Glenn Beck on George Soros

Glenn Beck has not exactly been a favorite around here (see herehere, and here), but his series on George Soros is intriguing to say the least. Beck has honed in on Soros as the root of all evil, and he has emphasized the point that Soros is Jewish. Beck seems have two main complaints: that Soros is a major funder of the left and that he is a currency manipulator poised to take down the dollar and foment revolution in the US.

Soros is well-known for funding the left, but Beck sees Soros as orchestrating the entire show:“For months, Glenn has been pulling back the structure progressives have worked decades to put in place. Beneath every layer lies one common thread: George Soros.” Beck’s team highlights Soros’ self-image as a messianic figure who believes he is able to change the world in his image: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin. But when I made my way in the world, I wanted to indulge myself in my fantasies to the extent that I could afford.” Beck’s website shows how Soros funds the left, including Moveon.org, ACORN, Center for American Progress, the Tides Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the National Council of La Raza.

Beck thinks that Soros is poised to bring down the United States in the same way he has other countries—by collapsing the currency and causing a revolution: “I told you there was a structure being put in place designed to bring about the fundamental transformation that has been promised. Through the course of this journey of discovery, amazingly, all the paths time after time really led to one man: George Soros, one guy. There’s a crisis slashing our economy: George Soros….He pulls no punches about the endgame: it’s one-world government, the end of America’s prevailing status as the world power.” Why?” The video goes on to recount Soros’ role in attacking the currencies of England, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, and Japan and in funding the revolutions throughout post-communist Eastern Europe. He now has his sights on the US which he sees as the main obstacle for human progress, favoring devaluation of the dollar and producing a “global society without borders or individual governments.”

There is a sense of urgency: “I knowthat soon, soon the gates of hell are going to be opening up….the only way to stop it is the sunlight….Your children’s, my children’s freedom, the republic is at stake.” “And the reason why I have built this show [on Soros] up so much is time is of the essence. … We either are going to be destroyed or we will destroy them. But once we’re out in the light and the shadows are gone, then the clock is ticking.” He has a two-year time horizon on the process: If it doesn’t happen in two years, he says we can all laugh at him; but of course, he could also argue that exposing Soros now was effective in changing Soros’ behavior and averting disaster.

As to how to prepare for the coming end times, he says that “they are deflating, collapsing the dollar in a controlled way” (see here), a policy explicitly advocated by Soros. Higher interest rates are coming; there will be unrest and the government will have to step in. His advice is to stock up with food (he has a year’s supply for his family) and get out of debt. He also advocates buying gold. In one his commercials promoting gold, he talks about gold as a defense against the coming crisis and does a Yiddish-like imitation of Soros saying that you have to protect yourself.

Essentially, Beck is making Soros into the main figure behind the current financial crisis and the movement to devalue the dollar. This is an oversimplification. Soros will doubtless position himself to benefit from how the crisis plays out (as he has always done  and as Beck is counseling his audience to do). But I have never seen any evidence that Soros was the prime mover of the financial fraud and mismanagement that caused the financial crisis or that he is the main force behind the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing designed to devalue the dollar.

Beck foresees a possible complete meltdown far worse than the present malaise. Blaming it on one person is certainly effective rhetorically. It simplifies the problem for his audience by allowing them to focus on one person as the source of all the problems.

In his show and on his website, Beck emphasizes that Soros is a Jew (although under pressure he later saidthat Soros being Jewish is irrelevant to his behavior and that he (Beck) is more pro-Jewish and pro-Israel than Soros). Beck dwells quite a bit on Soros’ wartime experience (much to the consternation of the ADL), the ostensible point being that Soros has never shown any guilt about his behavior and indeed seems to have valued his experience—“the happiest year of his life.” The implication is that Soros is a sociopath willing to turn on his own people: He learned that by hiding his own identity as a Jew, he could gain power and survive.

George Soros is a guy that had to wear a mask. When he was 14 years old, Hitler moved in to Hungary. And Soros is Jewish. His real name is George Schwartz. [He helped] “deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he’s 14 years old. He was surviving. … You would think that there would be some remorse as an 80-year-old man or a 40-year-old man or a 20-year-old man, when it was all over, you would do some soul searching and say, “What did I do? What did I do?” George Soros is not a fan of the state of Israel. George Soros is — many people would call him an anti-semite. I will not. I don’t know enough about all of his positions on Jews. I know his mother, in George Soros’s own words, his mother was an anti-semite. And so he just has this weird, weird world view. (See here and the video clip below summarizing Beck’s basic ideas.)

The Beck website quotes extensively from Connie Bruck’s New Yorker portraitof Soros which notes that Soros has accepted an identity as a Jew (“I am ready to stand up and be counted [as a Jew]”). Further indicating his strong sense of Jewish identity, in a New York Review of Books articleSoros stated “I have a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and a deep concern for the survival of Israel.

However, Soros claims to oppose Jewish tribalism:  “I am escaping the particular. I think I am doing exactly that by espousing this universal concept” — of open society. “In other words, I don’t think that you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe… the only way you can overcome it is if you give up the tribalness.”

