It Could Happen Here - Who The Hell is George Soros, Anyway? Part 2

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Mia talks with Gare and Robert about George Soros's Open Society Foundation and the political operatives who manufactured the antisemitic campaign against him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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uh yeah with with me here to wrangle robert evans and also garrison davis welcome welcome back my my two uses in this series are to uh make on Hungarian history of the Holocaust and talk about selling heroin to children. So proud to be here. I'm very excited. You're going to hear me complain. You're going to listen to me very briefly complain about Plato, a thing I did not think I was going to do when I started this. Like the philosophy guy yeah yeah okay okay all right okay so all right why are we eventually going to talk about plato uh so george soros is probably best known for a foundation that he eventually funds called open

society that was originally the soros foundation then was like, why am I naming this after myself? And it changed to Open Society. I'm going to read... The Open Society is a very sort of... Again, I got to say, exactly 20% more self-awareness than you get from the average billionaire. Bill Gates

is like, we'll call it the Gates Foundation. Soros is like, we'll call it the Soros. Wait, we'll call it the Soros. You know, wait, wait, you know, no, you know what? Well, and to be fair to Soros, right? Like Soros has a real ideology and it can't work. But if it did, the world wouldn't be that bad. Unlike what would happen if you let Bill Gates run rampant over the earth,

which is the world we live in right now. So I'm going to read a little bit from the influence of Soros again about like what the open society is. I have lived through Nazi persecution and Soviet occupation. Soros later said Popper's book is Carl Pop is Karl Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies struck me with the force of revelation. It showed that fascism and communism have a lot in common, that they both stand in opposition

to a different principle of social organization, the principle of open society. So, okay, I read this and I was like, okay, so let's go read Karl Popper's go read uh carl popper's book which is called the open society against enemies and so i i assumed right that's interesting me i was also doing poppers last night uh you had the superior experience with your poppers i'm assuming i had a i had a bad fucking time when i read this like last week you should have gotten yours from a gas station too yeah no instead i got it from the internet for free which questionable results so okay so i i i

read this book right so this is carl popper is like normally a philosopher well he's like a scientist right he's most famous for like philosophy of science stuff but he also wrote this book and this is his critique of totalitarianism. So, OK, I'm expecting, right, it's going to be half of it's going to be about the Nazis and half of it's going to be about the communist, right? No, the first half of this book is about Plato. And the second half of this book is about Marx, but he spends like 200 pages yelling at Plato. And to be fair, everything says about plato and about why plato is totalitarian is completely true but like his conclusion about what totalitarianism is is

that totalitarianism is is descendant it's like the product of this thing he calls historicism which is when like you have one thing that's the agent of history and so he sees like like i don't know like a great man or like the the guy like whatever hegel's geist or like one great nation or like a great class as like these are all examples of historicism and if you think about history like this you will you this is how totalitarianism is born. And I am incredibly skeptical of that, of the view of the way you look, think about history being the origin of totalitarianism. weird book in a lot of ways. Popper is trying to do this thing that like a lot of kind of liberal philosophers of that period is doing, which is that he's trying to reconcile sort of like individual freedom,

but then also sort of economic egalitarianism and you know, okay. So if you were actually serious about doing both of these things, right? Like the, the, the, the,

the two things you care about on earth are protecting individual freedom and achieving economic egalitarianism you have two options you either become an anarchist and you sacrifice neither of your values or you become a neoliberal and you sacrifice both and popper unfortunately takes the second route and like i feel like a lot of the um a lot of the conflict between uh uh kind ofciling the great man theory of history with some of these other – like it comes out of an unwillingness to look at systems of power because the extent to which like individual weirdos and their obsessions influence history is largely due to – or is largely like related to the degree of power that like different systems allow, uh, to be invested into like individual weirdos. Like it's, it's less a matter of like, you've got these sort of, you know, in that kind of fascist idea, you've got these sort of individuals who embody the spirit of a people and more, if your system allows huge

