Soros Exposed: Research on the Progressive Puppet Master

November 11, 2010

The Glenn Beck Program

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. Tonight on TV, Glenn presents an in-depth look at the Puppet Master, billionaire financier George Soros, one of the most powerful forces in the Progressive Movement. But don’t just take Glenn’s word for it. Read. Analyze. Do your own homework and come to your own conclusions - read below to fact check all the sources used on tonight's show.

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BACKGROUND

“Messianic Fantasies”

- “It is sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out,” (The Independent, June 3, 1993 “THE BILLIONAIRE WHO BUILT ON CHAOS - GEORGE SOROS.”)

- “I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of my self-importance—to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes (each with his General Theory) or, even better, a scientist like Einstein (reflexivity sounds like relativity).” (The Alchemy of Finance, George Soros) (Link)

- According to friend Byron Wien (now with the Blackstone Group), “You must understand he thinks he’s been anointed by God to solve insoluble problems. The proof is that he has been so successful at making so much. He therefore thinks he has a responsibility to give money away,” (Time Magazine, Sept 1, 1997) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,986919,00.html

- “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.” George Soros “Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise And Democratic Reform Among the Soviets and in Eastern Europe” (Link)

- George Soros 60 Minutes Interview – 12/20/98 / Transcript:

KROFT: Are you religious?

Mr. SOROS: No.

KROFT: Do you believe in God?

Mr. SOROS: No.

KROFT: (Voiceover) Soros told us he believes God was created by man, not the other way around, which may be why he thinks he can smooth out the world’s imperfections.

“THE MAN WHO BROKE THE BANK OF ENGLAND”

- “As September 15 wore on, George Soros’s confidence that Britain would pull the pound out of the ERM was growing. It had been Stanley Druckenmiller who had thought the time ripe for making a bet against the sterling. He talked to Soros about doing something. Soros gave him the green light but urged his head trader to bet an even larger sum than Druckenmiller had in mind. And so Druckenmiller, acting for Soros, sold $10 billion worth of sterling… The next morning at 7:00, the phone rang at Soros’s home. It was Stan Druckenmiller with news… While George Soros had slept, he racked a profit $958 million. When Soros’s gains from other positions he took during the ERM crisis were tallied, he racked up close to $2 billion… It was this bet, this single act of placing $10 billion on the fact that Britain would have to devalue the pound, that made George Soros world famous,” (SOROS THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY, pgs 5-6).

- “He famously shorted the British pound in 1992, wagering $10 billion on a drop in its value. In a desperate bid to keep its currency afloat, the Bank of England tried to buy up pounds as fast as Soros could dump them. However, as more and more investors followed Soros’ lead and joined his efforts, the Bank of England eventually gave up. The British pound was devalued, launching a tsunami of financial turmoil from Tokyo to Rome. When it was over, millions of hardworking Britons confronted their diminished savings, while Soros counted his gains. He had personally made nearly $2 billion on the catastrophe,” (The Shadow Party, pg. 4).

- Soros has said of this event: “I had no platform, so I deliberately [did] the sterling thing to create a platform. Obviously people care about the man who made a lot of money…my influence has continued to grow and I do have access to,” (Time Magazine, Sept 1, 1997) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,986919,00.html

- In 1997, during the Asian financial crisis, the then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad, accused him of bringing down the Malaysian currency, the ringgit, through his trading activities. In Thailand he was branded an “economic war criminal” who “sucks the blood from the people”. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/movers_and_shakers/article3228264.ece

REVOLUTIONS

- “Just write that the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire,” (The New Republic, Jan 1994) http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-speculator

- “I am acting out a fantasy and so is Eastern Europe. A psychiatrist once told me how dangerous it is to act out fantasies and I am beginning to see what he meant,” (http://www.osi.hu/oss/postscript.html)

ANTI-SEMITISM

- In a 1998 interview with Steve Kroft, Soros was asked if he felt guilty about confiscating property from Jews as a teenager. He responded, “No.” George Soros 60 Minutes Interview – 12/20/98

- “I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence–but I don’t want to be part of it.” That experience notwithstanding, Soros has chosen to exclude Israel and Jewish causes, by and large, from his massive philanthropy-a decision that has caused comment among one of his colleagues in the financial community, particularly those who are strong supporters of Israel. In Hungary, Soros has been subject to anti-Semitic attacks. Referring to being a target, Soros, in his book “Underwriting Democracy,” wrote, “I am ready to stand up and be counted.” When I mentioned that rather suggestive line to Soros during one of several extended interviews with him, he responded quickly, “Right. It took me a long time.”

He continued, “My mother was quite anti-Semitic, and ashamed of being Jewish. Given the culture in which one lived, being Jewish was a clear-cut stigma, disadvantage, a handicap-and, therefore, there was always the desire to transcend it, to escape it.” He confirmed what someone had told me-that his family name had long ago been changed from Schwartz. “So the assimilationist Jews of Hungary had a deep sense of inferiority and it took me a long time to work through that,” he said, adding, however, that he succeeded in doing so many years ago… “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.”

(Source: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SOROS by CONNIE BRUC, The New Yorker, January 23, 1995 http://www.scribd.com/full/41008029?access_key=key-1akmk6l4oun8ydlm6yem)

- “As I looked around me for a worthy cause. I ran into difficulties. I did not belong to any community. As a Hungarian Jew I had never quite become an American. I had left Hungary behind and my Jewishness did not express itself in a sense of tribal loyalty that would have led me to support Israel,” (http://www.osi.hu/oss/ch1.html)

INFO ON NAME CHANGE FROM SCHWARTZ TO SOROS

- Born in Hungary in 1930, Mr. Soros began life as George Schwartz. His father, Tivadar, was from humble origins; his mother, Erzebet, from money. Both were Jews, but nonobservant (she eventually converted to Catholicism). Once married, Tivadar had to work just two hours a day managing some of his wife’s family property, which provided a handsome living for them and their two sons, Paul and George. At some point during the boys’ childhood, the parents decided to change the family name and chose the Hungarian-sounding but in fact obscure Soros. It means “soar” (in the future tense) in Esperanto, the made-up trans-European language promoted by those who dreamed of a world free of nationality. Tivadar was among its leading proponents. (Source: The Mind of George Soros; Meet the Esperanto enthusiast who wants to save the world from President Bush, 2 March 2004, The Wall Street Journal)

- Before the end of the war, however, Soros’ upper-middle-class world had inverted. The family posed as Christians and separated to hide from the Germans. They changed their name from Schwartz (considered too Jewish-sounding) to Soros (more reflective of the family’s Hungarian roots and because his father liked the palindrome). (The elusive billionaire: An author tries valiantly to capture the essence of philanthropist George Soros, Vancouver Sun, 20 April 2002)

MORE ON TIVADAR SOROS

The other day, George Soros and his older brother Paul, an engineer turned investor-philanthropist, met in the offices of Soros Fund Management to discuss their father. The occasion was the English-language publication of Tivadar Soros’s wartime memoir, “Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary,” which was first published in 1965 in Esperanto, one of six languages in which Soros pere was fluent.

“It was his nature, regardless of difficulties, to believe that one must behave like a human being and one must make the most of life,” Paul Soros said, explaining the charm and ebullience of his father, who, in the book, is described by his five-year-old son George as “a married bachelor,” and who, even when living semi-reclusively under an assumed Christian identity, never missed his daily swim. “I remember during the siege we went to the opera, because at a time when there was no food the opera still served very nice hors d’oeuvres and patisserie. Whether or not it was prudent, the idea was that you should make the most of your circumstances.”

George, who, like Paul, has inherited his father’s broad face, pointed out that Tivadar’s fondness for the comforts of bourgeois life was not accompanied by a docile bourgeois sensibility. “We didn’t preserve ordinariness,” George said. “He made us very conscious that these were extraordinary times and that the normal rules didn’t apply.” In the book, Tivadar writes that at one point young George was required by the authorities to deliver notices to certain Jews that they should report to the Rabbinical Seminary with blankets and food. “This was a profoundly important experience for me,” George said. “My father said, ‘You should go ahead and deliver them, but tell the people that if they report they will be deported.‘ The reply from one man was ’I am a law-abiding citizen. They can’t do anything to me.’ I told my father, and that was an occasion for a lecture that there are times when you have laws that are immoral, and if you obey them you perish.”

