Daniel Greenfield June 29, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
Millions of people watched the series
finale of Succession, a show based on the Murdoch family succession
drama, complete with shots at Republicans, conservatives and FOX News.
The
real life succession drama of the Soros family was however greeted with
a few media puff pieces including at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times. The passage of the $25 billion Open Society network
which topples governments, uproots societies and funds the leftist
internationale to the next generation of the Soros clan garnered media
press releases.
But there’s plenty of succession drama in the family of the leftist billionaire.
As
George’s firstborn, Robert Soros might have been expected to inherit
the throne. A trader like his father, Robert was temporarily given the
reins to Soros Fund Management before having them taken back, and then
given back again. Robert’s marriage broke up after he allegedly cheated
on his wife, who
had cancer, with a
nude model. The divorce case dragged on, threatening his finances, and he left to start his own Soros Capital Management.
Robert’s
younger brother Jonathan, who had shared the role of chief investor
with him, seemed like the likely heir apparent. Jonathan, like his
father and unlike his older brother, had a much more ambitious political
vision, getting down and dirty with the leftist groups his father
backed.
Jonathan even carried the middle name of Tidavar:
George’s antisemitic father, who charged Jews trying to escape the
Holocaust “whatever the market would bear” and who had
dispatched his son to participate in the confiscation of Jewish property to “cheer the unhappy lad up”.
The
second Soros son could soon be found mingling at Democrat fundraisers
and leftist organization meetings including those of the Democracy
Alliance. Like his father, Jonathan had an ambitious program for
transforming elections. But in 2021, the Soros finances
took a beating, and, after an unstated break with his father, Jonathan Soros struck out on his own.
“We didn’t get on on certain points,” George Soros commented dryly. “That became evident to both of us, particularly to him.”
Of
the two sons to whom George was planning to bequeath his empire in
2004, Robert and Jonathan, both were gone. The two heirs had been meant
to rule the dual empire: Robert would handle the Soros money and
Jonathan the political activism
. But George’s relationships with his
oldest sons, like most of his relationships with human beings, fell
apart.Soros was running out of sons to take his place and carry on his poisoned legacy.
Raised
in what he had described as a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”, George
Soros, still in his late twenties, had begun dating his first wife,
Annaliese Witschak, a German immigrant from Hamburg. His parents were
overjoyed that his girlfriend wasn’t Jewish. With their approval, George
Soros married Annaliese and moved out of their apartment and into hers.
But
George was a cold and terrible person. By the late seventies, he was
very wealthy and his family hated him. Harshly critical of his sons, he
showed Robert and Jonathan little in the way of affection. And his
marriage to Annaliese broke up after he refused to look for their
daughter, Andrea, after she had stayed out too late.
The same day
that George Soros left his family, the 48-year-old met a 23-year-old
woman playing tennis. “How old are you anyway,” he later demanded. He
may not have realized at the time that Susan Weber was Jewish. George’s
mother hated her because of that. “My mother was quite anti-Semitic and
ashamed of being Jewish,”
he told an interviewer.
George’s
mother did what she could to sabotage the marriage, including, in one
memorable moment, calling him and screaming, “my son, everyone is going
to think you are a homosexual.” But even without her, his second
marriage was never going to be any happier. George had been too busy for
his children from his first marriage and he had even less time for new
ones.
Alex and Gregory were raised by Ping: a nanny from China. A family friend commented
that, “he is the kind of father who can interact with a 15-year-old much better than a two-year-old.”
The
second divorce left behind two more lost sons. Unlike Robert and
Jonathan, Alex and Gregory had not been raised to succeed their absent
father and had no talent for it.
Little is known of Gregory, the
youngest, who has avoided the spotlight, but Alex grew up a “shy… chubby
kid” and was generally overlooked in college. A few years after his
parents divorced, Alex began working hard to lose weight and used his
father’s wealth to hook up with models and fund massive parties filled with celebrities.
It
wouldn’t take much of a psychologist to figure out what was the matter.
Alex’s father had collected money and power, while his mother filled
the hole by renovating houses and collecting art. Their son had dreamed
of “being normal”, but that obviously was not going to happen.
“I was very angry at him, I felt unwanted,” Alex Soros
complained. “He had a very hard time communicating love, and he was never really around.”
What connected Alex, like Robert and Jonathan, to their father was money and power.