amounts of power to be invested in individual people with their weird hangups, then those weird hangups of this one guy may wind up defining history. I don't know. This is an unrelated rant. Well, no, I think it is related because this is sort of the core flaw of this ideology, which is that these people conclude – okay, so like they don't – okay, the thing that they have to do, like Popper has to do, right? Okay, the thing that they have to do, like, Popper has to do, right, because he, like, acknowledges that a lot of the Marxist critique is really powerful, and that, like, it is in fact not very good that you have an entire class of people to, like, survive off of extracting, right, you can't actually like defend capitalism on the merits of it being an economic system. You have to like do this like circle run around dance of like defending ideas. And this all gets like gets to this point where the problem that you're talking about happens, which is that like, well, OK, capitalism is also a system where one really

weird guy and he's like terrible ideas can have an enormous impact on how society operates. Like this is this is this is this is the thing we're all suffering from, from like Elon Musk, weird guy and he's like terrible ideas can have an enormous impact on how society operates. Like this is, this is, this is, this is the thing we're all suffering from, from like Elon Musk. Right.

Or like, what's that guy's name? Like Robert Moses. Right. Like, yeah, like the, you know, like capitalism is absolutely a system that generates just one guy who could

just fuck everyone's entire life. That's a perfect example of it because like the fact that Moses has these weird personal hangups around public transportation and this love of being driven around influences how tens of millions of people live to this day and influences like the global climate crisis. And so it's not like this great man didn't like grab the lathe of heaven. It was more like, no,

our, we, we, our society kind of like the system we set up allowed an enormous amount of power for this specific thing, how our cities are set up to be invested in an unelected weirdo, because he was the only one interested enough to focus on it. And that led to this very bad situation.

Yeah. And like, I think, I think Pompers thing that was like, well, okay, you, you do,

you deal with this by like just having elections for everyone. And that was like well okay you you do you deal with this by like just having elections for everyone and it's like yeah well okay like some so sometimes you have elections we never vote for crazy assholes thank god sometimes sometimes you get donald trump right like i you know these these are these these are things that are going to haunt both popper well popper doesn't live long enough to see like the absolute worst this can possibly go. But George Soros unfortunately

has lived to see exactly how badly this could possibly go. But in his... Let's call him by his nickname from now on. G-Sizzle. Is that good? we're not doing that thank you Garrison

this is why you're here you have power of attorney over what nicknames we call the subjects of the episodes I will keep and reserve this power for see this is we're we've built a system to try and uh and stop you know individuals with with

weird hang-ups from uh from influencing history so much it's that simple folks you know devolve powers yeah works great this could work for the presidency on unfortunately we're gonna have to talk about Yugoslavia this episode so uh it doesn't always work but all right so back back back and back in sort of the heady days of of the 70s and 80s so George Soros like okay, okay, he has a dual thing where he at once has this kind of crisis of conscience thing where he's like, I want to actually do something

with my life that's not just, you know, I want to have an impact on the world that is positive and not like I made so much money that, like, gods look at it and vomit. And so, okay, his solution is he sets up a tax dodge and he's actually very explicit about this in interviews that his first foundation to do charity

work was set up as a tax dodge um but but this is where soros is very interesting right because he has you know for for like a billionaire right he has some positions that are startlingly very good so he is anti-apartheid and that is like not a thing you can guarantee from people in that era like oh boy um he also and this is something that gets him in trouble like to this day is he's pro palestine and this is part of why like netanyahuanyahu absolutely hates him. He's not like, like, OK, he's not like a radical pro-Palestine. By the standards of Netanyahu, a radical. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Like his, you know, his sort of like his sort of like liberal humanism. Like, hey, we should not like shoot children with guns thing. Yeah. Is broadly anti shooting children. Yeah. Throwing rocks. Yeah. with guns thing yeah is broadly anti-shooting children for throwing rocks yeah and like like that that that makes you a like like like enemy number one of the israeli still well yeah no i i okay i'll put him in like any number no the enemy number one is those kids but yeah