“Masquerade” contains a great deal of black social comedy; a running theme is Tivadar’s efforts to convince his recalcitrant mother-in-law that, all things considered, it really would be best if she stopped regarding the occupation as a personal insult. (”I refuse to go anywhere if the people don‘t know who I am and I have to pretend I’m somebody else all the time,” she said of his attempts to find a safe house for her.) Tivadar’s own ease with his assumed identity-he grew a mustache, and went by Elek Szabo-led him, one day during an air raid, to tell a neighbor in the shelter about the time he approached the podium on which Hitler was standing at the 1936 Winter Olympics, just to see how close he could get. “Hardly fifteen minutes had passed after my tale when there was suddenly a great commotion,” Tivadar wrote. “The shelter commander appeared, surrounded by several officers. . . . It transpired that the air-defense commander, in great excitement that there was someone present who had seen Hitler, had radioed headquarters and a group had come over right away to see this privileged person.”

Tivadar’s energies, though, were largely devoted to the extremely serious business of procuring papers to save relatives and friends from a new, unimaginable form of terror. “My father was ahead of the curve, because he recognized the moment the Germans came in that this was a different world and one had to act differently,” George said. He and Paul agreed that they still try to live by their father’s resourceful example. “The funny thing is that in character we probably both inherited a lot more from our mother,” George said.

(The New Yorker, October 15, 2001, The Talk Of The Town -- DEPT. OF EXAMPLES; Pg. 56 “A SOROS SURVIVOR'S GUIDE” REBECCA MEAD)

GLOBALIZATION

- Soros has long been calling for increased globalization. In “The Crisis of Global Capitalism,” 1998 he writes: “To stabilize and regulate a truly global economy, we need some global system of political decision-making. In short, we need a global society to support our global economy. A global society does not mean a global state. To abolish the existence of states is neither feasible nor desirable; but insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions. Interestingly, the greatest opposition to this idea is coming from the United States. But there has never been a time when a strong lead from the U.S. and other like-minded countries could achieve such powerful and benign results. With the right sense of leadership and with clarity of purpose, the U.S. and its allies could help to stabilize the global economic system and to extend and uphold universal human values. The opportunity is waiting to be grasped.”

(Source: The Crisis of Global Capitalism.(book excerpt), George Soros, 7 December 1998, Newsweek)

- During this year he called for greater authority to institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and for an International Credit Insurance Corp. to establish some kind of supervision over national supervisory authorities and stated, “At the same time, there remains the urgent need for Congress to authorise an increase in the capital of the IMF.“ He admitted that such ”radical ideas“ could not even be considered until Congress ”changes its attitude toward international institutions in general and the IMF in particular.” (Source: Soros calls for global credit insurance agency, 15 September 1998, Reuters News)

- Soros has said that the United States would cease to be the world’s undisputed dominant force. “The veto power that we have in the International Monetary Fund will disappear. We will be downsized. At the same time, hopefully, we will have a better working system and opponents will be more downsized than we will.”

(Source: BOSTON, Oct. 29 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology press release http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/soros-1029.html)

- “The Bubble of American Supremacy,”: “The disparity between private goods and public goods manifests itself in a number of ways. First, there is a growing inequality between rich and poor, both within countries and among countries. Admittedly, globalisation is not a zero-sum game: its benefits exceed the costs in the sense that the increased wealth produced by globalisation could be used to make up for the inequities and other shortcomings of globalisation and there would still be some extra wealth left over.

The trouble is that the winners do not compensate the losers either within states or between states. The welfare state as we know it has become unsustainable and international income redistribution is practically nonexistent. Total international assistance amounted to $US56.5 billion ($74.4 billion) in 2002. This amount represents only 0.18 per cent of global GDP. As a result, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow.”

(Source: Edited extract from The Bubble of American Supremacy by George Soros via The Sydney Morning Herald, February 4, 2004)

KARL POPPER

SOROS’ PHILOSOPHY

- At the London School of Economics, Soros discovered the work of philosopher Karl Popper, whose ideas on open society had a profound influence on his thinking. He was attracted to Popper’s critique of totalitarianism, The Open Society and Its Enemies, which maintained that societies can only flourish when they allow democratic governance, freedom of expression, a diverse range of opinion, and respect for individual rights. Later, working as a trader and analyst, he adapted Popper to develop his own “theory of reflexivity,” a set of ideas that seeks to explain the relationship between thought and reality, which he used to predict, among other things, the emergence of financial bubbles. Soros began to apply his theory to investing and concluded that he had more talent for trading than for philosophy. In 1967 he helped establish an offshore investment fund; and in 1973 he set up a private investment firm that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds. http://www.soros.org/about/bios/staff/george-soros

QUOTES FROM “The Open Society and Its Enemies: Hegel and Marx,” by Karl Popper (Vol. 2), by Karl Popper

- The development of capitalism has led to the elimination of all classes but two, a small bourgeiouse and a huge proletariat: and the increase of misery has forced the latter to revolt against its exploiters. The conclusions are, first, that the workers must win the struggle, secondly that, by eliminating bourgeiouse, they must establish a classless society, since only one class remains. (pg 151-152)

- But all over the earth, organized political power has begun to perform far-reaching economic functions. Unrestrained capitalism has given way to a new historical period, to our own period of political interventionism, of the economic interference of the state. Interventionism has assumed various forms. There is the Russian variety; there is the fascist form of totalitarianism; and their s the domestic interventionism of England, of the United States, and the “Smaller Democracies” led by Sweden where the technology of democratic intervention has reached the highest level so far. (pg 155)

- Admittedly, increasing misery must produce resistance, and it is even likely to produce rebellious outbreaks. But the assumption of our argument is that the misery cannot be alleviated until victory has been won in the social revolution. (pg 163)

- I am not in all cases and under all circumstance against a violent revolution. (pg 166)

- …the working of democracy rests largely upon the understanding that a government which attempts to misuse its powers and to establish itself as a tyranny (or which tolerates the establishment of a tyranny by anybody else) outlaws itself, and that the citizens have not only a right, but also a duty to consider the action of such government a crime, and its members as a dangerous gang of criminals. (pg 167)

MORE ABOUT KARL POPPER

http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8018

- Although compelled to leave his native Austria in the 1930s (because of his Jewish ancestry), his book is remarkably free from personal bitterness or sadness.

- He did not shrink from tracing the sources of those dangerous ideas to Marx, to Hegel, and even to that greatest of all philosophers, Plato. At a time when many intellectuals had lost faith in democracy, Popper offered a spirited defense of democratic principles and outlined a compelling vision of a society grounded in democratic reforms.

- Popper was a fallibilist, one who perceives great error and danger in any theory of knowledge—or regime—that claimed to offer certain truth. In such a system, there would be no incentive to establish social and political structures that promote learning or the free exchange of ideas; truth is already at hand. In the name of historical progress, the regime may then justify the squelching of human freedoms and even atrocities on a grand scale.

- George Soros, who first encountered The Open Society as Popper’s student at the London School of Economics, founded the Open Society Institute to propagate Popper’s ideas, particularly in Eastern Europe. Thus the political philosophy Popper first articulated before the start of the Cold War is now being studied and put into practice in countries newly emerging from behind the Iron Curtain.

- He left school at age sixteen and began auditing lectures at the University of Vienna. Although a Marxist as a teenager, he was repelled in 1919 by the leftist-inspired street violence of postwar Vienna that resulted in the deaths of demonstrators. That same year, he studied Freud’s psychoanalysis and worked for a time with psychiatrist Alfred Adler.

- In 1922 he matriculated at the University of Vienna. To support himself, he apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker and took up social work. Pursuing his goal of becoming a schoolteacher, Popper subsequently returned to the university. In 1928, he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and, in 1929, a teacher’s certificate. Beginning in the late 1920s, Popper began interacting with members of the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists, a group of prominent intellectuals trying to articulate the importance of science for philosophy. Shortly after publishing (in German) a then little-noticed but classic work on the logical foundations of science in 1934, Popper left Austria under the threat of Nazi anti-Semitism. From New Zealand, where he had obtained a university teaching post, he returned to England after World War II as professor of philosophy of science at the London School of Economics, where he remained until his retirement.