Soros’ solution to anti-Semitism, therefore, is to retain a Jewish identity but to end Jewish tribalism—a questionable proposal given how closely linked Jewish identity is to the idea of collective Jewish interests. Would he advocate dismantling the ADL? Dismantle AIPAC? Throughout history Jewish identity, whether religious or not, has always implied a sense of collective interests; Jewish groups have always felt a connection and sense of common interests with Jews in other countries.

Further, Jewish commitment to leftist universalism has always been accompanied by strong Jewish identities (see here, p. 80ff)—hence the finding that Jewish support for leftist causes waxed and waned depending on whether they were seen as satisfying Jewish interests. Beck makes much of the fact that Soros’ father was an Esperanto-speaking radical—in other words, a member of the very mainstream Jewish subculture of the left that was the most important Jewish subculture of 20th century. Leftist Jews were “attracted to radical political solutions that would transform the economic and political basis of society and would also be consistent with the continuity of Judaism” (p. 81). Universalist ideologies of the left “function as a secular form of Judaism” (p. 87).

Soros’ behavior fits entirely into the mainstream of contemporary Diaspora Judaism in the West—a strategy designed to decrease the power and influence of the White European majority of America. Contra Beck, it’s hard to see Soros as a uniquely powerful, indispensable funder of the left. His leftist activism is no different from the activism of a host of well-funded explicitly Jewish organizations like the ADL or de facto Jewish organizations (because of Jewish funding) like the SPLC. His political involvement reflects the political stance of the great majority of American Jews, 83% of whom voted for Obama and support progressive causes. Indeed, the organized Jewish community has not only been the most important force in ending the European bias of American immigration laws, it has assiduously courted alliances with non-White ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party. Like Soros, the American Jewish community opposes any indication of White racial or ethnic consciousness while also supporting organizations like La Raza that promote the ethnic consciousness and interests of non-Whites.

When it comes to Israel, it has recently been revealed that Soros is a major funder of J Street, the relatively dovish pro-Israel lobbying group. This could mean that Soros is less hypocritical than the vast majority of American Jews who continue to support AIPAC and the Israel Lobby despite their very unprogressive  support of Israel’s pro-apartheid, pro-ethnic cleansing policies. J Street and Soros support an aggressive U.S. role in the Middle East, they oppose settlement building, and are open to talks with Hamas.

However, it has also recently come out that Soros funds neoconservatives with a history of support for the most racialist elements in Israel. This indicates that his support for the left on policy toward Israel is not strongly principled. Minimally, it indicates that he would accept a Republican government dominated by neoconservatives favoring the most racialist elements in Israel if it managed to contain White populist anger in America. Neoconservative support for pretty much  the entire social program of the left, including especially support for massive non-White immigration, is legendary.

A cynic would observe that the lack of effectiveness of J Street to date means that it mainly functions to give Judaism a softer veneer that is consistent with post-racial, multicultural America without having any effective influence on lessening the support of the Israel Lobby for Israel as an apartheid, expansionist, racialist state. Indeed, J Street recently noted “a deep commitment to Israel…[is] interwoven deep in the soul of American Jewish political identity.”

The reality is that American policy toward Israel is determined almost completely by the composition of the Israeli government which is now the most racialist in its history.  Simply put, the American Jewish community will not discontinue its support for Israel no matter how racialist it is—collective Jewish interests and all that. Given the demographics of Israel which is increasingly dominated by highly fertile ethnic and religious fanatics, the racialist policies emanating from Israel will continue or get more extreme in the foreseeable future. With all his money, Soros cannot change this even if he wanted to.

Soros’ sense of messianic fervor that Beck dwells on reflects the Jewish guru syndrome that is a theme of The Culture of Critique. Absolute confidence and a sense of certainty were typical of Jewish leaders of intellectual movements like Freud as well as financial fraudsters like Bernie Madoff.

As for Beck, it is intriguing to imagine what influence his end times scenario might have on his millions of fans. Beck is far from the only person who sees an economic catastrophe and hyper-inflation looming. If and when this happens, Beck’s analysis may become an important part of the world view of many displaced and disaffected Whites. Even though Beck has stated that Soros Jewishness was not relevant to his actions, the image of Soros the Jewish master manipulator is sure to remain in the minds of Beck’s followers and it’s hard to imagine that Beck did not intend this. It’s a short step from blaming Soros to blaming Jews in general, especially when it is well-known that the organized Jewish community and a decisive majority of American Jews are on board with his leftist agenda in the US.

An important aspect of the National Socialist world view was that Jews had caused the hyperinflation of the 1920s that resulted in untold misery among the Germans. A recent article summarizing ideas from Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations notes that “a conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as ‘Judefetzen’ (Jew-confetti), hinting at the chain of events that would lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.” Beck is doing nothing to lessen the perception that Jews are responsible for the current and looming financial meltdown and, to be sure, there is no shortage of Jewish names involved in the current crisis.

Hence the anxiety in high places.

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