George Soros and the Conspiracy Factory

A few months ago, I posted about a scholarship opportunity from the Open Society Foundations. Within hours, a fellow appeared in the comments accusing me of “recruiting for George Soros.” The claim was absurd, but it was delivered with that smug certainty common to internet prophets. My first reaction was anger. My second was bewilderment.

Why Soros? Why this old Hungarian billionaire who, unlike Bill Gates or Elon Musk, does not even occupy the spotlight of popular tech culture? Our resident Nigerian conspiracy theorist usually has his fire trained on Gates, but Soros is not far behind. Soros has become a permanent ghost in the machinery of global suspicion.

It was three days ago I stumbled on Carrick Ryan’s video dissecting the same Soros mythology. Watching it, I realised how far from the real story these narratives have drifted. Carrick Ryan’s video became the inspiration for this article.

To understand Soros is to step into a history filled with flight, survival, money, and a stubborn belief in open societies. The caricature of the puppet master dissolves quickly once you see the man who, for most of his life, lived in opposition to the very forces conspiracy theorists now claim he embodies.

George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930. By the time he was 14, his world had collapsed under Nazi occupation. He was Jewish, and the Nazis were hunting people like him. Soros survived by adopting a false Christian identity. Soros’s family changed their name in 1936 from the German-Jewish “Schwartz” to “Soros”, as protective camouflage in increasingly antisemitic Hungary. His father secured papers that helped the family avoid deportation. Soros later recalled visiting an official’s estate, pretending to be his godson, while that official catalogued the belongings of deported Jewish families. For a teenager, the dissonance was dizzying.

Survival depended on deception, but the lesson Soros took was not cynicism. It was the clarity that totalitarian regimes survive by extinguishing truth, by forcing people to live within lies. The boy who survived Budapest would spend his life fighting that darkness, not through weapons but through ideas.

After the war, Hungary fell behind the Iron Curtain. Soros fled in 1947, landing in London with little money at the age of 17. He enrolled at the London School of Economics, where he came under the influence of philosopher Karl Popper. Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies argued that societies flourish when they embrace critical debate and perish when they cling to authoritarian certainty. The book imprinted itself on Soros. He never let it go.

He worked odd jobs — waiter, railway porter — until he found a place in finance. Actually, he wanted to be a professor, but his grades were not good enough. So, he went to the ‘real world’. There, he understood that numbers were his ladder out of obscurity. By the 1970s, Soros was running his own hedge fund in New York. In 1992, he became famous as “the man who broke the Bank of England,” profiting $1 billion in a single bet against the pound. Overnight, his name became synonymous with ruthless financial genius.

But Soros did not hoard his winnings like a dragon. He began giving them away.

In the 1980s, Soros set up the Open Society Foundations. He poured money into universities, free presses, and civil society groups across Eastern Europe. Remember that he fled the Eastern European country of Hungary? His grants bought photocopiers so dissidents could spread underground newspapers. They funded scholarships for students from closed societies. They kept cultural institutions alive when governments tried to smother them.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Soros’s money was everywhere. In Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in his native Hungary. He saw democracy not as a gift of armies but as a fragile plant that needed tending. His foundations were watering cans.

The numbers were staggering. Over his lifetime, Soros has donated more than $32 billion. Two-thirds of his fortune. In 2019, he pledged $1 billion to establish a global university network dedicated to combating authoritarianism. Few billionaires have given away so much, so quickly, with so little concern for personal legacy.

Yet this philanthropy, which to him was an act of obligation, became the very ammunition used against him.

By the early 2000s, Soros was a marked man in the rhetoric of strongmen. In Eastern Europe, authoritarian leaders blamed him for every protest. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s allies dismissed opposition marches as “Soros plots.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán turned Soros into a campaign villain, plastering his face on billboards as the puppet master of migration.

The formula was simple. If people protested, say it was Soros. If journalists dug too deep, say they were funded by Soros. If courts resisted government control, accuse Soros. His name became a get-out-of-jail card for regimes unwilling to face their own citizens’ anger.

Soon, the trick migrated across the Atlantic.

Donald Trump suggested Soros was behind the refugee caravans at America’s southern border. Fox News commentators accused Soros of bankrolling Black Lives Matter protests. Michael Flynn hinted he was behind COVID-19 itself. Elon Musk tweeted that Soros “hates humanity.” None of these claims came with evidence. They did not need to. The name was enough. Go on Wikipedia and you will see an entire entry dedicated to conspiracy theories about Soros.

That is how a Nigerian conspiracy theorist felt confident accusing me of “recruiting” for Soros. To him, the scholarship I shared could not simply be a scholarship. It had to be part of a grand puppet show.

It is easier to dismiss inconvenient realities as manufactured by Soros than to face them head on. Refugees at your border are not people fleeing violence; they are Soros actors. Young people protesting racism are not citizens demanding dignity; they are Soros mercenaries. Students applying for scholarships are not scholars; they are Soros recruits.

It is lazy thinking dressed up as sophistication. And in its laziest form, it repeats an old, dangerous story.

Soros is Jewish. That fact alone fuels much of the poison around his name. For centuries, anti-Semitic myths have cast Jews as stateless globalists controlling the world from the shadows. The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged text circulated in Russia in the early 20th century, imagined a Jewish conspiracy behind every upheaval. Hitler used similar narratives to justify extermination.

When people imagine Soros as an omnipotent schemer funding every protest, they are recycling this ancient lie. To be clear, not everyone who criticises Soros is anti-Semitic. But the reason Soros in particular has become the face of global manipulation — when so many other billionaires fund causes and candidates — cannot be separated from this history.

The irony is painful. A boy who survived the Holocaust by hiding his identity has become, in the twilight of his life, the target of the very myths that once nearly killed him.

Strip away the fog, and Soros’s record is straightforward. He has opposed wars of choice, including Iraq in 2003. He has supported Democratic presidential candidates since John Kerry in 2004. He has funded prosecutors who advocate criminal justice reform, including easing mandatory sentences. He has spoken against Israeli government policies toward Palestinians, which made him enemies in Israel’s right wing.

You do not have to agree with his positions. Many do not. But disagreement is different from imagining a hidden hand guiding every global event.

George Soros is 94 years old. He has given away more than half of his fortune. His son Alex now runs Open Society. Whatever power he had is fading with age. And yet the conspiracy machine keeps him alive as a ghostly villain.

The irony could not be richer. The man accused of seeking infinite power has spent decades surrendering his wealth. The man said to control nations has no elected office, no army, no borders. The man said to be motivated by greed has already donated away $32 billion.

When is the supposed payday? What more could he possibly want?

Perhaps that is the strangest truth about George Soros. He is less a person now than a mirror. Authoritarians see in him an excuse. Conspiracy theorists see in him a puppet master. But if you take the time to look closer, you see an old man shaped by the trauma of fascism and flawed like any billionaire who believes money can bend the arc of history.

Soros has never been the wizard behind the curtain. He has been the scapegoat in plain sight. And the persistence of the lie says less about him than it does about us — about our hunger for shadows, our eagerness to blame phantoms, and our fear of confronting reality as it is.