Bill Donohue
Few persons have done more damage to free societies than George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire. Yet in left-wing circles, the 91-year-old is regarded as a hero. That may have something to do with the fact that his Open Society Foundations have been greasing them for decades.
Soros’ fans in the media and education consider him to be a champion of social justice causes. In reality, he is doing more harm to African Americans today than any single person in the nation.
His war on blacks stems from his funding of local D.A.’s who go easy on violent criminals—these attorneys are a main reason why there has been a big spike in crime in urban areas—and by opposing educational reforms, such as charter schools and school choice. Similarly, he supports the legalization of drugs, and the open borders’ policies that facilitate it.
In all cases, the victims are mostly blacks. If Soros were a Klansman, he would surely be known as one of the Imperial Wizards.
Soros has always been in love with power, the signature attribute of the Left. In 1946, he told his father, “I’d like to go to Moscow to find out about communism. I mean that’s where the power is.” He was right—Stalin’s genocidal regime was all about power. The power grab that most interests Soros today is the international regulation of speech on the internet. He wants to control speech worldwide.
Like many of those rich persons on the Left, Soros milked the capitalist system that he later tried to destroy. Unlike most Americans, he disparages the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming there are no “self-evident truths.” Not surprisingly, his idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness does not impel him to defend the life of the unborn; he is also a strong advocate of assisted suicide.
Soros is known as a “self-hating Jew.” As a young man in Hungary he became a Nazi collaborator. In a “60 Minutes” interview, Soros admitted that he helped confiscate property from Jews. He told Steve Kroft that he never regretted doing so. When asked if this was difficult, Soros said, “Not, not at all. Not at all.” Stunned, Kroft said, “No feeling of guilt?” “No” came the reply.
The hatred that Soros has for Israel is indisputable. He funds groups such as Bend the Arc, a far-left Jewish group that supports anti-Semites such as Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. He also throws considerable money at the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions) which is trying to bankrupt Israel. By funding the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, he is instrumental in branding Israel an “apartheid” racist state, the two bodies promoting this cause.
There is no shortage of influential persons who have tried to defend Soros from these accusations. Their favorite tactic is to accuse his critics of anti-Semitism. The Associated Press rallied to his side in 2017 by publishing a hackneyed story, “Demonization of Soros Recalls Old anti-Semitic Conspiracies.”
The New York Times often smells a whiff of anti-Semitism whenever Soros is criticized as a “globalist” and a “left-wing radical.” It declared such terms to be “barely coded anti-Semitism,” even though both labels are undeniably true and have nothing to do with bigotry.
To show how flatulent these accusations of anti-Semitism are, consider that the former prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was accused of making “common anti-Semitic canards” for his criticism of Soros. More recently, when the ADL criticized Tucker Carlson for being an anti-Semite—the Fox News host said Soros’ goal was “destruction aimed at the West”—it was rebuked by the Coalition of Jewish Values, which represents more than 2,000 Orthodox rabbis; they said the ADL’s characterization was “grossly misplaced.”
Soros has a long history of supporting anti-Catholicism, and that means lining up with the Democratic Party. When President Obama was in power, the atheist billionaire threw his weight behind Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United, two Catholic front-groups founded to manipulate Catholic voters.
Under President Trump, the Open Society Foundations funded by Soros gave money to organizations seeking to undermine the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. Faithful America, another Soros operation, asked for a Justice Department investigation of Attorney General Bill Barr for the crime of speaking about militant secularists at Notre Dame Law School.
President Biden has won the backing of Soros-funded organizations on several occasions. Even before he became president, Vote Common Good drew on 1,600 faith leaders (they were really a motley crew of left-wing activists) to openly support Biden in the race for the White House. Soros underwrote this effort as well. Earlier in 2020, after Cardinal Timothy Dolan thanked President Trump on a conference call for his outreach to Catholics, Faith in Life, another Soros entity, started a campaign to discredit Dolan.
Once Biden took office, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop José Gomez, raised concerns about having a pro-abortion Catholic in the White House. That was enough to trigger an enormous backlash; pro-abortion forces piled on him nationwide. Simply raising the propriety of a pro-abortion Catholic president receiving Holy Communion was sufficient to attack Gomez again. Faith in Public Life and Faithful America led the charge.
No one person in the United States has funded more Catholic dissident organizations than Soros. In actuality, these entities are more like letterheads than organizations. They typically have no members and some would not exist without Soros’ backing. It’s a shell game—they were founded to weaken the moral authority of the bishops by convincing Catholics and non-Catholics alike of the legitimacy of dissident voices.