they haven't whacked him yet so oh god speaking of things that the israeli government didn't do uh so he he gets his start i thought you were going to do an ad i also thought it was going to be an ad break don't worry i have a better one um it's coming good so in the 1980s his first experience like doing charity work is he decides that he's going to go up against like apartheid in south africa and you, this is good. So he starts doing is he starts giving scholarships to black students to go to the University of Cape Town. And then he learns a very, very important lesson about neoliberalism that he's about. He's going to like promptly forget after this, which is that.

OK, so what actually happened, what he thinks is going to happen, right? What he's trying to do is he's trying to make you know, he's trying to make sure there's more money for black kids to go to university. What actually happens is that the state uses his money to pay for the existing scholarships and stops paying for any more scholarships. like they don't want more non-white kids going to school but then two also this is also sort of a classic neoliberal failure which is like if you were if you when you replace the state with like billionaire philanthropists the state simply instead of like you know having more of the of like the resources the services provided the state just stops doing it and spends more money on cops and so he yesaurus very quickly realizes that like he figures this out and is like fuck this like no I'm not going to help you

like I'm not going to help the apartheid government do racism and so this makes him kind of weary of this stuff because he has sort of seen how you see what happens when you very explicitly try to work within a system that is unbelievably fucked up, which is that the apartheid government uses your money as a way to funnel more of their own money into their own pockets?

And do you know who else uses systems of apartheid to funnel more money into their own pockets? Oh, okay. I see. I now see what you're doing. I think the previous attempt at an ad break was actually better. I was kind of like, OK. I see. I now see what you're doing. I think the last Krugerrands flowing and purchase these products and services. I learned that Krugerrands was the South African currency from the movie Lethal Weapon 2. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if

we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

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who has watched Lethal Weapon 2. Have either of you seen any of the Lethal's Weapon? No. Unbelievable. You're missing maybe the best Mel Gibson performance outside of that time he got pulled over in Malibu and gave a racist rant to those California State Highway Patrol

officers. Mel Gibson. Speaking of people who are about to give racist rants. Okay, so the other thing about Soros, and the thing that is sort of blisteringly ironic about how

the sort of course of anti-Soros attacks go is that Soros is like a vehement like pretty hardline anti-communist and this is what he spends most of his time like in the 80s doing is you know like giving money to anti-communist groups and communist

countries so he funds solidarity in poland which is this like very mixed record well we'll get this yeah we don't we don't need it like he's funding anti-communist causes yeah yeah he's funny but you know he's he's funny he's trying to fund like a very specific kind of like liberal anti-communist cause right and you know this this goes badly for him in a number of ways one is that the moment like the moment the berlin wall falls everyone just like suddenly forgets about all of the anti-communism that he did uh because you know and this is something about the the kind of anti-communist that he is right like there's a lot of anti-communists who are like who are just

like death squad guys right like this is your like your guy trained by chen kai shak who's like shooting peasants in like el salvador right there's also like another kind of anti-communist in this era who are sort of liberal anti-communists who like are anti-communist but like also anti-pinochet for example like soros gives somebody to the the people you know when Pinochet has his big referendum of his like should I stay in power he gives money to the people who are like no and those are people who their intentions are better than the just like absolutely horrifying right-wingers but you know it doesn't it doesn't go great for

him so Soros his initial plan right is he's gonna you know okay when he's trying to like start funding a decommunist group she's gonna use his things like he's gonna go into Hungary he's gonna like give Hungarian students scholarships and the Hungarian students were like don't do this like if you if you just show up and give us money uh the the state is immediately going to be able to go like hey you were like outside funded uh opposition people doing like regime change stuff and it's gonna like immediately discredit us and so this is the point where he sets up the soros foundation which becomes opens it's There's a whole thing with... This stuff changes names

many times. The Open Society Foundation stuff? Yeah, yeah. We should talk about what they actually do, because in sort of like... I can tell you one thing that they do, because I used to work with, when I was teaching classes at Bellingcat, my partner, Giancarlo, he would go and teach because he was born and for at least a period of time raised in Venezuela.