SOROS’ CURRENT TIES

SOROS AND PRESIDENT OBAMA

- In December 2006, Soros met with presidential hopeful Barack Obama in Soros’ New York office. Soros had previously hosted a fundraiser for Obama during his 2004 campaign for the Senate.

- On January 16, 2007, Obama announce the creation of a presidential exploratory committee and within hours Soros sent a contribution of $2,100, the maximum allowable under campaign finance laws.

- Days after Obama was elected in November of 2008, Soros said in an interview “I think we need a large stimulus package which will provide funds for state and local government to maintain their budgets – because they are not allowed by the constitution to run a deficit. For such a program to be successful, the federal government would need to provide hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, another infrastructure program is necessary. In total, the cost would be in the 300 to 600 billion dollar range.” Since then, Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus and Obama very recently introduced a $50 billion plan to improve the country’s transportation program, saying “I want America to have the best infrastructure in the world.” (http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,592268,00.html)

- In that same interview, Soros called for cap & trade: “I think this is a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The US needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. I would use the revenues from these auctions to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy. That would be yet another federal program that could help us to overcome the current stagnation.” Since then, Congress has introduced cap & trade legislation. (More info in “going green” section)

- Also in that interview, Soros said “In 2010, the Bush tax cuts will expire and we should not extend them.” Since then, Obama expressed his opposition to the Bush tax cuts in an interview with ABC on September 9^th: “All those middle class folks who need tax relief hostage right now in order to provide tax breaks for the top two percent wealthiest Americans, who don’t need a tax break, aren’t asking for a tax break. And you know, if we could afford it, it’d be one thing. But we know that’s gonna cost $700 billion over ten years. And so, that is not a smart thing to do for the economy”

- Soros is also on board with Obama’s proposals to reform the banking system. In an interview with the BBC: Interviewer: Now President Obama last week announced some quite radical proposals to reform the banking system. He wants them out of what he calls “proprietary trading”, using their capital to speculate on their own account, and also he wants a limit on their size. Are these constructive measures in your view? Soros: Very much so these are the right … it goes in the right direction. In my opinion, it doesn’t actually go far enough because it still leaves the problem of too big to fail. In other words, if you let’s say now again Goldman Sachs gives up its banking license, it becomes then an investment bank …

January 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/davos/8485029.stm

- Since Obama’s been in office, Soros has made four visits to the White House

ALSO IN HIS 2008 INTERVIEW:

Soros: “I think this is a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The US needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. I would use the revenues from these auctions to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy. That would be yet another federal program that could help us to overcome the current stagnation.
SPIEGEL: Your proposal would be dismissed on Wall Street as “big government.” Republicans might call it European-style “socialism.”
Soros: That is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.
SPIEGEL: Would you advise the new president to say that publicly?
Soros: He has already spoken about changing the political discourse. I think it is better to have a government that wants to provide good government than a government that doesn’t believe in government.

WILL ANOTHER FISCAL STIMULUS BE NEXT?

- “The simple truth is that the private sector does not employ available resources. Mr. Obama has in fact been very friendly to business, and corporations are operating profitably. But instead of investing, they are building up liquidity. Perhaps a Republican victory would boost their confidence, but in the meantime, investment and employment require fiscal stimulus,” (Financial Times, Oct. 4, 2010 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/61a77634-cfeb-11df-bb9e-00144feab49a.html)

LAUNCHING A WAR AGAINST PRESIDENT BUSH

- Soros told the Washington Post: “I have made rejection of the Bush doctrine the central project of my life… America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”

- Also during that election: “This is the most important election of my lifetime. These aren’t normal times. The ends justify every legal means possible.”

SOROS AND VAN JONES

- Soros has also supported Van Jones – Originally through the Open Society Institute which gave the Ella Baker Center $151,800 in 2006 and $140,000 in 2007. Van Jones was head of the Ella Baker Center during those years. OSI also funded Green for All in 2008 – they received a grant in the amount of $75,000 to “integrate the Civic Justice Corps into Green For All’s campaign to create a national Clean Energy Corps.” while Van Jones was running it. Van Jones later appeared as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Additionally, OSI helped fund TIDES which then started the Apollo Alliance (where Van Jones sat on the board).

CAP & TRADE

Soros is also a huge proponent of cap and trade. The sot below sounds very similar to VAN JONES’ “We’re not going to put a new battery in a broken system.”

SOROS: “work on a better world order where we work together to resolve problems that confront humanity like global warming. And I think that dealing with global warming will require a lot of investment.
SOROS: You see, for the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he’s been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished. It’s run out of — can’t continue. You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come…Instead of consuming, building an electricity grid, saving on energy, rewiring the houses, adjusting your lifestyle where energy has got to cost more until it you introduce those new things. So it will be painful. But at least we will survive and not cook.
MOYERS: You’re talking about this being the end of an era and needing to create a whole new paradigm for the economic model of the country, of the world, right?
GEORGE SOROS: Yes.
VIDEO: Link

MORE ON GREEN INITIATIVES

- In 2009, Soros announced the formation of the Climate Policy Initiative to address global warming, and said he would fund it with $10 million a year over 10 years

- Friends of the Earth is another group that receives Soros money. In 2008 they received $50,000 from OSI to “build and support an international network of organizations dedicated to improving the environmental, social and developmental impacts of Chinese overseas investments.” Friends of the Earth also received $180,000 from Tides Foundation in 2008 to “integrate a climate equity perspective in the presidential transition.”

THE OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE

- Soros started Open Society in 1993

- Soros has given away over $7 billion to “support human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education in 70 countries.”

- Up to $425 million donated annually

- Aryeh Neier is the president of the Open Society Institute and Soros foundations network. “Neier personally created the radical group Students for a Democratic Society in 1959… He worked for the American Civil Liberties Union for fifteen years,” (The Shadow Party, pg 23).

- Open Society Foundations recently pledged its largest donation ever to Human Rights Watch in the amount of $100 million to be distributed over 10 years

- Richard Poe writes, “Through his global web of Open Society Institutes and Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent 25 years recruiting, training, indoctrinating and installing a network of loyal operatives in 50 countries, placing them in positions of influence and power in media, government, finance and academia.”

- Some organizations that have received support from OSI:

- Center for American Progress

- Tides Foundation

- Campaign for America’s Future

- National Council of La Raza

- ACORN

- Apollo Alliance

- Center for Community Change

- Free Press

- MoveOn.org
Top 20 grant recipients in 2008 (the most recent OSI filing)
- International Crisis Group        $5,000,000

- Ministry of Education Republic of Liberia        $4,250,000

- Drug Policy Alliance        $4,000,000

- Media Development Loan Fund        $3,900,000

- Bard College        $3,094,539

- Proteus Fund Inc         $3,000,000

- The Revenue Watch Institute     $3,000,000

- The Tides Foundation     $2,875,000

- The Mayors Fund to Advance New York City $2,512,415

- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities     $2,107,000

- Public Interest Projects    $1,700,000

- The Tides Center     $1,396,681

- Center for Community Change     $1,362,500

- Leadership Conference on Civil Rights education    $1,320,000

- Fund for the European University     $1,100,000

- Center for New York City Neighborhoods     $1,050,000

- American Civil Liberties Union Foundation     $1,000,000

- Center for American Progress     $1,000,000

- Foundation to Promote Open Society     $1,000,000

- Link Media Inc     $1,000,000

(Source: Open Society Institute, IRS Form 990-PF, 2008))))

CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS

- Early in 2003, Soros pledged $3 Million over 3 years to the think tank

- He awarded $1 Million in grants to Center for American Progress for 2008/2009

- The group was largely set up to prevent Bush from gaining re-election in 2004. Soros told the Washington Post: “I have made rejection of the Bush doctrine the central project of my life… America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”

- The organization is headed by John Podesta

- Van Jones is currently a senior fellow

- In its first year, CAP took in more than $10 million

- In 2006, CAP launched a network of liberal religious leaders called Faith in Public Life to “fuel this burgeoning faith movement with cutting edge strategies and capacity-building resources”

- CAP’s campus Progress, with a staff of 15 and a large network of student advisers, offers money and guidance to help college activists launch initiatives and newspapers

- CAP has a congressional outreach staff and aides dedicated to booking its experts on talk shows. It has a studio that offers daily taped segments and talking points for radio hosts, and it broadcasts liberal radio host Ed Schultz‘s show when he’s in town. .

