The Unbelievable Story of the Plot Against George Soros
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REPORTING TO YOU Matt Chase for BuzzFeed News WORLD The Unbelievable Story Of The Plot Against George Soros How two Jewish American political consultants helped create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. By Hannes Grassegger Posted on January 20, 2019, at 9:57 a.m. ET The glass tower that houses George Soros’s office in Manhattan is overflowing with numbers on screens, tracking and predicting the directions of markets around the world. But there’s one that’s particularly hard to figure out — a basic orange chart on a screen analyzing sentiment on social media. The data, updated regularly since 2017, projects the reactions on the internet to the name George Soros. He gets tens of thousands of mentions per week — almost always negative, some of it obviously driven by networks of bots. Soros is pure evil. A drug smuggler. Profiteer. Extremist. Conspiracist. Nazi. Jew. It’s a display of pure hate. The demonization of Soros is one of the defining features of contemporary global politics, and it is, with a couple of exceptions, a pack of lies. Soros is indeed Jewish. He was an aggressive currency trader. He has backed Democrats in the US and Karl Popper’s notion of an “open society” in the former communist bloc. But the many wild and proliferating theories, which include the suggestion that he helped bring down the Soviet Union in order to clear a path to Europe for Africans and Arabs, are so crazy as to be laughable — if they weren’t so virulent. Soros and his aides have spent long hours wondering: Where did this all come from? Only a handful of people know the answer. On a sunny morning last summer, one of them could be found standing in front of the huge buffet in the Westin Grand Hotel in Berlin. George Birnbaum is built like a marathon runner — tall and slender, his head and face shaved clean. Elegant horn-rimmed glasses frame his piercing blue eyes. Birnbaum — a political consultant who has worked in the US, Israel, Hungary, and across the Balkans — had agreed to talk for the first time about his role in the creation of the Soros bogeyman, which ended up unleashing a global wave of anti-Semitic attacks on the billionaire investor. But he also wanted to defend his work, and that of his former mentor and friend, Arthur Finkelstein. George Eli Birnbaum was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, where his family moved after fleeing Nazi Germany. His grandfather was shot by the Nazis in front of his son, Birnbaum’s father, who later survived Auschwitz. Anti- Semitism followed the family as they moved to Atlanta, where Birnbaum grew up, and where the Jewish school he attended was often defaced with anti-Semitic slurs. It left a mark. In an era when many American Jews drifted away from their specific identity, Birnbaum wasn’t allowed to forget it. Every weekend his father handed him the Jerusalem Post. “First you learn what’s going on with the Jewish people in the world, then you can worry about the rest of the world.” “First you learn what’s going on with the Jewish people in the world, then you can worry about the rest of the world,” Birnbaum remembered his father saying. He grew up believing that only a strong nation, the state of Israel, could protect the Jews from a second Holocaust. All of which makes it bizarre that Birnbaum and Finkelstein’s ideas spawned a new wave of anti-Semitism, and that they did so in the service of an authoritarian leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, reviled around the world for his far-right views. The two men took all the arguments against Soros, from East and West, from left and right, and fused them together. Two American Jews, one a towering figure in US politics, helped create a monster. Birnbaum doesn’t appreciate the irony, but there is little doubt he played a crucial role in the weaponizing of anti- Semitism. And he did it by putting Soros on the chopping block. Starting in 2008, Birnbaum and Finkelstein worked in secret to get Orbán elected. Their victory in Hungary — away from the intense political scrutiny of Western Europe — showed that constructing an external enemy could bring electoral success in the modern era. It allowed Hungary to give birth to “Trump before Trump,” as Steve Bannon said. Birnbaum and Finkelstein’s work has provided a new model for attack politics in this era of global division. They designed a master plan for exploiting these divisions that has worked in many different countries and contexts, and helped create a Jewish enemy that the far right has exploited to devastating effect. In 2016, when Trump ran his final TV ad ahead of the election, it came as no surprise that Soros was featured as a member of “global special