korea or Japan against each of which is to have a variety of grudges. Achieving co-operation will require extensive negotiations.
3. More Democrats, More Gerrymandering, More Activist Judges
This one is a bit sneakier, as Soros carefully chose the wording in this section of his speech to make it seem “non partisan”. Unfortunately for him, his history of political donation, as well as how he refused to deal with any of these issues when his favoured candidate of the early 2000s — Barack Obama was in office — gives away his partisanship:
I give President Trump credit for motivating his core supporters brilliantly, but for every core supporter he has created at least equally number of core opponents who were equally strongly motivated.
That’s why I expect a Democratic landslide in 2018. My personal goal in the United States is to help re-establish a functioning two party system. This will require not only a landslide in 2018, but also a Democratic Party that will aim at a non-partisan redistricting, the appointment of well qualified judges, a properly conducted consensus, and other measures that functioning two party system requires.
We can take it as a given that by “non partisan redistricting” he means increasing the likelihood of Democrats winning in traditionally red areas of the U.S. map, and by “well qualified judges”, he means the sort of activist judges that will repeatedly attempt to stymie the executive branch of government, as we see in California and Hawaii on an almost weekly basis.
4. Saving the European Union… from Itself
Our current aim, Soros said in his speech, “is to help save the European Union in order to radically reinvent it.”
There is scarcely an EU-backer out there today who thinks the union is operating within its founding purview, or is popular amongst the publics of its member nations. Nevertheless, they won’t just let it die.
That would be to admit too much about globalism and the no-borders movement. Instead they will flog the dead horse of “reform”, no matter how much it hurts ordinary people.
“The EU used to enjoy the enthusiastic support of the people of my generation, but that changed after the financial crisis of 2008,” said Soros.
Well firstly, the man is 87 years old, and was born in Hungary in 1930. There were lots of people who fancied European unification in the 1930s. Soros even helped out back then.
But it wasn’t the financial crisis of 2008 that changed people’s minds.
Europe’s expansionism has been rabid since its inception. Many warned about it, in the 1970s, in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the Conservative Party in Britain saw one of its largest ever internal fissures over the matter, with the Maastricht rebellion, a precursor to the introduction of a Europe-wide common currency called the Euro.
“The EU lost its way because it was governed by outdated treaties and a mistaken belief in austerity policies,” Soros said.
More lies. It is not the age of the treaties that is the problem, it is the premise they are built upon: the erosion of national sovereignty. Furthermore, while “austerity” has been implemented for some smaller nations, there is almost nothing in the British referendum result, nor the increased disaffection with the EU across the Visegrad nations, that points to economic austerity as a prime mover.
“How can we prevent the European Union from abandoning its values?” Soros asked. “We need to reform it at every level: at the level of the Union itself, at the level of the member states and the level of the electorate. We are in a revolutionary period; everything is subject to change. The decisions taken now will determine the shape of the future,” he said.
A revolutionary period, indeed.
5. The EU Should Give Africa 20% of Its Budget Per Year
Speaking on the migrant crisis that his Open Society organisations helped to foster, Soros claimed the European Union was not doing enough to help Africa and therefore limit inward migration.
He said the project — a compact between the European Union and the African Union — would cost around 30 billion euros per year, around 20 per cent of the European Union’s total budget.
But don’t worry, he wants the money to be borrowed, rather than taken directly from member states. Which means your kids will have to worry about it, not you.
Having compacts with the African states is very important. And actually the amount of money that is devoted to it is not sufficient. It needs to be much larger and it must come from the European Union itself. Not from the member states because the refugee problem is a European problem, and it needs a European solution. And the European Union is a very large, has very large uncommitted borrowing power. It is very cheap currently and it ought to be used. We estimate that you would need at least 30 billion euros a year for a number of years to make, to devote to democratic development in Africa so that the supply of migrants should diminish.
Or you could just, you know, enforce your borders?