TIDES

- 2008 funding from Open Society Institute to Tides (latest year for which the OSI has filed a Form 990 document with the IRS):

The Tides Center:       $1.354 million

Tides Foundation:       $2.875 million

Total:                         $4.229 million

- Drummond Pike is Founder & CEO of Tides Foundation. He is also Treasurer of Democracy Alliance, a group that was founded with major financial backing from member George Soros.

- The Apollo Alliance is a project of the Tides Center.

- Van Jones is a former board member

- Apollo Alliance helped to design and promote the stimulus bill which included $110 billion for “green spending”

SOJOURNERS

- Open Society gave Sojourners a $200,000 grant in 2004, $25,000 in 2006, and $100,000 in 2007.

THE QUANTUM FUND

- Soros launched the Quantum Fund after immigration to America from London in 1956. It was one of the world’s first private hedge funds.

- Soros recently passed much of the fund’s management to his two grown sons, Robert and Jonathan

- The fund, which is registered in the Netherlands Antilles, turned an original investment of six million dollars, in 1969, into five and a half billion dollars by 1999.

AMERICAN CONSTITUTION SOCIETY

- The American Constitution Society is a left-wing legal activist group working to change our nation’s laws and approaches towards law enforcement. One of its areas of focus is constitutional interpretation and change.

OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE DISCLOSED GRANTS TO ACS

Grants disclosed on George Soros’ Open Society Institute’s Form 990 tax filings to American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) going back to 2002 (with the exception of the 2005 filing which could not be searched electronically). Open Society’s 2002 filing referenced that the grant was designated for start-up of ACS. Adding all the totals from each year below (excluding 2005) comes to $14,602,850.

2008 funding: $3.65 million

2007 funding: $4.5 million

2006 funding: $5,025,000

2004 funding: $676,800

2003 funding: $251,050

2002 funding: $500,000

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Welcome to the Republican party Cher!

Biden part Deux: The China connection

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Last week I took you through several examples of the ways Joe Biden apparently helped his close family members secure amazing business deals while he was Vice President. One of those instances involved Joe Biden's younger brother, James, becoming an executive at a new construction company – despite having no experience in the construction industry. Then, six months after he joined the company, it scored a $1.5 billion contract to build 100,000 homes in war-torn Iraq. The company's president even admitted to investors that "…it really helps to have the brother of the vice president as a partner."

If you think it's good to be the Vice President's brother, it's even better to be his son. On Thursday's TV show, I did a major chalkboard explaining how Joe Biden's son, Hunter, came to be on the board of Ukraine's largest private natural gas company. Tonight on TV, I'm going back to the chalkboard for part two of our Joe Biden profile. As bad as the Bidens' activity in Ukraine looks, it's really just the tip of the iceberg when you see the deals that they struck in China.

RELATED: 'Creepy Uncle Joe's' diary

To give you an idea of just how much the Biden's were plugged into China, there's a separate story that we won't have time to get into tonight. Chinese oil tycoon Ye Jianming worked overtime to get meetings with top movers and shakers in the U.S. government. His efforts included things like donating $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation – which was basically a rite of passage for any foreigner wanting access to the U.S. government during the Obama years.

In 2015, Mr. Ye worked on trying to connect with the Biden family. By that point, as you'll see tonight, Hunter Biden's company was deeply involved with Chinese businesses. At first, one of Mr. Ye's top lieutenants, a guy named Patrick Ho, met with Hunter Biden in Washington DC. That led to Mr. Ye himself meeting with Hunter at a Miami hotel in 2017. At that meeting, Mr. Ye proposed partnering with Hunter Biden's firm to invest in U.S. infrastructure and energy.

Then in November 2017, Joe Biden's brother, James, was in a hotel lobby when he got a random call from Patrick Ho, Mr. Ye's top lieutenant. Ho was in deep trouble and told James Biden he was looking for a lawyer. Federal agents had arrested Ho in New York on allegations that he bribed African officials in Chad and Uganda for access to oil fields. During Ho's trial, prosecutors showed that Ye's company had a side gig as an arms dealer in conflict zones around the world. Ho was ultimately convicted of conspiracy, attempted bribery, and money laundering. His boss, Mr. Ye, is now in Chinese custody at an undisclosed location.

Probably the most disturbing aspects of these China deals are the national security implications.

Perhaps the weirdest, most cryptic part of this episode is what James Biden told The New York Times when they interviewed him about that phone call from Patrick Ho. James Biden said he was surprised by the call and believed that Ho had intended to reach Hunter Biden, so he gave him Hunter's contact information. James Biden said:

There is nothing else I have to say. I don't want to be dragged into this anymore.

Dragged into what exactly? Presumably, the deep web of Chinese business connections that Joe Biden facilitated for his son while he was Vice President. Probably the most disturbing aspects of these China deals are the national security implications. You're not going to believe the partnerships that were formed. I'll explain it all on tonight's TV show. I'll also talk with Peter Schweizer who did so much amazing research and first blew the lid off the scandal of the Bidens' activity in China. You don't want to miss it…

Say what you will about 'Creepy Uncle Joe' but you can't say he failed to take care of his own

Joe Biden – "Lunch Bucket Joe" – likes to remind America as often as possible what a regular guy he is. But beneath his carefully crafted narrative is a familiar story of old-fashioned crony capitalism. Or, in this case, we could call it bro-ny capitalism.

Starting in November 2010, Joe Biden's younger brother, James Biden, was named executive vice president of HillStone, the housing subsidiary of a company called Hill International. Hill International owned 51% of HillStone. A group of partners, including James Biden, owned the other 49%.

James Biden had no documented work history in the construction industry, but six months after he joined HillStone, the company scored a $1.5 billion construction contract from the U.S. government to build 100,000 homes in war-torn Iraq. The minority partners in HillStone would pocket around $735 million of that contract. Which means, minus expenses for the actual construction work, James Biden and the rest of his minority partners would stand to pocket millions of dollars.

Analysts were puzzled how HillStone, which was a brand new construction business created in 2010, got such a sweet contract. In a meeting with investors, the president of HillStone's parent company, David Richter, reportedly told them that "…it really helps to have the brother of the vice president as a partner."

Other lucrative government deals materialized for Hill International, including in 2012, a $22 million contract to manage the construction of State Department offices.

James Biden wasn't HillStone's only connection to Vice President Biden. HillStone's president, Kevin Justice, grew up in Delaware and was a close friend of Joe Biden's sons, Beau and Hunter.

You can never accuse him of failing to take care of his own.

However, by the beginning of 2012, Kevin Justice claimed that James Biden and David Richter (who was president of Hill International) were trying to dilute Justice's ownership stake in the $1.5 billion Iraq project deal and control all the money. Kevin Justice left the company in February 2012.

As you'll see on the show tonight, crony capitalism absolutely thrived under Joe Biden. You can never accuse him of failing to take care of his own. He's an expert at keeping things in the family. That is Joe Biden's biggest political achievement.

THIS could derail the Biden 2020 train before it even starts

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Joe Biden always likes to remind people just how much of a regular Joe he is. For almost half a century he's worked hard to craft this "Lunch Bucket Joe" persona. He's Mr. Amtrak, commuting every day between Wilmington, Delaware and Washington, DC when he was a Senator. They even named the Wilmington Amtrak station after him in 2011. He liked to remind Americans over the years that he has little wealth to show for his long career in government, even after becoming Vice President. Except, he hasn't exactly been skipping meals and sleeping in his car either.

In 1977 before he'd even finished his first term as a U.S. Senator, his speaking fee was one of the highest in the Senate at $22,596 per speech. By 1979, Biden was one of the Senate's top 25 earners of outside income – along with 22 others on that list, he voted against a bill to limit such earnings. Today he gets between $100,000 – $200,000 per speech.

RELATED: 'Creepy Uncle Joe's' diary

Don't cry for poor ol' Joe. He's scraping by okay.

One thing you could never accuse Joe Biden of is failing take care of his own. When his second son, Hunter Biden, graduated from Yale law school in 1996, Hunter was hired as a lobbyist with MBNA, which is a major credit card company based in Delaware. As a reminder, Joe Biden was a Delaware Senator for 36 years before he became Vice President.