He would teach classes in Latin America to local journalists who wanted to know open source investigative techniques and who didn't have the kind of money to pay what it usually costs to do a Bellingcat thing. And that program, whereby a bunch of journalists in Latin America, particularly Colombia, got training, was funded by the Open Society Foundation. And so a couple of years ago, when there was that massive swelling of the police murdering people in protest crowds and stuff in Colombia, the journalists who were like doing open source investigation to track down which police officers were, you know, killing folks and how this was going were a lot of the folks that Giancarlo had trained. Like that's the kind of stuff that one of the kind of things that

the Open Society Foundation does. Yeah, they also do a lot of they do a lot of like giving students scholarships the other thing they're really big on that doesn't get talked about much is that they were huge on like cultural events basically like like paying people money to like put on plays and like theater stuff and music and like writing poems and books which is like i don't know like i actually think that's cool like like we as a society used to do this like we used to like pay people like the government used to pay people to like write things and like create art and then we decided that that was bad and i've never done it again and yeah i'm anti-creating art for the record that's why i'm really happy about all this ai stuff bait bait yeah bait post do not engage so unfortunately for the soros foundation um one of the people they give these

these scholarships to is victor orbran which is i victor orbanban. Oh, you mean, yeah, the Hungarian president in quotation marks. Yes. We, we, we shall, we shall return to that. This is, I think maybe the single greatest example of like creating young grave digger I've ever seen in my entire life.

I, I, I don't know. Like one, one of the things that, that comes up about this, and this is, this is one of the things that another one of the guys who Soros backs,

who like betrays him later on says that Soros is bad at politics. Like he's just not, he's like not very good at it. Like he's not, you know, people like the sort of like thing about him is that he's this sort of like criminal mastermind who can like, like bankroll revolutions and stuff.

And he just like gets outmaneuvered by people constantly in ways that are like kind of depressing um yeah but okay so he's spending the 80s like doing all this you know like doing this sort of cultural work and you know in in hungary right there's there's a sort of interesting thing that happens where like he's wealthy enough that like even the communist party is sort of like has to work with him because he has money and they sort of don't but you know the other thing that that's i think important to understand is that he's not like there's a bunch of foundations who do like exactly the same stuff right like maybe slightly worse like you know there's like the ford foundation there's like the rockefellers right or the roeller foundation. Like they all, they all like at any place where

open society is like doing stuff, there's like a worse version of it than the Ford foundation and like the Rockefellers are doing, but you know, somehow stunningly only one of these groups is singled out for being yelled at all the time and I will leave as an exercise to the reader why specifically they picked Soros and not Ford. Huh. Huh. I wonder what... Big mystery. I wonder what differences

and cultural views might be at play here. Yeah. So, okay, the other real problem that he runs into, which is a cultural problem, is that, okay, this is a problem that all the liberal anti problem that he runs into which is a cultural problem is that okay this is the problem that all the liberal anti-communists run into which is that okay so the walls come down right and the communist governments fall and it turns out that uh the anti-communists in eastern europe are almost all right-wingers and their base are all like

right-wing nationalist fanatics um here's another source quote about this i thought i would blaze the trail i would lead and others would follow but now that i look back i find that there was practically nobody behind me i asked myself what went wrong and part of what went wrong is like what soros is doing in these places so for example you know he's he's involved in funding solidarity. He's involved in some of solidarity's negotiations with the government. And then the other thing that he does is he's one of the people who helps like do structural adjustment in Poland.

