George Soros throws in the towel – His entire foundation has decided!

Billionaire leftist George Soros and his notorious Open Society Foundation appear to be slowly withdrawing from investments in Europe as populism sweeps the region.

(Video Credit: Reuters)

Soros may not like to admit it, but there’s a fairly good argument to be made that populism has spread so far across Europe because of his incessant meddling in its finances and politics. Now, both he and his foundation are going on the offensive as he cedes control to his son Alexander Soros.

“The announcement by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the global grant-making network founded by billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros, to sharply curtail European funding has rattled the continent’s civil society communities. Part of a momentous overhaul, the $25 billion-strong philanthropy that the 93-year-old hedge fund tycoon handed over to his son Alexander Soros this year will phase out many of its long-standing European programs and grant-giving activities,” Foreign Policy reported.

“In an Aug. 31 internal letter, the younger Soros explained that the OSF was not withdrawing as such from Europe: ‘In our new operating model, we will be better positioned to allow the robust civil society sector in many EU countries to move forward, as we free resources and personnel to anticipate emerging threats from authoritarians across the region, and indeed, around the world,'” the media outlet continued.

Those changes will ostensibly cut the Open Society Foundation’s staffing from 1,650 to less than half that number.

“Although it’s unclear how much of the roughly $209 million allocated to Europe annually—about 14 percent of the group’s total $1.5 billion budget—will be affected, the OSF will still have a presence in Europe in Ukraine and the Balkans. The foundation is now in the process of redirecting operations to the global south. The recalibration bears the distinct signature of Alexander Soros and the mark of a private philanthropy that tried very hard to advance democracy in Europe—and didn’t always succeed,” Foreign Policy noted.

This is not a new development. The Soros retreat from Europe has been evolving for some time.

“In contrast to its hand in overthrowing communism and getting Central and Eastern Europe’s fledgling democracies on their feet, the OSF’s record on piercing the armor of authoritarian governments such as those today in Russia, Hungary, and Poland is dismal,” the media outlet added.

“In fact, although George Soros vehemently denies it, the OSF’s condoning of the West’s 1990s economic prescription for post-communist Central and Eastern Europe—namely free market neoliberalism as part and parcel of liberal democracy—proved fodder for nationalist populist strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who rallied the discontented masses against liberalism as such—personified in none other than Soros and the OSF,” Foreign Affairs admitted.

The media outlet gave a passing mention of the Color Revolutions that Soros fomented, “Since the 1980s, when hedge fund manager George Soros started funding grassroots, oppositional groups in communist Central and Eastern Europe, the OSF has been a major presence in democracy promotion in the region and a crucial lifeline to an array of democracy-minded NGOs.”

Those civil society groups were at the forefront of the 1989-91 democratic revolutions, winning Soros some credit for communism’s peaceful overthrow. Through the 1990s and beyond, his philanthropic operation expanded, shifting focus from regime change to democracy assistance and spreading across the globe, even to the United States, where his billions bolstered Democratic election campaigns and drug treatment programs,” Foreign Relations recounted.

Hungary’s Viktor Mihály Orbán is getting the blame for Soros tucking tail and running. Instead, he should be thanked for it.

“Interestingly, the OSF opted to start pulling up stakes at exactly the same time that nationalist populists—viscerally opposed to Soros’s liberal, secular, rational agenda—came to power one after another in Central and Eastern Europe. The OSF downgraded its funding of Hungarian NGOs (Soros is a Hungarian expat, having left the country after World War II) in 2010, the same year that Orban came to power for a second time,” the Soros-connected news outlet recalled.

“In 2005, in Poland, the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party won the presidential and parliamentary elections. Everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe, liberal-minded parties found themselves on the defensive, many tossed out of parliaments altogether. (And a final ingratitude: In 2018, Orban’s government chased the Soros-founded Central European University, a beacon of liberal thinking, from Budapest to Vienna),” Foreign Affairs stated.

Soros refers to those leaders who defy him as authoritarians or dictators when he fits that bill perfectly himself.

“When I got involved in what I call political philanthropy some 40 years ago, the open society idea was on the ascendant—closed societies were opening up,” he told NPR during an interview in 2019. “And now, open societies are on the defensive and dictatorships are on the rise. … I have to admit that the tide has turned against me.”

And once again, the piece attacked Orbán for calling out Soros as the villain that he certainly is.

“Given the OSF’s comparatively gentle approval of ‘shock therapy,’ as it was called, it was hardly fair that the populists—and none more so than Orban in Hungary—singled out Soros and the OSF as the boogeymen responsible for what they called callous, elitist, foreign-designed economic policies,” Foreign Affairs railed.

“Orban’s Fidesz party and its cronies also seized on Soros’s Jewish identity to tap antisemitic prejudices. Whether fair or not, grantees in Central and Eastern Europe became tainted by association with the OSF, to such a degree that many welcomed a smaller role for the OSF and a more indirect means of funding,” the media outlet stated further decrying Orbán with misleading accusations.

“Since the populist surge, the OSF has proved unable to crack the shell of democratically elected authoritarian governments the way it did Soviet communism. Last year, Fidesz coasted to another supermajority in the Hungarian parliament—its third in a row. Poland’s Law and Justice has been nearly as successful. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is, thus far, unassailable, at least with OSF methods,” Foreign Affairs concluded.

Despite what Foreign Affairs claims, the Open Society Foundation was not the author of the fall of Soviet communism. In fact, it did not fall but shifted into a corrupt construct that Soros allegedly aided.

What is evident in the piece is that Hungary, Poland, and Russia have been successful in repelling the Soros infection that caused upheaval and revolutions that made him even wealthier while many, many perished in the process.

Now, the old spider will move on to the global south which is comprised of Brazil, India, Indonesia, China, Nigeria, and Mexico. He’s also fixating on keeping former President Trump out of office.

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