Like the protagonist in the classic Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane,
Soros can never have enough power. But unlike Charles Foster Kane, the haughty,
imperious fictional media mogul, Soros views himself as much more than a mere
leader. With a straight face he told reporters, “It is a sort of 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 – UK, June 3, 1993)

Although markets have helped make him a billionaire several times over, Soros
has declared war on capitalism. He blames markets and something he calls “market
fundamentalism”— and not the suffocating regulations and high taxes his funding
of left-wing groups promotes – for the current economic slowdown. “The entire
edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that
markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and
rebuild from the ground up.”

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite
recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do
it,” Soros told the Financial Times in 2009. In an interview with
Der Spiegel the previous year Soros said European-style socialism “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.”

Only in the twisted messianic fantasies of this octogenarian billionaire
whose demeanor is that of a James Bond villain could such phantom armies of
marauding free market fundamentalists wreak havoc on America. Perhaps these were
the same laissez-faire legionnaires who brought us Sarbanes-Oxley, Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac, government bailouts of private industry, farm subsidies,
ethanol mandates, smart growth, and the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in
recent decades.

One thing’s for certain: Soros’s answers to the nation’s problems almost
invariably involve more regulation and more government intervention in the
marketplace. If a policy increases the power of the state and diminishes the
power of the individual, Soros is for it.

Because Soros is a lightning rod for criticism, recipients of his money often
lie about taking it or perform an elaborate dance of legalistic hairsplitting to
conceal the fact he is funding them. For example, Paul Steiger, editor-in-chief
of the left-leaning investigative journalism website Pro Publica, denied his
organization accepted funding from Soros.

In criticizing an Investor’s Business Daily editorial, Steiger
wrote (Dec. 24, 2009):

An unmitigated canard quoted in the editorial – one that has a goofy way of
creeping into discourse from a variety of people who dislike something we have
written – is that George Soros, the global billionaire, is behind our coverage.
Soros has never given us a penny, and even if he had, none of our funders know
in advance what we are going to write about, nor do they have any role in
deciding what stories we do or don’t do.

In fact Pro Publica’s website contradicts Steiger, openly acknowledging Soros’s
Open Society Foundations as a donor.

(Surprisingly, the liberal-dominated “No Labels” group founded last month to
combat what it calls the “hyper-partisanship [that] is destroying our politics
and paralyzing our ability to govern,” does not appear to be connected to Soros.
The new 501c4 advocacy organization has a particularly vapid slogan: “Not Left.
Not Right. Forward.”)

Glenn Beck, Threat to the Republic?
Not content to rest
on his laurels, Soros has been buying up media properties for years in order to
drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic,
too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run
their own lives.

But controlling segments of the media is not enough for him. Now he’s openly
funding the fake media watchdog, Media Matters for America, founded by the
formerly conservative journalist David Brock. The writers at Brock’s well-funded
slander shop assiduously monitor Rush Limbaugh’s broadcasts, seethe over Andrew
Breitbart’s latest expose, turn purple over Bill O’Reilly’s latest on-air
editorial, and analyze every last semi-colon in Charles Krauthammer’s latest
column in search of that rarest of unicorns, the beast known as “conservative
misinformation.”

Soros’s donation to Media Matters suggests that intimidating journalists who
dare to question his vision is now a top priority for Soros. Come down on the
wrong side of an issue and risk being labeled ignorant or evil by the smear
website. Say that tax cuts lead to economic prosperity, and you’re attacked.
Criticize illegal immigration, and you’re attacked. Say affirmative action is
racist and discriminatory, and you’re attacked.

“They are vicious. They only understand one thing: attack, attack, attack,”
said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. David Folkenflik, media reporter for liberal
National Public Radio, was similarly unimpressed by Media Matters. “They’re
looking at every dangling participle, every dependent clause, every semicolon,
every quotation to see if there’s some way it unfairly frames a cause, a party,
a candidate that they may have some feelings for.”

Media Matters relies heavily on personal attacks, rather than substantive or
fact-based arguments. It settles scores. Large swaths of the site are dedicated
to skewering specific media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, G.
Gordon Liddy and Brock’s former friend Laura Ingraham. What results is not
even-handed analysis of what they say or write, but personal scrutiny, including
minute parsing and microscopic analysis of every comment and its presumed
meaning.

Today, Media Matters is one of the loudest voices in the liberal media echo
chamber as it feeds hard-line left-wing media critiques to liberal blogs,
sympathetic and lazy reporters, and pundits in an attempt to silence
non-compliant journalists and muscle right-leaning media figures out of the
public debate entirely.

Even before the donation, Soros and Brock already worked closely together.
Before the last presidential election they collaborated on a project called
Progressive Media USA that vowed to spend $40 million trashing GOP presidential
candidate John McCain. Media Matters exists to help protect Democrats and harm
Republicans. Even the New York
Times describes the organization as “highly partisan.”

As if on cue, Media Matters, and now Soros, believe Fox News is the greatest
threat to the American republic. Both Soros and Brock had always denied that the
billionaire funded Media Matters—and there was no definitive evidence of such a
connection— but recently Soros proclaimed himself a new donor to the
organization. Said Soros

Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by various Fox News commentators,
I have not to date been a funder of Media Matters. However, in view of recent
evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite
violence, I have now decided to support the organization. Media Matters is one
of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and
misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in
an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and
informed discourse in our democracy.

In accepting a cool million from Soros, Brock promptly denounced Fox News
host Glenn Beck as Public Enemy Number One.

From the moment in early 2009 that Roger Ailes enlisted Glenn Beck to the Fox
News Channel’s new agenda – a battle to overturn the 2008 election results that
Ailes likened to the “The Alamo” – Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 GOP
attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and
undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends. Worse
still, in recent months, Fox has allowed Glenn Beck’s show to become an
out-of-control vehicle for the potential incitement of domestic terrorism. No
American should be quiet about these developments – the degradation of our media
and the reckless endangerment of innocent lives. George Soros, a philanthropist
of the highest integrity, unfortunately knows first-hand what it’s like to be
grotesquely caricatured and flatly lied about on Fox. Media Matters is grateful
that he has decided to lend his voice and support our goal of greater
journalistic accuracy and accountability. We are especially pleased that in this
moment of hidden right-wing billionaire money corrupting our democracy, Mr.
Soros, upon deciding to support our efforts, quickly and transparently has made
that support public.

Only in the topsy-turvy world that Brock and other leftists occupy could
holding governments accountable be considered antisocial behavior. Whatever
happened to the journalists’ mantra that it was their purpose to comfort the
afflicted and afflict the comfortable? What about speaking truth to power?

(This article is excerpted
from the January 2011 issue of Organization
Trends.)

Buy Matthew Vadum’s book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which is now available in fine bookstores near you. If you’d like an autographed copy, order it directly from  the publisher, WND Books, here.