NG: “Your new book, The Soros Agenda, is a must-read to understand how the last twenty years evolved and the way the Left was consistently financed to undermine all of our values and all of our institutes. The Soros Agenda, I think, is frankly scary and in danger of winning.“
“You are the first person, to my knowledge, to lay out how Soros operates, the kind of people he’s been influencing, the depth of his penetration, and that makes The Soros Agenda, I think, a really important book. We’re going to encourage people to get a copy of your book, there will be a link to it on our show page, and I think we ought to watch carefully to see how Alex leads the Soros billions as we get into the 2023 election process. But I want to thank you for joining me because you’re doing courageous work, you’re taking real risks, and I think it’s remarkable that you wrote this book “
“Newt talks with Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “The Soros Agenda” about the recent announcement by billionaire George Soros, that his son Alex will be taking over the family business. June 17, 2023.”
“The Wall Street Journal broke the news on Sunday, June 11th that billionaire philanthropist George Soros is handing control of his non-profit Open Society Foundations to his 37-year old son, Alex Soros. The Soros super PAC, “Democracy PAC” has backed the election campaigns of district attorneys and law-enforcement officials. So how will Alex Soros change things? Newt’s guest is Rachel Ehrenfeld. She is the Founder and President of the American Center for Democracy and author of the new book, “The Soros Agenda.”
Click here to listen to the video and read the transcription below:
“NG: On this episode of Newt’s World, the Wall Street Journal broke the news on Sunday, June 11th, that billionaire philanthropist George Soros was handing control of his non-profit Open Society Foundations to his 37-year-old son, Alex Soros. Open Society Foundations directs about a billion five hundred million dollars per year to groups such as those backing human rights around the world and helping build democracies. Foundation money also goes to universities and other educational organizations. The Soros super-PAC, called Democracy PAC, has backed the election campaigns of district attorneys and law enforcement officials seeking to reduce incarceration rates and racial bias in the judicial system. You may remember, George Soros’ money is one of the reasons we ended up with the radical Left district attorneys in major cities across the country, which has led to a huge crime problem. Here to discuss Alex Soros taking over for his father, I’m really pleased to announce our guest, Rachel Ehrenfeld. She is the founder and president of the American Center for Democracy and the author of a new book, The Soros Agenda.
Rachel, welcome, and thank you for joining me on Newt’s World.
RE: Thank you for having me.
NG: You know, the news broke that 92-year-old George Soros would be handing over the reins to his son Alex, who is 37. What do we know about Alex and how he was chosen as the successor?
RE: Soros will be 93 in August, his 37-year-old son, Alex, grew up in a house that was completely consumed with politics, surrounding and focusing on his father’s activities. He was very young when his father, George Soros, opened his Open Society Institute in New York in 1993. He grew up with radical ideas and listening to his father’s mumbo-jumbo about his philosophies, which he said were related to Karl Popper’s “open society” idea. First came the Open Society Institute, which morphed into Open Society Foundations, including many different entities, and different organizations, all run by the Open Society Foundations that Alex Soros is now running.
The Wall Street Journal announcement about Alex taking over the OSF was very interesting because they called it an interview. It wasn’t an interview. It was a glamorous press release, a very interesting public relations exercise trying to boost the image of Alexander Soros. And he needs boosting because he doesn’t have his father’s charisma.
Alex is radical and has a big war chest to spend. He has been very active on social media, tweeting and sharing on Facebook his many photographs with political leaders, presidents, prime ministers, and celebrities from all over the world, not only in the United States. He did everything to boost his image. It seems he learned marketing from his father. His father used marketing after he became a billionaire in 1993 after devaluing the British pound and making between 2 and 10 billion dollars. Alex grew up very rich, very spoiled, and groomed to be part of the Open Society Foundations. Alex has his own foundations, he declared that he would increase funding, especially to voting rights, because apparently, he thinks that American citizens don’t have voting rights. Since we do have voting rights, I think that the effort will be to get the millions of illegal migrants, somehow, to vote for the Democrats. Another focus will be supporting federal abortion rights, which they hope will be the Biden administration that would pass a federal law allowing abortions at any stage. Another focus is transgender- rights. However, if they are successful in pushing transgenderism, they won’t have to worry very much about abortion because a castrated population will not produce very many pregnancies. This is what Alex said. He has his own Bend the Arc Foundation, and the need to Bend the Arc is also what George Soros said in an interview with the New York Times: “history needs to be bent,” he said. And Alex has his own bending, and his Bend the Arc organization of secular left-leaning progressive Jews and few non-Jews. It is very active against Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish state. They are funding, of course, also and operating against the judicial reforms that the Netanyahu government is trying to pass.
Alex Soros made a statement a while back saying the Jews don’t really understand that if they support Israel, they support things that they would never support here (in the US), like discrimination and totalitarianism (because it’s a state with a Jewish religion). He is really parroting his father’s statements, saying that Jews living in a special state is an abbreviation that he doesn’t support. That, in a nutshell, is who Alex Soros is.