And this goes really badly because, so when we were talking about, okay, we should talk a little bit about what solidarity is because he helps destroy it by accident. Solidarity is this giant sort of like social democratic union that forms in, you know, in like the early 80s in Poland. That's like the first sort of independent union in one of these communist countries. And they eventually are able to sort of like knock off the government, but they come into power.

And, you know, so they do on sort of Soros' advice and on the advice of a lot of the sort of financial people they're getting, right? All of the people are telling them to do privatization. So they do it, right? They privatize all of these giant state-owned like facilities. They privatize their docks, like stuff like that. And this, it turns out, just causes massive deindustrialization. It destroys Solidarity's base because there's suddenly no longer all of these union jobs

at all of these state-owned factories. And so they lose the next election and Solidarity vanishes forever into the mists of time. There's like six of those guys left. Yeah, and this is a real sort of Soros problem that keeps running over and over again, right? He spent all this time being an anti-communist, but then the actual anti-communists who have bases and who aren't just destroying their own bases by doing privatization, which is stuff he's also pushing, right, are these right-wingers.

are these right-wingers and this is this is just sort of a fiasco and you know it's like he he he doesn't he tries to do like a very similar thing to what he'd been doing in in eastern europe and china and this goes like even worse because he winds up like backing he winds up backing one of the ccp factions who gets purged after tiananmen and so you know soros like as the sort of 90s go on right like he's kind of slowly starting to realize that like the stuff that he's doing not working very well and one of the sort of i don't know if consequence is the right word but okay one of soros is sort of like principles that makes him different from a lot of other these billionaires right he doesn't do humanitarian aid. His thing is that, like, he wants to produce a society that doesn't need humanitarian aid, which is sort of noble, but, like stuff in Yugoslavia. Like he winds up building like a water purification plant in Sarajevo while he's under siege.

And the other thing that I didn't know he was like really heavily involved with is like, he's basically the reason why the UN war crimes tribunal that like tries Milosevic and stuff like happens, like he funds it. It wasn't really like a UN thing. He was, he was like, like hey we're

gonna have this tribunal and then the german government like arrested one of the war criminals just sort of randomly at like an airport or something and he's able to convince sort of like clinton and a bunch of other people to like actually turn and the un to like turn this into a real court and this pisses off a lot of people and like by a lot of people i mean like very specifically pisses melosovic off because i somewhat obvious reasons that he's trying to try him for war crimes okay so i i think gare you're too young for this robert do you remember rock the vote god oh yes i remember rock the Okay. So one of the things Soros does is he does like a, he brings like a rock to vote. He's like one of the people who brings the rock to vote to like Slovakia.

Great. And, you know, and this is the first time that like. This is how we introduce people to democracy by showing them how cringe it can be. Perfect. And the government is immediately immediately this is sort of the first time that like a government is seriously like well i mean it's not okay this is the first time that you've had like a protest movement that starts and the head of the country goes like it's george soros he's the one doing this even though like the ford

foundation again and the rockefellers and just like a bunch of random people in slovakia are also doing this but this is this is this is sort of going to become like a pattern in in in these things because you know he he's sort of like like i think he's kind of like poking a lot of sort of very powerful like increasingly powerful sort of regional right-wing leaders because he looks at the societies and are like it actually it sucks to have like just dog shit right-wingers who are like racist and hate everyone running a country yeah that sounds like it would be bad yeah and this is this is the thing about soros right like he every once in a while right he sees something really bad going on and goes i'm gonna throw a

bunch of money at it try to fix it and so one of the things that he does this for is the war on drugs like in the in sort of the 80s and 90s like soros looks at this and is like this fucking sucks like this is really bad and so he starts working in Baltimore where the government is trying to do like something like pretty like something like even now is considered sort of like pretty radical uh uh like harm reduction stuff so I mean they like it like Baltimore in the 90s has needle exchanges uh he's doing like narcan trainings for people he's you know he's doing things like fun instead of like like giving money to like he's doing he has these programs to like get people out of like prison faster and

he's doing like after-school programs for kids and this stuff like this looks like genuinely good like there's no like i don't know it sucks that like it's it's billionaire money that's like doing it but like i don't know like probably there's a lot of people who are alive because they didn't get hiv from needles that they were able to do exchanges for yeah sure that's all that's all good stuff yeah and but you know the interesting thing about source right he's he's like not like you know he's doing stuff that's like pretty lefty, right? But he's like not a partisan guy until he sees George Bush. And he sees, like the day after 9-11, he's like, holy shit, this guy is a maniac.