interests” who don’t have “your good in mind.” Want to support more reporting like this? Become a BuzzFeed News member today. George Birnbaum in a 2015 appearance on Fox News. Fox News / Via youtube.com To understand Birnbaum, you have to look backward, through the brutal Israeli politics of the 1990s to Washington, DC, in the 1970s, where a new profession known as political consultancy was devising a fresh set of tools for bringing people to power. There you find Birnbaum’s spiritual father, Finkelstein. Starting in the late 1960s, Finkelstein was one of a handful of men reinventing the industry of political consulting in New York. He would go on to help presidents and senators, to pioneer a slashing style of television advertising, and to build a generation of protégés. Finkelstein isn’t as famous as his contemporary Roger Ailes, but he is a hidden link that runs through the contemporary Republican Party, leading from the libertarian icon Ayn Rand to the cynicism of Richard Nixon and finally on to Trump. Finkelstein was a New York City kid. The son of a cab driver, he met Rand while he was a student at Columbia University in the early 1960s. He went on to work briefly as a computer programmer on Wall Street before becoming an early exponent of the art of polling toward the end of the decade. From left: Paul Curran, a one-time Republican candidate for governor of New York, Whitney North Seymour, the former US attorney for the Southern District in New York, and Arthur Finkelstein, June 8, 1983. Chester Higgins Jr. for the New York Times It was back then that Finkelstein started developing a political method that now reads like a how-to guide for modern right-wing populism. Finkelstein’s premise was simple: Every election is decided before it even begins. Most people know who they will vote for, what they support, and what they oppose. It’s very difficult to convince them otherwise, Finkelstein believed. It’s a lot easier to demoralize people than to motivate them. And the best way to win is to demoralize your opponent’s supporters. That’s what Trump did to great effect against Hillary Clinton, and what he meant when, after the election, he thanked black Americans for not voting. Finkelstein had long been studying the big political trends, and he settled on simple issues that could do the most damage. In the end, he noticed, it usually comes down to the same concerns: drugs, crime, and race. These are the issues that create the most political division, he wrote in a memo to the Nixon White House in 1970. Finkelstein’s goal was to polarize the electorate as much as possible, to pitch each side against the other. The fuel: fear. “The danger has to be presented as coming from the Left,” a 25-year-old Finkelstein advised Nixon. Whoever doesn’t attack first will be beaten, he argued. And Finkelstein made things personal. Every campaign needs an enemy to defeat. He developed negative campaigning into a technique he called “rejectionist voting” — to demonize the enemy so much that even the laziest of voters would want to get out and vote, just to reject them. In TV campaigns opponents were branded as “ultra liberal,” “crazy liberal,” “embarrassingly liberal,” or “too liberal for too long.” Finkelstein would also advise his clients not to talk about themselves, but instead to focus their campaigning on destroying their opponents. He became notorious for turning “liberal” into a dirty word. In TV campaigns that no 1990s American could avoid, opponents were branded as “ultra liberal,” “crazy liberal,” “embarrassingly liberal,” or “too liberal for too long.” Campaigners named his ideology “Finkel-Think.” It was simple but effective. Friends of Finkelstein have often claimed that nobody got more politicians elected than he did. Controversy occasionally surrounded his work. In the 1980s, while working for a Republican candidate, he was criticized for polling voters to see what they thought of the Jewish identity of his Democrat opponent. By the time of his death in 2017, Finkelstein had left an indelible mark on national politics, having worked for Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. While working as a central campaign member for Reagan in 1980, a strangely gloomy advertisement appeared: “Let’s make America great again.” He reportedly did some work for the Trump Organization in the mid-2000s — and later spoke of the “mind- boggling” power of Trump’s personality. When Trump finally ran for president, his campaign was stuffed with “Arthur’s kids” and friends: Larry Weitzner, Tony Fabrizio, and his old buddy Roger Stone. Birnbaum was one of Arthur’s kids. After graduating from Florida Tech in the early ’90s, he first came into Finkelstein’s orbit in DC when the latter was working at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.