George Soros is someone I have given up on trying to make sense of, but for those who pay attention, his comments in an interview with Fareed Zakaria that aired over the weekend are worth a look. He seems to think American now is in some kind of pre-Nazi phase, with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News operating as propagandists. The Daily Caller has a summary:
"Well, look, Fox News makes a habit — it has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them," Soros said. "And you wouldn't believe that an open society and a democracy, these methods can succeed. But, actually, they did succeed. They succeeded in — in Germany, where the Weimar Republic collapsed and you had a Nazi regime follow it. So this is a very, very dangerous way of deceiving people. And I would like people to be aware that they are being deceived. Now, I — because I saw it as a child, I immediately react that way. But the people in America, they are innocent. They haven't had the experience. They're having the experience now. And I hope they wake up and they realize that they are being deceived."
Host Fareed Zakaria also asked Soros about his thoughts of the Tea Party.
"Look, I think the people in the Tea Party are very decent people, hard-working. They have been hit by a force that they — that comes from somewhere which they can't fully understand," Soros said. "And they are being misled. And they are misled by people who are using it for their selfish purposes, namely to remove regulations and reduce taxation. So reduce taxation and regulation and they are being used and deceived."