Top Trump ally Elon Musk has publicly thrown down the gauntlet to the world's leading liberal 'philanthropist' and his NGOs' color revolution-fueling soft power influence operations. Sputnik asked a leading independent political commentator what this could mean under Trump 2.0.
Open Society Foundations chairman Alex Soros has put a brave face on the losses facing by his father's
neoliberal philanthropic empire now that Joe Biden is gone and MAGA has turned to Washington with a vengeance.
"My father was more about how you get closed societies to become open, and my task within the foundation is how do you renew open societies from within?" Soros Jr. told FT in an interview this week, hinting at the OSF's plans for work in the United States in the coming four years.
A second Trump term carries substantial risks to the Soros family and 'philanthropic' fortunes.
With the Democrats’ exit from the White House and loss of both houses of Congress, Soros will have fewer means to influence domestic policy on issues
ranging from identity politics to courts, education and online censorship.
Trump’s reelection and the failure of the Soros-backed campaign to lock him up is a major reputational blow to the Open Society Foundations, which
reoriented its global focus onto US politics in 2023 but still lost.
Setbacks in the US could reverberate in Europe, toppling, undermining or crippling Soros-allied politicians. Hungary’s Viktor Orban said last week that Soros “lost the battle for America,” and his supporters must now be “squeezed out of Brussels” as well.
Musk as Antithesis of Soros?
Alex Soros also dropped hints about the seriousness of the threat posed by tech billionaire Elon Musk to his family's fortunes. "I was open for a meeting [with Musk, ed.], I made an overture through somebody that knows him and he didn't respond. I think he's much more interested in trolling than meeting," the OSF chairman said in his FT interview, referring to Musk's references to Soros senior as a Magneto-style supervillain to Soros senior as a Magneto-style supervillain and as a "brilliant guy" who "fundamentally hates humanity."
Musk opposes key policies pushed by Soros,
from lawfare-minded DAs to
censorship, and has accused him of seeking to “destroy Western civilization.”
Since Trump’s comeback, Musk has also jumped into European politics to back populist figures abhorred by Soros, from AfD in Germany to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in Britain.
“I think there are some important contrasts to draw between Musk and Soros. Soros is a financier,” veteran political commentator and former hedge fund manager Charles Ortel told Sputnik.
“He has, in theory, a great track record managing his and other people's money. But on the charity front, it's difficult for me to find a lot of good works, and it's easy to find a lot of diabolical activities,” Ortel said, citing Soros’ links with the Clinton Foundation, for example.
That’s a contrast with ‘pauper to prince’ Musk, whose career has involved actually "developing novel products and services and bringing them to market efficiently," Ortel said. The tech billionaire's philanthropic activities have been "quiet, which is the way it's supposed to be done."
“No doubt the Deep State will resist [Musk and Trump]. But the people of America…are sick of this globalist, elitist, unregulated, Davos and Bilderberg operation where multibillionaires gather in secret and design ways to restrict liberty and impoverish private sector workers. This is a structure that must change, and I believe that Musk will be a powerful ally” to Trump, the observer believes.
Could Soros' Non-Profit Status Be Revoked?
"Soros is only one example of, I believe, a bad actor who is abusing non-profits that actually are not regulated carefully enough anywhere, and especially in the United States. So he and people like Bill Gates and the Clinton Foundation and the Obama Foundation and many other dynastic political families set up these 'organizations' that are not independent or not tightly controlled. They're supposed to be nonpartisan under American law, the 501C3 entities, in fact, they're not," Ortel stressed.
"Folks like Soros use foundations...as false fronts to pay off people that are important inside the country. Nobody really knows how much money is actually sent from these charities to the to the recipients because they're never audited. Nobody knows how many kickbacks end up in politicians pockets, not just around the world, but inside the United States," he added.
Ultimately, Ortel hopes the Trump administration will "use the power they now have merely to enforce existing laws and regulations to stop charity fraud. People talking about price gouging in the private sector - charity fraud and abuse of government money I think is a much more serious problem inside my country and around the world."
9 November 2024, 11:58 GMT
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