Between 1989 and 2008, MBNA was Joe's largest corporate donor. In the Senate, Joe voted against a bill that would require credit card companies to warn consumers of the consequences of making only minimum payments. He also voted four times for a bankruptcy bill – supported by the credit card industry – that made it harder for financially strained borrowers to get protection from creditors. But I'm sure that had nothing to do with his donor relationship with MBNA – just like he insists he had nothing to do with MBNA hiring Hunter twice, the first time straight out of law school, and again from 2001 to 2005 as a consultant.

When he ran for president in 2008, Joe paid over $2 million in campaign cash to his family members and their businesses. $1.8 million of that went to Joe Slade White & Company for "media consulting" fees. A top executive at that company was Valerie Biden Owens – Joe Biden's sister and longtime campaign manager.

One thing you could never accuse Joe Biden of is failing take care of his own.

Biden's campaign also paid $150,000 for legal work to a lobbying and law firm in Washington DC co-owned by his son, Hunter Biden. Joe Biden's campaign spokesman insisted that Hunter didn't receive a dime of that money because another lawyer at the firm did the actual legal work for the campaign.

A 2008 report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington ranked Biden among the top five senators for amount of money paid to family members over the three election cycles from 2002 to 2006. He was also in the top five for payments to a family business.

According to the Federal Election Commission, a campaign can hire family members and their companies if the work is legitimate and charged at market rates. But as you'll see in the show Thursday night, the phrase "just because you could doesn't mean you should" means nothing to Joe Biden.

Yes, Virginia: Hitler really was a socialist

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Much hay has been made of late regarding a decades-old debate as to whether Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were socialists.

On the face of it, the argument may seem ridiculous. … After all, the name of the party was National Socialist German Workers' Party. For some, it should be as simple as that. They called themselves socialists, so they were socialists.

However, proponents of the idea that Hitler and the Nazis were diametrically opposed to socialism point out numerous reasons that this simple explanation is, by itself, insufficient, and in fact can point out several facts, which clearly demonstrate that the Nazis were socialist in name only, but not in ideology.

As is generally (and gloriously) true, the truth behind this debate is extremely nuanced and takes effort to discover. But it is very clearly there.

For those of you looking for the Cliff's Notes version, here is the answer: Yes, Hitler and the Nazis were socialists, for the simple reasons that they were staunchly anti-capitalist and believed that the means of production in their society should be controlled by a centralized state power. That is very clear from their writings, their words and their actions. Done and done.

Much hay has been made of late regarding a decades-old debate as to whether Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were socialists.

As is generally (and gloriously) true, the truth behind this debate is extremely nuanced and takes effort to discover. But it is very clearly there.

For those of you looking for the Cliff's Notes version, here is the answer: Yes, Hitler and the Nazis were socialists.

Now, for those of you looking for a more complete and nuanced analysis of the topic, please consider the following thoughts:

With a recent article in Vox as case-in-point, those who believe that Hitler and the Nazis were not socialists will generally put forward some version of the following arguments:

1. The Nazis did not preach or practice pure, "classical" socialism, so they weren't socialists.
2. The Nazis were not the true Socialist party in Germany — there were already socialist and communist political parties in Germany — when they adopted the term "socialism."
3. The Nazis were fascists, not socialists. Everyone knows fascism is right wing, socialism is left wing.
4. The Nazis only adopted the title of "socialist" for political reasons, not ideological ones.
5. The Nazis were staunchly anti-communist and anti-Marxist, therefore they couldn't have been socialists.
6. The Nazis were racists and nationalists, so they couldn't have been socialists.
7. The Nazis did not seize all private property and money, so they weren't socialists.
8. Hitler was only interested in power, in being a dictator, not in socialist principals of peace and love and equality…

I'll address each of these in turn, but the above arguments and themes all miss a central and critical reality … and demonstrates a lack of critical thinking as well.

What's missing from the simple question of "Was Hitler a socialist?" is this: When do you mean?

It's a vital component of any coherent discussion, for two reasons.

First, because when examined over a timeline it becomes perfectly clear that yes, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party was an extremely, very clearly socialist-aligned organization at the time of their founding. One could argue that over time the specific manifestation of Nazi-socialism did drift away from what is today viewed as "classical"' or archetypal socialism (also a misnomer, which I'll cover shortly) and toward a nationalistic, "Germanified" socialism. During the build-up to war, it then morphed further into economic-statist policies of fascism and eventually a fascist-dictatorship.

Second, it's vital to note the shift and migration "from" socialism "to" a dictatorship because this is almost always what ends up happening when socialism, communism and/or Marxism implemented in any country (as evidenced by Germany's Hitler, the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, China's Mao Zedong, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, etc).

Marxist-collectivist systems devolving into brutal dictatorship with some elements of Marxist-philosophy remaining is the norm, not the exception. I'll leave what that says about Marxism to your own judgment.

So, with that said, let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start), and review the historical record:

1. The Nazis did not preach or practice pure, "classical" socialism, so they weren't socialists.

Statements like this one are generally followed with quotes from Hitler or some other Nazi leader saying something negative about socialism, or examples of a policy like leaving most manufacturing in private hands as proof that the Nazi Party wasn't a socialist organization. But generally, those quotes and those policies were from much later in the Nazi-Germany saga.

What is conveniently ignored is the fact that Hitler joined the German Workers' Party in 1919, when he was 30 years old. Six years before he wrote "Mein Kampf," and 14 years before he was appointed chancellor of Germany.

So, at the time the political party was formed, what did it espouse and believe? And what did Hitler espouse and believe?

History is abundantly clear on this. As we know from "The Coming of the Third Reich"by Richard J. Evans, we know because Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, a party he'd initially been ordered to spy on and join by his Germany Army Intelligence handlers. It's key to note that the original name of the group was the German Socialist Worker's Party (italics mine), but party-supporter and journalist Karl Herrer recommended against including the word "socialist" because it might be confused with another local political party (the Social Democratic Party of Germany) and might make it more challenging to gain the support of his middle-class newspaper subscribers. Subsequently, the name was shortened to German Workers' Party. Author F.L. Carlsten makes that clear in his book, "The Rise of Fascism."

Hitler joined the party and within a few months had risen to a level of authority. Having spoken publicly for the first time at a party meeting just weeks after joining, by early 1920 he was appointed chief of propaganda, a period of party history covered in excellent detail in "The Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany" by T.L. Jarman.

As the party grew in prominence, Hitler believed they needed a public manifesto that clearly articulated the party's political beliefs and platform. He, along with party founders Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Anton Drexler, wrote a manifesto titled, The National Socialist Program. As explained in William Shirer's seminal, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"(a work every American should read), on that same day, the German Workers' Party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler arranged a public meeting at a large Beer-Hall and personally read the manifesto aloud to more than 2,000 attendees, receiving ever increasing applause as he continued.

You can review the entire 25-point plan here, and yes, it is a platform that is filled with anti-Semitic and nationalist themes, but a review of several of the key points of the manifesto are important to understand their political beliefs as they orient around socialist and Marxist philosophy.

"…We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens…"

"…The first obligation of every citizen must be to productively work, mentally or physically..."

"…The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality [the state], but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all..." [italics mine]

"…We demand the Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery…"

"…In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits…"

"…We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries..." [italics mine]

"…We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries…"

"…We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare…"

"…We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation…"

"…We demand the immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality…"

"…We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death…" [italics mine]

"…We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the [existing] Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order…"

"…The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education…"

"…The comprehension of the concept of the state must be striven for by the school as early as the beginning of understanding…"

"…We demand the education at the expense of the state of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession…"

"…The state is to care for the national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young…"

"…We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press… Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden… We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands…"

"…a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: "THE GOOD OF THE COMMUNITY BEFORE THE GOOD OF THE INDIVIDUAL." [All CAPS theirs in the original document]

"…For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power… Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general…"

"…The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration…"

I apologize for the length here, but this was their "Declaration of Independence", and the length to which they spoke of these beliefs is strong evidence of how important these ideals were to them and their platform. That Hitler would dedicate the bulk of his written manifesto for his party to these indicates they were more than just a convenient political tool.