Some Soros-funded activists used to work for the bishops’ conference, thus suggesting that there are sources working within the Church to submarine it. One of the most prominent is John Gehring of Faith in Public Life. An anti-Catholic extremist, he wraps himself in Catholic cloth, telling the media he is an authentic Catholic leader. Meanwhile he libels the “white hierarchy” of bishops for not supporting Black Lives Matter, the wholly discredited Marxist organization that is under investigation for fraud in many states.
Gehring is a master manipulator of the media. In 2012, he sent a memo to many reporters and commentators instructing them on how to handle the bishops. He was concerned that a bishop-sponsored project, “Fortnight for Freedom,” could hurt left-wing causes.
He taught the media how to deal with declarations about the “war on the Catholic Church,” a reference to Catholic League admonitions that some bishops took to heart. He accused the bishops of making “inflammatory and irresponsible rhetoric,” all the while inflaming anti-Catholic sentiment in the media. A copy of his memo was leaked to me by a reporter and I issued a news release exposing his deceitful campaign.
When Pope Francis visited the United States in 2015, Faith in Action did Soros’ bidding by seeking to engage the pope on economic and racial justice issues he was sympathetic towards. It, too, was a stealth campaign, organized to politicize the pope’s message. Soros invested $650,000 in this effort.
Catholics for Choice is the oldest anti-Catholic “Catholic” entity in the modern era. Though no organization has given it more money than the Ford Foundation, Soros’ foundations have not been miserly. This letterhead has a history of lying about the Church’s official teaching on abortion.
Soros likes abortion so much that he dropped a bundle in 2016 trying to convince Catholics in Ireland that they needed to get rid of their “pro-life” beliefs and vote to repeal its Eighth Amendment ban on abortion. He scored a victory for death in 2018.
Some who now receive money from Soros have turned to violence to further their cause. Two years ago, mobs took to the streets to smash statues of American icons. A favorite target of these saboteurs were statues of Father Junípero Serra (later made a saint), the 18th century priest who pioneered the rights of Indians.
One of the most prominent persons to justify the violence was Morning Star Gali, an American Indian. Her command of history was so bad she couldn’t distinguish between Spanish colonizers who mistreated Indians, and heroes like Serra who championed their cause. Who funded her? Soros, of course.
In January, Catholics for Choice vandalized the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. At a prayer vigil that was held there before the March for Life, the Soros-funded entity desecrated the Basilica by using light-projecting technology to post anti-Catholic messages on it.
If there are two Soros-operated entities that the Catholic League has fought the most it would be Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. We don’t engage them anymore—our relentless attacks on them have effectively disabled them.
Both of the two anti-Catholic “Catholic” groups were founded in 2005, following the defeat of John Kerry the year before. Kerry lost to President George W. Bush in part because of the “values voters,” a bloc of mostly Catholic and evangelical Protestants who stood for traditional values. Soros wasn’t happy with these traditionalists, or the outcome, and sought a corrective by establishing phony Catholic groups to alter the political landscape.
It was a stealth campaign to end all stealth campaigns. There was nothing Catholic about either of these entities, but they gave the impression to the public that one could be a Catholic in good standing and oppose the Church’s teachings on marriage, the family and sexuality. In 2016, they came crashing down.
That is when the Wikileaks revelations became public. Leaked emails showed that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, sought to create mutiny in the Catholic Church by funding Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. One of Podesta’s associates, Sandy Newman, said there was a need for a “Catholic spring,” and that the goal should be to “plant the seeds of the revolution.” Made possible, of course, with Soros’ money.
There is one other aspect to this story that’s worth mentioning. After Obama was elected in 2008, the IRS contacted me to say that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating IRS strictures for non-profit organizations. After the probe was finally finished, we received a slap on the wrist. I promised the IRS official I would not stop hammering pro-abortion anti-Catholic politicians, and that he should inform his superiors of my pledge.
More important, I told him that I knew who was behind the attempt to destroy me. Just before the 2008 election, a CNN staffer sent me copies of a long document detailing news releases I had sent that allegedly violated IRS rules. She did this because the person who sent it to her tried to get me kicked off TV; he sent the document to validate his request.
When the IRS complaint was sent to me before Thanksgiving in 2008, I quickly concluded that it looked amazingly like the document forwarded to me by the CNN employee. It was sent to her by Catholics United.
In other words, Soros was behind the attempt to silence the Catholic League. He lost. It’s too bad he hasn’t lost more often—his legacy of hate has done much harm.