In 2012, the New York Times ran its first major profile on Alex Soros headlined, “Making Good on the Family Name”.
The
third son had discovered that the way to his father’s heart was through
social justice and had revamped his trashy parties as fundraisers for
political causes. The approach eventually paid off as a decade later,
George Soros handed over his political empire to Alex Soros.
Alex
Soros has the thinnest resume of his brothers. He lacks the financial
acumen of Robert or Jonathan, and shows no apparent leadership skills or
larger vision. But that may be exactly why he survived and his half
brothers did not. With Robert and Jonathan, a breaking point eventually
arrived and they struck out on their own, but Alex lacks the skills or
the backbone for it.
“I carried some rather potent messianic
fantasies with me from childhood,” George Soros confessed. The radical
billionaire had compared himself to a deity
over the years. How better to ensure that he could never be overshadowed by his sons than to pick the weakest of them?
That may very well be a major part of the Soros succession story.
“We think alike,” George Soros said of Alex. That is to say, Alex will serve as George’s undead proxy.
George,
determined to control his empire even from beyond the grave, may have
chosen a feckless party boy who would never challenge him, but just
enjoy going to parties and posing with famous people. But there is also
another element to the Soros succession story that strikes at the heart
of the billionaire’s famously ugly tangled relationship with the Jewish
people.
Alex, unlike Robert and Jonathan, is Jewish. And once he
dived into political funding, he quickly set himself apart by playing a
role in leftist Jewish groups like Jewish Funds for Justice and the Bend
the Arc: Jewish Action PAC. His thesis was even titled, “Jewish
Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature”.
“When
I was six or seven years old,” Alex Soros related in an essay, George
had sat him down and told him about how he watched the Holocaust play
out, claiming that his grandfather had “helped save other Jews”.
In reality, Tidavar, otherwise a failure,
had charged
Jews “whatever the market would bear” and worked with Hungarian Nazi
collaborators. George would later agree that he had “helped in the
confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of
guilt. “It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of
course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”
George Soros
knew better than anyone else how much his parents had hated Jews. Yet,
if we are to believe Alex, he told his first Jewish son a different
version of the story in which he and his grandfather were heroes
fighting Nazis, instead of collaborating with the looters.
“It was the first real bonding experience I ever recall having with him,” Alex Soros related.
There
is something darkly fitting that George only bonded with his son at the
advanced age of 7 by distorting his family’s actions during the
Holocaust into something a child could be proud of.
George, as
was his wont, traumatized his son, but also gave him something none of
his siblings had. “As other members of my family remained in a kind of
hiding, continuing to conceal their identities, I decided to get a bar
mitzvah,” Alex later wrote.
Psychoanalyzing self-hating Jews is
generally a waste of everyone’s time and the Soros clan is spectacularly
malignant even by those standards. While Democrats claim that any
critic of Soros is an antisemite, George Soros has spent much of his
life hating Jews and
defending antisemitism. And yet, having alienated his non-Jewish wife and sons, he is passing his political empire on to his only visibly Jewish son.
George
Soros has lived a long time and he may yet change his mind. Alex may
end up sharing the same fate as Robert and Jonathan. For now, Alex is
working the party circuit: photos of him posing with Pelosi, Schumer,
Obama and countless other Democrat figures the way that he once did with
celebrities in the Hamptons define one difference between him and his
father.
“I’m more political,” Alex Soros told a reporter. George
Soros is abundantly political, but Alex’s politics are more
conventional. Where his father had a grand vision but limited interest
in spending time with politicians, Alex is a social butterfly. Where his
father had theories, he has social networks, but that’s true of most
politically active socialites.
The Soros networks will continue
to do enormous damage but once George is gone, they will lack his
ability to leapfrog rivals and nations. Instead they are likely to do
more harm in another quarter. Alex’s Jewishness, such as it is, has
already led him to fund leftist groups trying to undermine the Jewish
community from within. Where his father funded big picture
transformations, Alex is living out a fake family history in which his
father and grandfather were heroes fighting Nazism, and he believes that
is carrying on their legacy by attacking Jews.
Once the chain of
succession passed from Robert and Jonathan to Alex, it became entangled
in that big lie. The lie about what the Soros family did during the war
was at the heart of George’s origin story, to Alex’s relationship with
his father and now to the entire Soros network.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