It's also worth noting that according to the US Holocaust Museum, the National Socialist Program remained the platform of the Nazi Party until Hitler's suicide in 1945, although clearly some of the specific tenets were ignored as the Third Reich matured and entered its "war" phase. In fact, we know from Big Business & Hitler, in 1924, party co-founder Gottfried Feder proposed an expanded 39-point plan that would include accommodation for Industrialists and large landowners with the National Socialists, but at the 1925 Bamburg Conference, then party leader Hitler refused to make any changes, stating that the manifesto was "inviolable" and would never be changed. Even after coming to power and declaring himself Dictator for Life, Hitler never modified a single word.

The point is that the original German Workers' Party as well as the National Socialist German Workers' Party, from its earliest roots, absolutely believed in and ran on many traditionally "Socialist" ideals, such as subordinating the individual to the "common good" and "the State."

Arguments as to whether the Nazi Party was "right wing" or "left wing" is what confuses most modern pundits and scholars.

Arguments as to whether the Nazi Party was "right wing" or "left wing" is what confuses most modern pundits and scholars. They clearly were nationalists, socialists, anti-capitalists and statists. Placing them on modern "right vs. left" political spectrum is an entirely different debate, and largely a semantic one. Whether they have more in common with the modern U.S. "right" or "left" is in the eye of the beholder.

2. The Nazis were not the true socialist party in Germany, there were already socialist and communist political parties in Germany when they adopted the term "socialism."

It's completely true that there were already socialist and communist political parties in Germany. Socialist parties had sprung up and gained popularity in Europe both before and during World War I. Russia had collapsed into a communist revolution during World War I, and there were communist political parties and organizations throughout Germany and Austria who had proven, friendly ties to the Russian communist parties responsible for the Russian revolution.

But the presence of other parties does not in any way indicate that Hitler's party wasn't also socialist. Just as today in America there are democratic socialists, socialist, Green Party and Communist parties, does not mean that I couldn't start up a new flavor of socialist political party tomorrow.

What is clear is that the founders of the Nazi Party did want a very different type of political party, one that was highly nationalist and one that sought an ethno-German racial ideal. In fact, as detailed in the already cited "The Rise and Fall of Fascism," the reason that Anton Drexler and others founded the National Socialist German Workers' Party in the first place was their rejection of the existing Social-Democratic Party and Communist Party's lack of nationalism. Hitler's flavor of socialism was staunchly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic and he spoke against "Jewish-Marxism" and communism, as did key party leaders Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolph Hess. Existing socialist and Marxist parties were too globalist for them – they were after a purely ethno-German socialism.

3. The Nazis were fascists, not socialists. Everyone knows fascism is right wing, socialism is left wing.

Without turning this into a purely semantic debate, applying the modern "U.S.-centric" idea of the right vs. left political spectrum to political, economic and social philosophies such as socialism or fascism is truly an apples vs. Legos idea.

Of course, the origins of "right" vs. "left" political spectrum likely dates to the French Revolution and had to do with which side of the King's throne courtiers and lords were seated. At that time, those Loyal to the King were on the "right" and those who favored the people's independence and Democracy would be on the "left" …but clearly today's modern conservatives and libertarians would not support rule by a monarch or dictator, whether his name was Louis, Washington or Trump.

This is a key part of why there is so much cognitive dissonance for today's self-avowed socialists when someone dares to point out that Nazis were socialists and did support many socialist ideals. Nazis were also nationalists, were anti-immigration, often xenophobic and pro-militarism. Those are traits they associate with today's modern far-right.

As Jane Carlson points out in her recent Vox article, trying to put German-Nazis of 1930 on our modern U.S. political spectrum is a troublesome exercise. For our purposes, we'll simply note that the policies and platform of the early Nazi Party clearly aligned to socialist theory of the time, simply modified to fit the Volkish German tastes of the time.

Furthermore, claims that Hitler and the Nazis were fascists, not socialists, is again an inherently anachronistic view of events. It also clouds the issue of fascism and socialism, painting them as polar opposites on the political spectrum, when, in fact, they were close bedfellows in the 1920s.

Fascism didn't come to the Nazi Party and Germany until late in the 1920s or even early 1930s. Certainly there are no contemporary media references to the National Socialist German Workers' Party as "fascists" during the era of the party's founding in 1919, at the time Hitler wrote and presented the National Socialist Program in 1920, leading up to the Beer-Hall Putsch in late 1923, during Hitler's incarceration in 1924 and even leading up to the elections of 1928 and 1930.

During that entire era, no paper, across all of Germany, Italy, England or America can be found that refers to Hitler or to the National Socialist party of Germany as a "fascist" party. They were referred to as the national socialists or Nazis, a name meant to be a pejorative. It's also noteworthy that in his book, "Mein Kampf," Hitler did not refer to himself as a fascist or even use the word a single time.

It wasn't truly until the elections of 1932 that "fascism" could truly be applied to the policies espoused by Hitler and other Nazi politicians who held seats in the German Parliament. By then, it had been nearly a decade since Benito Mussolini, the publisher of a Socialist newspaper for more than six years, founded his own version of a violent nationalist-socialist party within Italy: fascism.

Fascist political ideology was the brainchild of another Marxist, a man named Giovanni Gentile. Gentile was an Italian intellectual and student of Marx, but whose criticism of the standard socialist model was based on the idea that the human mind was insufficiently pure to make communal socialism practical for industrial countries. As such, he advocated for a hybrid of a strong-centralized government with total authority (lead by intellectuals and experts) but leaving direct ownership of industrial production in the hands of the business elite. A Socialist-Corporate state.

Mussolini had seen in World War I, his countrymen were no longer fighting for some grand, socialist utopia as they had been toward the outset of the war. By the end of the war, they were fighting for their country. Under the tutelage of Gentile, he morphed that nationalist passion into fascism, but it was not a far-right movement. Mussolini referred to himself as a socialist in his own diary just 12 days before his capture, and it's worth noting that the party he was head of at the time of his capture was called the Italian Social Republic.

By the time Hitler had been named chancellor in 1933 and dictator in 1934, it would have been fair to start thinking of Nazis as having fascist ideas.

Hitler, seeing the success of Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s and wishing to curry favor with the Italian leader to help reinforce his southern flank, developed a warm and open relationship with him. By the time Hitler had been named chancellor in 1933 and dictator in 1934, it would have been fair to start thinking of Nazis as having fascist ideas. But even as late as 1937, Winston Churchill was still making speeches and writing essays about the "two" great "creeds of the Devil" in socialism and fascism, as threats faced by Britain.

The real difference between communists, national socialists and fascists is simply this: Communists are the international workers party and fascists are the national workers party.

In the end, it's reasonable to look at Hitler's adoption of some tenets of the fascist political-economic system of an authoritarian-central government but leaving private ownership of some industries as an indication that Hitler was not, in the end, a "perfect" socialist. But, as you'll learn below, that notion is itself, nonsense.

4. The Nazis only adopted the title of "socialist" for political reasons, not ideological ones.

As we have already cited from Carlsten's "The Rise of Fascism," the opposite is actually true. Anton Drexler had originally wanted to include socialist in the party's title, but its primary "publicist" at the time, Karl Herrer, had objected — not because they were opposed to socialist ideas, but because it would make it difficult to stand apart from the already existent Social-Democratic Party, and because it would make it more difficult to appeal to middle class readers of his newspaper.

In fact, as author Robert Spector covers thoroughly in his book, "A World Without Civilization," Drexler and others went out of their way to publish articles clearly delineating between Marxist-socialism and the German-socialism they intended to create, which would be a massive social-welfare state that would provide aid only to true ethno-Aryan Germans.

The ideals of the Nazi leadership were absolutely and significantly focused on German nationalism, anti-Semitism, racial purity, etc. It's also fair to say that Hitler's personal ideology and goals were built around German-idealized delusions of grandeur, and less around the philosophical tenets of socialism.

But a fair assessment of the progression of Nazi Party socialist doctrine cannot start in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor or 1938 when he invaded Poland. A more fair assessment might to be say that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to create a 1,000-year German Reich and a pure ethno-German race, and they were also socialists. More pure socialists when they started in 1919 than when they finished in 1945? Yes, certainly if our goal here is to measure Hitler against some 'perfect socialist' yardstick, then it might be fair to suggest that, by the end, he was less of a socialist than he was at the beginning.