NG: Wasn’t there a feeling for a long time that his older half-brother, Jonathan, who is a lawyer with a finance background, that he was the more likely successor?
RE: Yes. But Alex has been much more involved in politics than any of the other George’s kids. That’s what he grew up with. He went to international meetings. In 2018, for example, George took Alex on a special world tour, introducing him to political leaders worldwide, visiting Africa, and introducing him as his heir.
NG: Well, Alex says that he’s even more political than his father. What do you think he means?
RE: That he will support more active, he will give more money to different political causes. We will have more woke, radical causes in the United States than ever before. We didn’t have transgenderism, we didn’t have political leaders promoting racial division like it is happening now. There are many new agendas, woke agendas to support, and I’m sure there will be more. And we are not finished with illegal migration. That’s something that George Soros has been supporting for a very long time, not only here but in Europe too, and I’m sure that the son will continue with that.
NG: What is the world that they want to create?
RE: They want to create Sorostan. (NG laughs.) Soros is power-hungry. He said that in his youth, he was thinking of himself as God. When he became rich and could afford spending on all kinds of political activities, he started to “live out” his fantasies. And, I guess he aimed at the United States, the superpower country in the world. What better goal than to take over the country? He couldn’t be elected president because he was born in Budapest, so the next best thing is to try and change the country to his liking. Indeed, he criticized the Constitution. He said that our Founding Fathers were the children of the Enlightenment; they believed in the division of power and that the division of power will be enough to protect democracy. But they were naïve, he said, and after 200 years, he said condescendingly, we have discovered that when it comes to human affairs, the truth can be manipulated. He has big ambitions, big ideas. If you ask what is an open society? He said that it is a different conception of how society works or is organized. It is more sophisticated than democracy or the Communist system. He wrote books about this. He said that he is an unacknowledged philosopher.
That’s how Alex grew up with these ideas. He thinks that the” little people” don’t really understand what the world is about. So, he is doing his best to get us what he thinks we deserve. And that’s a society that would become Sorostan.
NG: He has some very strong beliefs that may not be in touch with reality. You write about a dinner that you had at his home in 1995, where he was saying things that were just plain not true. Can you explain that?
RE: The first experiment that he had in the United States was to see how much he could push changes in this country was the attempt to legalize drugs. In 1993 and 1994, when he started, the idea of using drugs or becoming a drug addict was unacceptable, and the idea of legalizing drugs was unthinkable. So he wanted to see how much he could push Americans, how resilient Americans are in holding their values and how resilient is the law, the criminal law in this country. And so founded his own organization to promote drug legalization, and he funded other smaller organizations that existed, and he started lobbying for legalizing drugs. He declared that some drugs are addictive—this is after Arizona pushed back and said no, you cannot legalize all drugs—so he said okay, some drugs are addictive, but others like marijuana are not! This was a lie. We knew in 1994 that marijuana is very addictive, and that marijuana is listed under Schedule 1, as one of the most dangerous drugs, together with heroin. Fentanyl is Schedule 2; marijuana is Schedule 1. At that dinner, there were a few reporters, there were some administration officials who were talking about all kinds of visits and travels — which they should not have accepted from Soros. They were there to support him in thinking about legalizing drugs. He even spoke about how the Swiss created a drug park in the middle of Zurich, where people used drugs freely, and it became a terrible place that they had to close it down later. I visited the place, and I spoke with the Minister of Justice, a former president-elect, the psychologists and psychiatrists who were in charge of such drug programs in prisons; and I saw how dreadful this program was. I just came back from Switzerland when I was at this dinner at his home, and he started telling me how wonderful it was. We were standing in the corner of the room, a very big living room in his apartment on Fifth Avenue, he was talking very loudly, telling me about this, and I quietly said, well, that’s not exactly the case, I just came back from Switzerland, and it’s actually a failed program. He was astonished that I even tried to correct him. So he started yelling at me: No! this is a very good thing. and I said, well, no, it’s not. He was so mad that he turned around and left the room. He left me alone. It was like a scene from a Woody Allen movie. Everybody moved to the other end of this big living room and left me standing in the corner… Telling him or trying to inform him or objecting or disagreeing with what he said was not something that he tolerated very well.
NG: The very nature, I guess, of being that kind of a billionaire is having a kind of arrogance that no one challenges him. Is that a fair statement?
RE: No, absolutely no one really challenged him. I also wrote op-eds published in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere saying that because of his money and his respectability as a financial maverick, if unchallenged, he will be able to change the political landscape of the United States. This was February 1996. I was right, unfortunately.
I took the information to some senators, I took the information to Republican megadonors at the time, and I said, look, this is something that you have to fight. Nobody did anything.
NG: It’s been very hard to get much information about Soros. How much that is a function of his aggressiveness legally in going after people?
