The news that U.S. billionaire of Hungarian extraction George Soros has appointed his son Alexander as the new leader of his Open Society Foundations (OSF) has added new fuel to the ongoing diplomatic duel between U.S. ambassador to Hungary David Pressman and the government of the host country.
Reacting to the news, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán posted a short clip from the 1972 Francis Ford Coppola movie “The Godfather,” accompanied only by the comment “Soros 2.0.”
For those not familiar with the movie, the clip shows the moment when Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), head of the Corleone crime family, hands over his empire to his youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino).
In response, U.S. ambassador to Hungary David Pressman posted a short clip referencing conspiracy theories with the comment “The dog-whistle conspiracy theories are like the plot of Godfather 3: predictable & troubling.”
As Remix News reported earlier, ever since his appointment last August, Pressman has been a vocal critic of Hungary’s government and has run a number of controversial campaigns to encourage the Hungarian population to be more open to supporting Ukraine in the war.
Pressman has claimed that Orbán’s government pursues “policies endorsed by Putin.” He also stated, “The presence of this opaque Kremlin platform in the heart of Hungary threatens the security and sovereignty of the Hungarian people, their European neighbor and their NATO allies.”
Orbán responded, saying, “The United States has not given up its plan to squeeze everyone, including Hungary, into a war alliance, to go with the crowd. But I have made it clear several times, Hungarian diplomacy has also expressed this, that the will of the Hungarian people is clear, and our historical knowledge is quite stable, so we will not allow it. Whatever path our friends may choose, we will not allow them to squeeze us into a war. We will not carry weapons, and we will not be involved in a conflict that is not our war.”
Orbán and Soros have long been fierce political and ideological opponents, with the Hungarian prime minister accusing the billionaire oligarch of actively interfering in national governments, promoting color revolutions, and backing mass immigration.
In a speech in May of this year during the CPAC Hungary conference, Orbán “thanked” Soros for his role in making Hungary famous during the 2016 migration crisis.
“Because Uncle George did announce his resettlement program, deployed his NGO army and set about implementing his grand plan. They flooded the Balkans with illegal migrants and set up a people-smuggling route into the heart of Europe, and then they bumped into Hungary. We called a halt, we took up the gauntlet, we defended ourselves, we built a fence and we defended our country. After a while, I also realized that it is not enough to defend our borders, it is not enough to fight physically in self-defense. We can only defend our country if we also engage in intellectual and ideological battles. We found ourselves in the middle of an intellectual ideological battlefield, because migration is an important part of the liberal progressive philosophy,” said Orbán.
Despite the American ambassador calling Orbán’s most recent post a “dog-whistle conspiracy theory,” there is a long-standing record of Open Society Foundations’ aggressive political policies, including trying to remove Orbán from power. In fact, George Soros himself has called on the EU to cut funding for Hungary, saying: “I call on the EU to make Hungary a test case.” He also said during the 2016 migrant crisis that “(Orbán’s) plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”
Alex Soros himself has declared himself to be “more political” than his father and told the Wall Street Journal outright: “As much as I would love to get money out of politics, as long as the other side is doing it, we will have to do it, too.”
Fox News Digital reported that the oligarch’s heir apparent has made some 17 trips to the White House since Biden’s administration began.
Alex has stated that voting rights and abortion will be top causes going forward, and OSF’s cheerleaders never fail to mention “promoting democracy” as its greatest “legacy.” However, in reality, the group has been most famous for helping to install liberal district attorneys across the United States, resulting in a wave of crime in major cities where violent offenders have received lax sentences or have not even been prosecuted at all.