But as I've already pointed out, the same could be said for virtually every socialist leader of all time. They all started with grand socialist ideals, tried them out, found that they didn't seem to work to achieve any practical real-world goals, so instead they became a tyrannical dictator wielding violence, torture and autocratic rule to maintain their vision. Ask Mao, ask Stalin, ask Maduro, Ask Xi, ask Castro, ask Che, ask Minh, ask Lenin…Hitler was just a me-too.

5. The Nazis were staunchly anti-Communist and anti-Marxist, therefore they couldn't have been socialists.

The idea that being anti-communist or anti-Marxist indicates one couldn't be a socialist is an anachronism, especially for post-Great War Germany. Let's not forget that Russia and Germany had fought ferociously during the war, including clashes before and after the communist revolution. Many Germans strongly blamed Germany's surrender at the end of World War I on communist sympathizers and/or spies within Germany, especially Marxist-Jewish political leaders, intellectuals and writers.

Leaders of the early Nazi Party, in particular, viewed the Treaty of Versailles not so much as a surrender to Western powers but as a surrender to international "Jewry", both the capitalist-Jews from America and England as well as the communist Jews from Russia. As Shirer points out in "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," Hitler and other Nazi leaders frequently referred to being "stabbed in the back" by communist-Jewish elements in Germany and Austria.

As such, as we learned from Roger Griffin's epic work "Fascism," the anti-Marxism present in the early Nazi Party was strongly anti-Bolshevik, or, said more plainly, it was "anti-Jewish Russians and Germans who betrayed at the end of World War I and who profited from the war."

Recall as well that communism is merely one manifestation of Marxist political philosophy … one that could progress out of a Socialist foundation. Even today, communists and socialists can have lively debates on the topic, one rejecting or point out logical flaws in the "purity" of the other on the scale of Karl Marx's idea of "perfect" socialism. (Marx never really had such an ideal, see below).

The point is, the fact that Hitler was feverishly and passionately anti-Marxist (because he was massively anti-Semitic) and anti-communist doesn't indicate he wasn't some form of socialist.

6. The Nazis were racists and nationalists, so they couldn't have been socialists.

I would have hoped I didn't have to go too deeply into this topic, but many people seem to make some form of this argument.

The disconnect here is that most people today associate left-leaning or socialist-aligned politics to be also "globalist," for open borders and pro-immigration. On the other hand, many people associate right-leaning and even "conservative" groups with anti-illegal-immigration and "America-first" policies.

Again, let's not start a semantic debate about modern policies of those on the right vs. those on the left and whether one or the other group is more or less racist than the other (let's do that on Twitter instead!); for our purposes here, what is key to point out is that Marx himself was a fairly racist bloke, who wrote an essay in 1844 titled, "The Jewish Question" (wonder where Hitler got that?):

" What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general."— Karl Marx, The Jewish Question, 1844

In a letter to co-creator of Socialist doctrine, Friedrich Engels, Marx wrote:

"It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses' exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a n—–. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product." — Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels, 1856

Many seem to believe that today's democratic socialism is inherently and not racist universally (unless perhaps, you happen to be a Jew … or maybe a white male, at least in some of the more vehement circles), so the fact of Nazi racism demonstrates simply that they could not have been socialists. But the socialism of the Nazi era was generally not-free of the every-day racism that was pervasive throughout that era.

To be sure, the Nazis were perhaps the most racist, anti-Semitic socialists who ever existed, but their racism, just like their nationalism, doesn't erase their socialism.

Furthermore, while socialism is not inherently racist, socialism and racism have been happy bedfellows numerous times.

One of the key and so-often-present-it-seems-to-be-required components of socialist movements is the presence of a bogeyman. An enemy of the people, or, in the case of Germany, the "volk."

In today's Americanized version of socialism, the bogeyman is the Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street,"Oh, wait, we have a more modern caricature of the same profile: Donald Trump. A self-made, unapologetic billionaire capitalist, flaunting both his wealth and ego across every TV screen and Twitter-feed 24/7.

For today's democratic socialist, that is the bogeyman. The rich (generally white) capitalist male who has more than his neighbor and doesn't feel bad about that.

Anti-Semitism and versions of socialism have often gone together because of the anti-capitalist and anti-wealthy-person ethos at the heart of Marxist ideology.

Hitler's bogeyman was also a banker — the Jew. Anti-Semitism and versions of socialism have often gone together because of the anti-capitalist and anti-wealthy-person ethos at the heart of Marxist ideology. Because Jews have tended to be industrious and have accumulated wealth, the Jewish people have been hated by many socialist and fascist groups throughout history. Socialist and totalitarian regimes in the Middle East also hated Jews, long before the founding of Israel after World War II.

In fact, after meeting with Hitler in the 1940s, Muslim regimes in Turkey and Syria planned on building Polish-styled death camps in the Middle East. During the war, Hitler also invited the creation of an entire Muslim division of Waffen-SS, such was the alliance between Islamic-Marxism and the National Socialists, all oriented around the anti-Capitalism and anti-Semitic ideals of Marxism.

As Richard Pipes detailed in "Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,"Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin also implemented anti-Jewish (themed as anti-capitalist) programs in Russia and the USSR after the Communist revolution. Lenin ordered the Jews to be sent to the front lines of combat in battle, and ordered that no Jew should be given high-ranking administrative positions in government, as was detailed in "Time of Darkness: Moscow"by the great Russian political reformer and historian, Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev.

The argument that it is fascism that was the birth of Hitler's anti-Semitism also fails to hold water. Mussolini founded the fascist movement in Italy and had seized control of the Italian government well before Hitler's SS had started harassing Jews, but Mussolini protected Jews in Italy from persecution (as long as they swore political loyalty to him), until much later after his country was under Allied attack and he had to beg Hitler for German troops to fight off the Allied advance.

To this day, even in America, democratic socialists struggle with elements of anti-Semitism in their own ranks, because Jews are still being accused of hypnotizing the world via money by democratic socialist members of the U.S. Congress.

No, socialism is not inherently and always racist. But neither is socialism free from racist ideology, if that racist ideology serves as a bogeyman, any enemy of "the people" who is preventing the utopia of equality. Hitler's enemy of the "volk" was the capitalist, banker Jew, sucking the life out of his precious Fatherland. For freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), it's the un-woke white male, driving an SUV and drinking single-malt while hunting deer from a tree stand, making the world unsafe for women, children and minorities. Both were self-ascribed socialists. Both racist, too.

Racism isn't always about "race" either. The point is about dehumanization as a means to classify the enemies of "The People." In addition to murdering six million Jews, the Nazis killed additional millions of gypsies, homosexuals, blacks, Christians and Slovaks. Hitler and the Nazis used dehumanizing language to describe all of them… . Jews just happened to be his favorite target. But the techniques used by socialist were universal. Marx referred to capitalists or the bourgeoisie as "parasites" over 120 times in books, essays and speeches.

As recently as this past year, National of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan referred to Jews as "termites"… although luckily Chelsea Clinton was kind enough to write an article for the online progressive magazine,"Forward," politely correcting him and implying, emphatically, she'd never met a Jewish termite.

Today's democratic socialists are using the same techniques. How many times have Trump supporters been called "sub-human" or a "Basket of Deplorables"? Marxism requires an enemy of the people, but when push comes to shove, people don't like to kill other people. So, the enemies must be made sub-human in order to justify the "purging" and "liquidation" that must necessarily follow. What will Sen. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do when wealthy, white males won't go along with their gun and SUV confiscation schemes required under their green-collectivist state? The Weather Underground boldly let us know back in the 1970s, when they issued a news releaseclaiming that in order to bring justice to the U.S., up to 25 million white people would have to die.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party is rounding up Christians, Muslims and Uigars, placing them in concentration camps and re-education camps. More than 35 percent of the current Chinese population has been relegated to digital and travel-restricted ghettos, because their social-trust score is below Communist Party standards. Hitler had to go through the trouble of rounding Jews up and moving them into ghettos. Today, Chinese leader Xi Jinping does it with the help of Facebook and Google.

All part of creating the socialist utopia Marx dreamed would destroy the unfair inequality of capitalism.

Dozens of classical stars of the socialist firmament were ardent racists. Margaret Sanger, socialist and anti-black advocate…sorry, pro-black-abortion advocate. Bernard Shaw, famous socialist, was first to dream up and write about using gas chambers to 'gently, humanely' remove those societies that was determined to no longer have a productive use. " Sir or madame, please kindly justify your existence." Both Shaw and Sanger are still widely studied and celebrated by socialists today.

