Soros is a vile piece of human garbage. This is a great article by Matt Palumbo for the NY Post. I was Matt’s editor at Freedom Daily, the news site founded by triple-amputee vet Brian Kolfage also well known for founding We Build the Wall which built border walls on private property.
George Soros is the most dangerous man in America. The investor is intent on remaking the country to his liberal image, from our foreign-policy priorities to undermining our criminal-justice system. This week, The Post takes a look at the reach of Soros’ billions. In this fourth essay, Matt Palumbo, author of “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros,” talks about how “fact checking” can shape the narrative.
It’s not enough for George Soros to fund the media and encourage stories that back up his point of view — he has to make sure no one disagrees with it.
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Last year, Soros partnered with fellow leftist billionaire Reid Hoffman (the co-founder of LinkedIn) to financially back a project to fight so-called disinformation. The name they chose might have come from George Orwell himself: Good Information Inc.
Branding anything that goes counter-narrative as “disinformation” has become the left’s latest strategy to fight anything that threatens their spin, and Soros has taken note.
Later in the year, heading into the midterms, in an open letter signed by 11 other leftist groups, the Soros-funded Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights called on Big Tech CEOs to take “immediate” action to spread so-called “voting disinformation” to “help prevent the undermining” of democracy. The signatories had received a combined $30.3 million from Soros in just a four-year period.
Soros already has had success across the Atlantic in using fact-checkers to censor narratives damaging to the left.
As the Hungarian publication Remix revealed, of the 11 Facebook-approved fact checking organizations for Central and Eastern Europe, eight were funded by Soros. As is the case for the US, these fact checking groups are largely critical of the political right.
Major fact-checking organizations such as PolitiFact, Snopes, and others have long faced allegations of left-wing political bias — allegations a series of studies over the years have confirmed. One of the more recent studies of bias on PolitiFact found sources six times more likely to defend Biden in their “fact-checks” than check his facts.
Major funding for PolitiFact’s parent company, The Poynter Institute, includes the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Soros-backed Tides Foundation and Tides Center, the Carnegie Corp. of New York among many others.
One project of the Poynter Institute specifically, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), was launched in 2015 with its initial funding coming from the National Endowment for Democracy (backed by the US State Department), the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
The IFCN acts as the “high body” for the dozens of fact-checking organizations under its umbrella, which unite under a shared code of principles, and a mission “to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
Among the most well-known organizations that are affiliated with the IFCN include the Associated Press fact checker, FactCheck.org, The Dispatch fact checker, The Washington Post fact checker and PolitiFact.
The problem, of course, is that these “fact checks” are anything but impartial. Facebook and other social-media companies censored any articles that suggested the COVID-19 virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, based on denials of scientists who had a conflict of interest. Now that even top researchers say the lab leak is a distinct possibility, they’ve lifted those restrictions.
Hunter Biden’s laptop was censored because intelligence officials said it “could be” Russian disinformation — it wasn’t. Articles questioning the effects of climate change are given warning labels even if they are backed up by data.
As is the case with Soros’ financing of media, in addition to spreading leftist narratives, he buys his own name protection. A simple search for Soros’ name on PolitiFact’s website reveals that they’re unwilling to admit a single damning allegation made against the man — of which there are many.
The extent to which PolitiFact in particular will go to defend Soros, and make sure people see it, is further than for anyone else.
Those who found themselves Googling George Soros’ name in past months may have seen an ad display among the top of the results from PolitiFact, inviting the searcher to learn the “Truth” about Soros, that “George Soros does not pay protesters. Here’s the truth. The real purpose of the ‘paid protester’ myth.”
Anyone who clicked the ad would be brought to a PolitiFact “fact check” of a claim from pundit Candace Owens that Soros is “funding the chaos” in Minneapolis through his Open Society Foundations during the summer of 2020 riots.
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