And like it instantly has like the switch flips of like this man, this man is an enemy to open society, which is true. And he's like, he's like gets this braid of like, I need to bring this man this man is an enemy to open society which is true and he's like he's he like gets this braid of like i need to bring this man down and so he starts getting really for the first time right he starts getting really really involved in the 2004 election he's doing like like these like micro targeting ad stuff he's like throwing money around everywhere and you know i mean he explicitly like the like the way he looks at it like he's very explicit about this is like he he wants to level the like the playing field between the Republicans who are funded by just a trillion right wing billionaires and the Democrats who are funded by not that many billionaires. bush i'm gonna read from the implodisaurus again in imposing its view of freedom on both the american people in a foreign country quote the supremacist ideology of the bush administration

in its is in contradiction with the principles of open society because it claims possession of an ultimate truth which i don't know i i don't actually think like claiming possession of an ultimate truth is like specifically the thing that like is the reason why the Bush administration is bad. But simultaneously, I don't know. Like. I. It's hard for me to be like too mad about a billionaire seeing George Bush and just like going, oh, my God. And sort of. Yeah, it didn't it didn't work, but it's good that he gave it,

gave it the old college try. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, this this has a backlash effect, which the Republicans see him start doing this and they're like, oh, shit, this is incredible campaign material for us. And we start seeing like the sort of the less openly anti-Semitic precursors to all the stuff we see today. Bill O'Reilly goes after him. Oh, God.

Robert, do you remember Dennis Hastert? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Look, if I'm listing my favorite pedophiles who were longstanding speakers of the House of Representatives. Dennis Hastert is easily in the top three. He I. This is the thing that's been like collectively wiped from like America's conscience. Is that like the Republican speaker of the House for like 20 years was like one of one of one of history's most prolific pedophiles.

He sure was. And he he also, it turns out, one of the people who mainstreamed the anti-Soros stuff, he starts citing a fucking Lyndon LaRouche quote-unquote report claiming that Soros got his money from drugs. So

Lyndon LaRouche is this, like, fascist weirdo who cut his teeth in running this, like, anti-communist cult that would, like, physically fight leftist groups on campuses and would like give information on like student leftist groups and like other leftist groups of the government like they are they are so fed it up that like if you start reading about the larushites like they were nerking the federal orgs like you've never heard of before it's a stunningly stunningly bizarre like conspiracy cult thing and dennis haster was just straight up like reading their anti-semitic conspiracy

theories like on tv but you know and i i think i think this is something that some one of the things i wanted to emphasize like in this episode right is like the anti-soro stuff isn't really like i don't know what you call it like a sort of organic anti-semitism like it's not something that like comes from the republican base right this is something that this is a deliberate choice by republican political strategists who are very deliberately like this this is this is a jewish billionaire who's helping the who's helping the democratic party like we can use this to do to try to do like culture worship to win this election and you know like you you know we can see the results of this and this isn't even you know we're gonna get this in a little bit but like this this isn't even the only time this is gonna happen

where like the specific like soros like anti-semitism stuff between against them is like it's cooked up by like like very specifically cooked up as a targeted thing by political strategists I love it which it's it's good anyways

we should we should do ads yeah speaking of anti-Semitism you know just just speaking about it. That's what we're doing here. Anyway, here's a Mads. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone

from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough,

so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Got another email from the ADL. I'm i'm gonna deal with this y'all continue talking about george soros oh boy so all right but the other thing soros keeps doing like you know so in going after bush right he has now made himself like he's not enemy number one yet but he's going

he's made himself like a pretty high profile enemy of the republic like he's right up there with that guy who threw the shoe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That guy actually sucks. Yeah. Yeah.