Perhaps a final lesson here can be learned by examining the ideology of Richard Spencer, self-proclaimed racist and white supremacist, and therefore branded by the media and political elite as a right-wing extremist. However, Spencer also rejects the U.S. Constitution, is pro-universal health care and pro-free (segregated) college education, and in favor of government-funded abortions. Most of the National Socialist program themes Hitler wrote about, he'd embrace in total. And he's a right-wing extremist? Take away just his virulent racism, he'd be a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, espousing purely leftist ideologies.

Hopefully you are getting the wider picture. Socialism doesn't guarantee racism, but neither does it offer any sort of protection from it. To claim otherwise is willful blindness to history.

7. The Nazis did not seize all private property and money, so they weren't socialists.

Again, it's vital to review the overall timeline of Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party from the early and perhaps idealistic days of 1919 all the way through the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. For most of the 1920s, Hitler and the Nazis held little by way of political power through which they could have seized anybody's property, but that doesn't mean they didn't advocate for doing so, first in their National Socialists program cited extensively above, but numerous times after that. They did, after all, seize substantial privately owned property in Germany as well as conquered lands, including thousands of businesses, farms and bank accounts.

The fact that they focused first on Jewish businesses is irrelevant to the fact that private property was seized and transferred to the ownership of the state. The fact that Jewish property was at the top of the list of whom to target doesn't make it less Marxist or socialist to do, any more than it would be less socialist to target rich white males, as is currently being proposed by Bernie Sanders and others on the far left. Who you're targeting for confiscation schemes should be a moot point.

It's key to recall who Hitler and the Nazis were. They were socialists by way of economic policies, but staunchly nationalist and staunchly anti-Semitic racists who believed in a German super-race that could only be realized by way of physically purging inferior peoples and blood and by "reclaiming" lands stolen from their rightful Aryan-ancestors. Eric Kurlander powerfully and skillfully provided that history in "Hitler's Monsters," another book every American should read to fully understand the Nazi era.

It is true that once the Nazis came to power and started down their twin paths of political dominance within Germany and military conflict with external forces, Hitler's pragmatic side certainly overwhelmed any traditional or "classic" socialist ideals he may have once held. Surely after the powerful success he'd seen Mussolini seemingly achieve in Italy under fascism, the idea of communal socialism wouldn't have seemed the most efficient way for him to achieve his vision of a blood-pure and massive German super-state.

Note that the Nazis did nationalize dozens of industries and, by law, did have total centralized-control over the means of production … business owners and manufacturers had ownership of their property and factories in name only once the Waffen-SS and stormtroopers were fully in power. So, in his own way, Hitler did achieve Karl Marx-vision of control over the means of production by an all-powerful state. For Hitler, that state was simply imbued in him, instead of in a democratically elected central committee. Hitler's rejection of the authorities of labor unions or of workers' councils shouldn't, then, be viewed as anti-socialist. … Hitler was not in favor of giving any other person or group any authority over his own. Coincidentally, President Xi of China just recently declared himself dictator for life. History seems to love to recycle these themes, no?

Hitler was a pragmatist. He saw the favor of the German aristocracy and wealthy manufacturers (if they were not Jewish) as key to achieving his vision for the Third Reich.

Hitler was a pragmatist. He saw the favor of the German aristocracy and wealthy manufacturers (if they were not Jewish) as key to achieving his vision for the Third Reich. The fact that this meant not being a "perfect" socialist may have occurred to some, but certainly not to him.

8. Hitler was only interested in power, in being a dictator, not in socialist principals of peace and love and equality.

Before I dispense with the peace and love and equality BS … look, a study of Marx is a study about inequality! Marx was a racist, class-warfare-monger whom the average democratic socialist in America today would wholly reject from their social circles and political party.

So, I won't argue this last one, it's just beyond discussion. Socialism isn't nice and peaceful and filled with love and equality. Just stop it. Please pick up a history book and get back to me when you're ready to have a real conversation.

Yet, one final point should be made:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PERFECT "MARXIST" SOCIALISM!!

From the time Marx wrote "The Communist Manifesto" in the 1850s until his death in 1883, Marx never once espoused any version of "perfect" Socialism. As socialist professor Philip Gasper pointed out quite correctly in his 2005 book, "The Communist Manifesto: A Roadmap to the World's Most Important Political Document":

"Marx and Engels never speculated on the detailed organization of a future socialist or communist society. The key task for them was building a movement to overthrow capitalism. If and when that movement was successful, it would be up to the members of the new society to decide democratically how it was to be organized, in the concrete historical circumstances in which they found themselves."

So, for Karl Marx, the "father" of socialism, there is no thing as perfect, idealized, "do it this way or you're not a socialist" socialism.

The primary goal was building a movement to overthrow capitalism. In that Hitler and the Nazis viewed Jewry as capitalistic (as did Marx), it's very likely that Marx would have found them to be wonderfully and perfectly socialist. He did exactly what Marx advised: Take what you got and organize your own brand of socialism against the "concrete historical circumstances" in which they found themselves.

The very statement that "Hitler was not a socialist" by some imaginary perfect socialist checklist is itself a ludicrous notion. Marx never created one, it's only via the magic of a modern veil of anachronistic imagination that one can create such a yardstick by which to make such a claim. And so, we're back where we started, according to Marx himself: The Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, called themselves Socialists. The claimed an all-powerful centralized state power as having authority over the means of production. As such, they were socialists, by Marx' own definition.

In the end, the story follows the Occam's Razor theorem to the "T"…

A younger and idealistic Hitler returning from the Great War believed in and espoused many socialist ideas and political ideals and got together with a bunch of other young people also espousing socialist ideas. As he grew older and gained more political power, he found that those socialist ideas weren't much use when it was time to actually accomplish anything in the real world, so he did what all socialist rulers eventually do — he claimed power by force and used violence to try to achieve his political ends, killing millions of people along the way, all the while still calling himself a socialist. And Marx slept soundly in his grave.

Socialism is the building block that undergirds all forms of modern totalitarianism. But it should never be confused with a large welfare-state safety net. Charity and safety nets can be and should be created for those who cannot fully take care of themselves. As individuals, we have a responsibility to take care of and protect the weakest among us. If we fail to do this we revert back to the laws of the jungle, that leaves its weakest behind for the good of the "pride." Safety nets when done right are uniquely human and humane as still look to help individual.

The human "pride" knows that what ennobles man is that we refuse to leave the weakest behind to be eaten and we certainly could not call ourselves a noble species if our stated goal was to not only leave the weak behind, but to set out to purposely kill any group deemed "inferior" or slowing the pack down. A true safety net empowers anyone that has been kicked to the ground to stand back up. It gives them a hand up as an individual — while they regain their footing.

Socialism at its root is and always must be about the collective. Collective "injustice" in all of its forms. In opposition to a "safety net" for individuals, socialism looks for "groups" of victims and groups of villains. Socialism is at its heart a system that dismisses rights of the one for the gain of the many. Once those the in-group deems vermin, cockroaches, greedy, privileged or problems — anything is justifiable to provide "social justice" to the collective.

In western society, traditional western liberalism stand against the collective mob and as a protector of the individual. Once one understands why socialism is defined as a "stepping stone," you will begin to understand why the story usually ends in mass graves of enemies or starvation. Create a collective at the expense of the individual and it becomes a playground for those who seek power and riches at any cost, justifying every evil they commit in the name of the collective they are supposedly defending.

So yes, Virginia, Hitler really was a socialist. Tragically, a very successful one.

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Yes, Virginia: Hitler really was a socialist

For those of you looking for the Cliff's Notes version, here is the answer: Yes, Hitler and the Nazis were socialists.

Arguments as to whether the Nazi Party was "right wing" or "left wing" is what confuses most modern pundits and scholars.

By the time Hitler had been named chancellor in 1933 and dictator in 1934, it would have been fair to start thinking of Nazis as having fascist ideas.

Anti-Semitism and versions of socialism have often gone together because of the anti-capitalist and anti-wealthy-person ethos at the heart of Marxist ideology.

Hitler was a pragmatist. He saw the favor of the German aristocracy and wealthy manufacturers (if they were not Jewish) as key to achieving his vision for the Third Reich.