RE: Probably a large part. People who used to work for him are afraid to say anything. Two of the people I spoke with are no longer alive. People who work for him and opposed his drug legalization campaign, for example, didn’t dare say anything to him, and they swore me to secrecy. Publishers didn’t want to touch anything regarding Soros a long time ago. When I wrote the Wall Street Journal piece, I was threatened with a letter from his lawyer at the time, saying that I should retract what I said. But there was nothing to sue me for, I didn’t say anything untrue; he just didn’t like the criticism. The strategy he adopted later was to label anyone criticizing him as an anti-Semite. And his son, Alex, who has now taken over, has already announced in the Wall Street Journal that he will do the same to try and silence critics. And by doing so, by trivializing anti-Semitism, they increase it.
NG: But this is a guy who is basically against the state of Israel.
RE: Yes, his Open Society Foundations funds not only left-leaning radical groups in Israel, including Arab groups that deny Israel’s right to exist. They also fund indirectly, for example, the PFLP, which is a designated terrorist organization. Yet nobody is calling them out. Nobody is following that. There is a chapter in the book where I name the organizations they are funding, and they are doing their best together with Alex Soros’ Bend the Arc to defame the Jewish state of Israel and criminalize it, together with Human Rights Watch and BDS.
NG: I’m amazed by two aspects of his politics. One is the sheer amount of money that he gave to the Democrats in the last election.
RE: He had given a lot of money in the last election. But considering the amount of money that was given to elect prosecutors, for example, it’s not that much money. It turns out that bribing politicians or buying politicians in America is not a very expensive thing. Look at the new allegations against Biden: as vice president of the United States, he can be bought for $5 million? It’s nothing!
NG: That’s true. But you have things like the influence of Anthony Blinken, secretary of state…
RE: Most of the officials in high positions in the Biden administration are linked with Soros, one way or another.
NG: I didn’t realize, for example, that Robert Mally, who was the special envoy to negotiate with Iran, is the former president of Soros-funded anti-Israel pro-Hamas International Crisis Group. This is a totally biased thing. Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, was on the Soros-funded anti-American anti-Israel International Crisis Group board. Victoria Newland, the under-secretary of state for political affairs, is on record helping the Soros fund management in Ukraine. And you go down this line by line by line, it’s amazing how many people who are associated with Soros ended up in the Biden administration.
RE: It’s the tip of the iceberg, actually. To really find out the links between Soros and his influence everywhere, and the people and organizations that he has funded, we need to develop a special AI—even AI with very sophisticated algorithms will not track down all the connections. The Open Society Foundation was ranked as the least transparent NGO of its time in the United States and NGOs abroad. That’s quite impressive: the least transparent!
NG: These are people who are very good at defending themselves, very good at calling for openness while being totally closed, clearly deeply committed to a hard-left, anti-traditional American position, with an enormous network inside the Biden administration, and inside the Democratic party. The last thing I have to ask you about is—again, until you wrote this book, I’ve always been curious but we just didn’t know enough—apparently, according to your book, the IRS filings of the Soros-funded Democracy Integrity Project, this is almost a Bolshevik, I mean, Lenin would have loved this deliberate use of words for the opposite meaning.
RE: Indeed, it sounds like Willi Münzenberg’s propaganda machine for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
NG: The Open Society Foundation is actually closed. The Democracy Integrity Project is actually designed to undermine democracy and integrity—it’s amazing. But, according to the IRS filings, Soros’ Democracy Integrity Project had a payment of almost a million dollars to the British intelligence agent who concocted the Steele Dossier.
RE: Yes. But you didn’t hear anything about it. Writing about, well, it’s Hillary Clinton, sure, but he continued to fund her. He funded many things in Ukraine, and his involvement in what is happening now in Ukraine, I mean, how the US got involved in Ukraine, deserves a special book.
NG: Is Soros anti-Russian in that sense?
RE: He doesn’t like Putin. Putin threw him out because Putin didn’t like him propagating his ideas and funding everybody. He was handing out not only his money in Russia.
NG: … your new book, The Soros Agenda, is a must-read to understand how the last twenty years evolved and the way the Left was consistently financed to undermine all of our values and all of our institutes. The Soros Agenda, I think, is frankly scary, and in danger of winning.
RE: You’re not the first one to say that, that it’s frightening, but I think that because I lay out his plans and the strategies that he used, I think it could help people who want to counter it to learn what to do. Because if you know your enemy, you can try and counter it, right?
NG: That’s why I think your book is so important. You are the first person, to my knowledge, to lay out how Soros operates, the kind of people he’s been influencing, the depth of his penetration, and that makes The Soros Agenda I think a really important book. We’re going to encourage people to get a copy of your book, there will be a link to it on our show page, and I think we ought to watch carefully to see how Alex leads the Soros billions as we get into the 2023 election process. But I want to thank you for joining me because you’re doing courageous work, you’re taking real risks, and I think it’s remarkable that you wrote this book.”