We're not praising him. We're just noting that a guy threw a shoe. Yeah. He starts this sort of like arc of pissing off a bunch of really, really powerful and important people who are anti-Semitic right wingers. So remember how I, a while back i said i was talking about there was a guy who double-crossed soros who was like this guy's bad at politics so that guy was like a i i that that that guy that guy was a a georgian protest leader who soros like helped like his

protest movements overthrow a sort of like kind of pretty shitty like pro-Russian government in Georgia but like that guy that guy has like a wild arc that you could do his own fucking movie series on uh he's now a a victim a close ally of Victor Rabanne so it's going great how do you actually pronounce his name? For some reason, it always just like pings off my brain. Oh, yeah. I mean, with Garen, I hear the real brain trust to ask about pronunciations. You've brought together, you know, just the goats of saying words right. Two of podcasting's greatest, greatest pronunciators.

Just send me a list of like Europeanan cities it's a free episode idea there you go yeah i'm just gonna say the word binghamton like 47 times it's gonna be great okay so soros back to say this this gets called the rose revolution and you know this turns out badly for soros in every possible way which is that like one his guy like sucks and turns on him and then two he really like this like really pisses off latimer putin a man who is going to hold this grudge like on his deathbed he will be holding this grudge now okay so one of the things that that sort of like happens so he he's backing these sort of like protest movements in in eastern europe i a few sort of 2000s um and you know as the 2000s go on and turn to 2008 thing the the world economy goes to shit uh a bunch of right-wingers

start taking power and one of victor ruban's like political consultants who's this guy who he met through netanyahu like specifically like this is another consultant guy very specifically cooks up the idea for how he's trying to fend off like a right like a sort of another sort of right-wing challenge he's trying to fend off like the rest of sort of political establishment and orban's consultant like very specifically he's like what if we go after soros again and you know and so he does and this is this is another one of those things like this is literally the the anti-semitism is fucking cooked up in a pr lab in in order for these people to win elections and i don't know that that that just sort of

the just sort of like cynical cold-bloodedness of it like of these people like this political consultant by the way like is also jewish right, and he just doesn't give a shit. He's like, fuck it. Like, well, you know, like, I'm like one of Netanyahu's guys. Netanyahu fucking hates this guy, too. Like, why don't we just use him as a punching bag? And so they do. And, you know, this is part of, a big part of the reason, like, why Soros turns into this sort of enemy number one is that in 2015, they start blaming him for the influx of refugees from Syria

and this spreads like fucking wildfire suddenly like every single right-wing leader on earth is like oh shit I can blame all of my refugee stuff on this guy and they start doing it you know suddenly like like Erdogan is blaming him for like the Gedsy Park protest in like, Trump gets on this. And, you know, this stuff sort of, like, it spreads really quickly. And once it's sort of out of the bottle, right, like, you know, like, people are, like, there are, the people who sort of first start this, right, are doing this sort of, like, you know, like, incredibly cold, cynical political calculus.

But once this, like, incredibly high level of anti-Semitism gets out ofsemitism gets out to the open it starts turning into just like soros is satan shit um and you know and part part of what happens here is is that like this is this is one of the things like the sort of campaigns against soros is one of the things that is responsible for like our current like migrant policy like why it's so bad like why like half of our episodes next week are going to be about like just horrible shit happening at the border which is that like soros in the in the like the late the 90s and 2000s found out that like clinton was funding his welfare reform by cutting legal immigrants off from food stamps and SSI benefits. And he's like,

