The scandal surrounding the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its abuse of taxpayer dollars to support causes backed by leftist billionaire George Soros continues to get worse.
MRC Business has revealed that USAID gave a $1 million grant to Central European University, a grossly anti-American indoctrination giant founded and financed by none other than Soros himself. The grant’s period began in September of FY 2021 and is set to end in September FY 2025, with $238,609 of the total obligated grant being outlayed so far.
To illustrate just how invested Soros is in elevating CEU on the global stage, his Open Society Foundations funneled an ungodly $948,570,000 into the university between 2016 and 2023 alone.
But somehow, even with Soros throwing his fortune at CEU, the Biden USAID still poured tax dollars into a university that has been at the nexus of global leftism and anti-American dogmatism.
The grant is being administered through the “American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA)” program for the objective of supposedly strengthening “overseas schools and hospitals that best demonstrate American ideas and practices, and are likely to survive over a long term.” Diving into CEU’s sordid history and track record shows why this claim is a complete lie.
George Soros himself serves as CEU’s “honorary chair” of the Board of Trustees, while his son Alex is featured as a prominent member of the board.
This makes the USAID-funding CEU news worse in light of a new in-depth investigation by MRC Business in partnership with Bongino Report content manager Matt Palumbo illustrating how Alex Soros’s numerous visits to President Joe Biden’s White House over the years typically corresponded with major policy announcements and directives that aligned with his own political interests.
CEU announced its American-accredited programs’s relocation from Budapest to Vienna in 2018 after Hungary passed a higher education law that Influence Watch described as designed “specifically to curtail the influence of Soros-funded social institutions.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused Soros of backing mass illegal immigration in the country. “The truth is that George Soros is a speculator who operates an extensive mafia network, and who is threatening Europe’s peace and future,” Orban said.
Why is any institution with this kind of infamy being fed American tax dollars? Paging the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)!
MRC Business released an extensive report in 2021 showing how CEU is one of two Soros-backed institutions (along with the radical Bard College) co-leading Soros’s globalist Open Society University Network (OSUN), which he launched in 2020 with $1 billion in seed money. The result was an education juggernaut.
It’s oddly coincidental that USAID just happened to funnel this money into CEU right when its mission with OSUN was taking shape.
In 2021, Soros’s globalist vision for a global university network had already taken shape. He claimed to have OSUN “nodes” already established in different areas throughout the world, which included the following:
- U.S.
- Central Asia
- Middle East
Bard College professor emeritus of history Gennady Shkliarevsky rebuked his institution for joining with Soros’s political agenda for education. In 2020, he called the Open Society University Network the “making of an unholy alliance.”
Specifically, Shkliarevksy wrote in an op-ed that “[t]he motivation for creating the OSUN is political. The OSUN will use education as a tool for ideological and political purposes—to advance and promote the vision and ideology of open society. Combining education with ideological and political goals can amount to indoctrination.”
And CEU is effectively the head of the snake, along with Bard.
In total, OSUN has vacuumed up 43 major universities and educational institutions collectively from around the world under its umbrella, including U.S.-based organizations like Arizona State University, Tuskegee University, and Columbia University’s Picker Center for Executive Education.
Even pro-Hamas institution Al-Quds University is considered to be one of OSUN’s “partners.”
Just two case studies from MRC Business’s report showcase the kind of extremism that OSUN, co-led by CEU, promotes.
On the economics front, OSUN also promoted an October 2021 interview with far-left French economist Thomas Piketty. The interviewer, Bard associate professor of economics Pavlina Tcherneva, highlighted how she and other female scholars published a “manifesto on the need to democratize work after the pandemic.”
She underscored three principles of the manifesto, which sounded like they were taken directly from Karl Marx: “The first one is that it’s time to democratize firms by involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and the future of the workplace. The second was the need to decommodify work by collectively guaranteeing useful, dignified employment opportunities to all.” The third principle was perhaps the most extreme: “And of course to decarbonize the planet, to marshal our collective resources and address climate change.”
Around the time that USAID began funneling money to CEU, a September 14, 2021 OSUN webinar was devoted to “White Supremacist Extremism in the U.S. and Beyond.” American University Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss claimed that the “global reaction to the shock of 9/11 has helped fuel and underpin some of the growth” of white supremacist extremism.
Miller-Idriss then slammed U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials for not having “recognized” white supremacist extremism for the “primary threat that it is.” However, she praised how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in October 2020 that “white supremacist extremism, in particular, to be the most pressing and lethal threat facing the homeland.”
The worst part took place at the end, when the speakers fielded a crazy question during the Q&A that accused American police officers of committing “genocide” against African Americans. Bard College Professor of Anthropology and event mediator Jeffrey Jurgens actually chose to promote the following question to conclude the talk:
Where is the overlap between white supremacist movements and the genocide of black people by police?
Watch the entire anti-American OSUN event below:
CEU in its own right has a notorious record for being politically extremist in nature.
The elder Soros gave a series of lectures to CEU in 2009 to push his ideology on students. In one lecture, he chastised American capitalism’s “market mechanism” as being “amoral.” He told students that the deep-seated conflict between “open society” and “capitalism” was “covered up by the market fundamentalist ideology, which gained the upper hand in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.”
But that’s not all.
In 2018, then-CEU President and Rector John Shattuck penned an anti-Trump attack op-ed headlined, “How Democracy in America Can Survive Donald Trump.” Shattuck slammed Trump’s 2016 election as a byproduct of America’s Electoral College system, which he deemed a corrupt relic.
“The Electoral College that propelled Donald Trump into office despite his loss of the popular vote is a dangerous remnant of the compromise made to protect the institution of slavery at the time the Constitution was written,” he wrote.
Current CEU President and Rector Shalini Randeria’s podcast Democracy in Question attacked Republican states on Sept. 15, 2021 for instituting voter ID laws. Her guest for the podcast was none other than the Soros-funded left-wing activist and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“The most pernicious assault on American democracy today are the laws and measures enacted in various state legislatures under Republican control that aim at voter restriction,” the caption to Randeria's interview with Abrams railed.
The American people should be rightfully outraged that their tax dollars are being used to co-sign Soros’s grotesquely anti-American, global academic enterprise.
