How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

George Soros is an American billionaire philanthropist of Hungarian Jewish origin. Soros’s philanthropic organization, the Open Society Foundations, has been deeply involved in democracy-building efforts in more than a hundred countries, including in his native Hungary, where his support also led to the founding of Central European University, Hungary’s leading university. In 2017, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán claimed that there was a “Soros Plan” to flood Hungary with non-Christian migrants in order to dilute the nation’s Christian identity. Orbán’s government has launched a campaign against George Soros and his alleged plan, including billboards and television ads targeting Soros, employing what many have perceived to be starkly anti-Semitic representations. There is of course no evidence whatsoever that the Jewish financier has any sort of plan to flood Hungary with non-Christian migrants, but the lack of evidence in the mainstream media is taken, by the Orbán government, to be evidence of Soros’s control over it, when in fact it is Orbán who is manipulating reality.