wait, this is fucked. Oh, slick Willie. He caught 1.5 million people off of fucking benefits for just no reason. Unbelievably demonic act. And Soros

finds out about this and is wait what the fuck what do you mean he's doing this so he like puts a coalition together that like funds a bunch of immigrant advocacy groups he's able to overturn this but there there's a sort of right wing reaction to this right like part is partially also part of the right-wing reaction to soros 2004 there's this very very effective and like unbelievably brutal sort of right-wing backlash about immigration politics that is – it's one of the things that drives the Obama administration. The Obama administration is worse than the Bush administration on deportation shit. It's just utter horror. And all of that stuff continues, and all of these right-wing people figure out that if you can just pin like

like trump starts but trump pins the migrant caravan on soros and they figure out like this is the this is like the specific combination right it's like the the the anti-semitism of like the jewish banker bringing immigrants into your country is just like the sort of one-way shop driving your entire country into like a like fascist right-wing frenzy and it works and now you know like the the cycle that we're in now is like anytime something happens uh like the right blames him for like this so the the the the current right-wing panic is that george soros was funding some like pretty moderate, like reform DA people because he's a criminal justice reform guy. And the Republicans are now all talking about how this is like a scheme by Soros to like cause crime and like destroy the entire country.

And unfortunately, like this is just like, this is, this is just, this is just reality now. Um, all of these like really bleakly cynical political leaders and their like pollsters and pr consultants were like we can use anti-semitism to win elections and they did and now we live in hell yeah Yeah, but on the upside, you know,

the, you know, have you guys had the new Mountain Dew Zero Major Melon? It's not tasty, but it's in grocery stores. So if you're looking for a diet Mountain Dew flavor, you know, that makes it all kind of worthwhile. Ah, capitalism no longer delivering flavor. That's what I had for you. It was that or another heroin. Why would they need to deliver flavor when instead they can just continue to mainstream anti-Semitism to get right wing politicians elected so they can make.

right-wing politicians elected so they can make hey but you know what i i've been i've been studying this can for a while now and none of the anthropomorphized watermelons uh look like they could be racial caricatures so that's a win you know look that if that is if that is actually that actually is a racism win to be if not if if Mountain Dew had made a a melon version in 1930 it would have been pretty bad like we would be sharing pictures of those cans on Twitter today and going oh my god they would have to make a statement they'd have to donate some money to like I don't know fund a probably scholarships or something it'd be a real problem for Mountain Dew is what I'm saying but today nothing problematic about the melons on their can yeah I'm sure there's nothing problematic about the soda industry aspartame the health chemical well uh is is that is that all we had

yeah that's yeah this is this is pretty good after here well it's is i think now now we finally know why george soros is as bad as magneto um and and why comparing george soros to magneto as the one of the richest men in the world who owns probably the most influential communication app is uh probably not a good thing you know okay one one more thing that I want to get at. Like for one second, I realized I forgot to say earlier. Is it like Soros is not like in the scale of billionaire Soros is not very rich. Like he's like the 370th richest billionaire. Like he's not even in the top 100.

Right. Elon Musk, he has like six billion dollars. Elon Musk has like one hundred and 184 billion dollars or something so like you know the the the the relative levels of influence that these people have no i was talking about elon musk yeah yeah yeah the one of the richest most influential people yeah yeah yeah i just i i just i i i need everyone to understand exactly how much more fucking rich it's it's it's like fucking it's like when fucking henry ford was like doing anti-semitic

conspiracy theories it's like you literally like like you personally literally control like more wealth than like all the people you're ranting about combined like shut the fuck up oh my god uh anti-semitism folks it. And also rich people do it even though they're, they are the actual, like the, the actual, yeah. In,

in, in so far as anything, even remotely like what they're, what they're hypothesizing could even potentially exist. It's fucking these people. So yeah, they're bad. Uh,

yeah. they're bad yeah it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources

for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources thanks for listening you should probably keep your lights You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio

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