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'Bullhorn antisemitism': Critics shoot down Rudy Giuliani’s George Soros airport anecdote
March 23, 2023
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani traveled to Ukraine in 2019 and brought back a tale about liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros that he was recorded sharing in a podcast appearance that made its way to the internet on Wednesday night.
Recall that Giuliani's Ukraine visit – which included a stop-off in Budapest, Hungary – was to speak with prosecutors in Kyiv "for a documentary series meant to bolster unproven and debunked claims of corruption," CNN explained at the time. That refers to ex-President Donald Trump's failed efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into giving him dirt on then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, which led to his first impeachment.
Giuliani regaled his anecdote alongside Christina Bobb, one of Trump's defense attorneys whom Fulton, County District Attorney Fani Willis is looking to question about Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Bobb is also involved in the ongoing classified-documents-at-Mar-a-Lago saga. United States Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith believes that Trump misled his attorneys about the materials that he had in his possession.
READ MORE: 'What about Bill Clinton?' Rudy Giuliani calls Manhattan DA a 'piece of I don't know what'
"When we made our trip to Ukraine, I almost got, almost got arrested, almost got killed, almost got caught by Soros," Giuliani said.
"So I haven't asked you enough questions about this trip," a background man bellowed.
"Soros tried to figure out how we were leaving to cut off. To cut off. We got a private plane, he was gonna cut it off. We, we were originally on a plane the next morning and we knew they were gonna cause trouble at the airport. They were gonna cause trouble with our visa, cause trouble with this, cause trouble with that. So we rented a private plane that night. But we didn't realize he controls the private airport and he found out that he rented a plane, but he couldn't get there on time. And literally, our plane is taking off – it's like right outta 'Casa Blanca' – and his car is actually, she saw him," he said.
"Yeah. The car. She told, she told me that. Yeah. The car pulls up as she's coming through the, through the, uh, path, uh, the, the pathway from the doorway. Yeah. And she says, I thought she was exaggerating. 'I think I got a picture of the car' and she said, 'sorry. I'm sorry. I was in the car,'" Giuliani continued.
READ MORE: 'What a buffoon': Rudy Giuliani ridiculed after proclaiming himself a 'moderate biblical scholar'
"Was it actually him?" Bobb exclaimed.
"Yeah. Oh, Pam was in the car. That's what you said," replied Giuliani.
Pam's surname was unspoken.
"Oh man. I didn't realize it was actually him. I knew that. But we had, we had some very, very substantial, but you, you took off before they could get you, right?" Bobb wondered.
"Yeah. We had some very substantial security," Giuliani affirmed.
"Wait, you left out the best part of the story. So you see the car pulling up, you guys are just pulling on the plane. You had a hurry up. Right? Tell that part of the story. You had to hurry up to take off. Because they're trying to..." Bobb requested.
"Yeah, they're trying, they're trying to stop us. They're trying to come out on the on, they're trying to come out on the jetway I think our pilot [inaudible]," Giuliani chuckled.
Multiple voices began chattering simultaneously, with one man yelling out, "Yeah, you gotta, that's the, that's the part we gotta know!"
Giuliani boasted that "it would have been an international incident" as the clip ends.
Whether or not this actually occurred is unknown. The Twitterverse were unconvinced.
Republicans against Trumpism: "Imagine believing it really happened."
SarahCA: "When my dad started showing signs of dementia, his adult children took measures to keep him from practicing law and embarrassing himself. Too bad Rudy has no one who cares except the MyPillow guy."
Kaylan_TX: "I want some of what he's on."
Qpublican f*ckery detected: "Of all the things that never happened, this never happened the most."
JUSTICENOW!: "I seem to remember this goes back a few years? So; a 90-year-old, fabulously wealthy guy drove a car onto the airport tarmac trying to block an airplane? Okay, Rudy."
sweetleaf says abolish the Electoral College: "So a 92-year-old multi-billionaire personally risked his life to perform a Hollywood-style stunt by blocking an airplane with his car?"
SleePercell: "Was Hillary in the passenger seat and Hunter in the back?"
D Villella: "Does anyone believe anything Rudy Colludy says?"
Free Ukraine: "That was George Santos."
Mr. Braves: "George Soros, the most powerful man according to the GOP, the Keyser Söze of the world, can stop Rudy 'tutty' from leaving the country when George Soros owns the pilots, planes, airports, air traffic controller personnel, etc. I don't believe you, Rudy."
Jules Just Jules: "Runway incursions are kind of a big deal and we would have heard about this."
Dave: "Are there people out there thinking 'I can totally see George Soros racing out on the runway in his car and playing chicken with Rudy’s plane'?"
Russell Drew: "I think Rudy Giuliani has been inhaling too many of his own farts. His mind has turned to absolute mush. Pretty incredible how Republicans have decided to vilify a highly successful, 90-year-old, Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Bullhorn antisemitism right there."
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Proud Boys trial thrown into chaos after defense witness revealed as government informant
March 23, 2023
The trial of several members of the Proud Boys on seditious conspiracy charges was thrown into chaos this week after it was revealed that a witness the defense planned to call served as a government informant.
The Associated Press reports that Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer for former Proud Boys chapter leader Zachary Rehl, called for an emergency hearing after prosecutors informed her that one of her planned witnesses was a "confidential human source" for federal law enforcement officials.
She alleges that prosecutors sat on this information for months and did not spring it on her until Wednesday.
Although the alleged informant is not named in Hernandez's filing, she does detail interactions that they had with some members of the Proud Boys who are now on trial.
READ MORE: 'A serious crime': Former DA slams pundits who argue Trump's hush money scheme isn't a big deal
"Hernandez said the unnamed informant participated in 'prayer meetings' with relatives of at least one of the Proud Boys on trial and had discussions with family members about replacing one of the defense lawyers on the case," writes the Associated Press. "The informant also has been in contact with at least one of the defense lawyers and at least one of the five defendants."
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What connects the two biggest stories now dominating the news — Donald Trump’s likely arrest and the Fed’s bailouts of shaky banks?
Start with multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, and follow the money.
You may recall that in 2016, Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention to make the case for why Trump should be the next president of the United States.
In the midterm elections of 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to the Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Thiel also donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican Senate primary race of Blake Masters, who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and who admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
Masters lost. But thanks to Thiel’s munificence, Vance is now in the U.S. Senate.
Thiel and other wealthy self-described “libertarians” want Trump to be re-elected president in 2024. I’ll get to the reason in a moment.
What connects Thiel to the bank bailouts?
Days before Silicon Valley Bank failed, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, advised clients to pull their deposits out. This contributed to the run on the bank.
Some $50 million of Thiel’s own money was still stuck in the bank. Then, guess what? Thiel and other rich depositors got bailed out by the Fed.
Charges of hypocrisy have been leveled at Thiel and other wealthy depositors who claim to be libertarians but were rescued by the government.
There was nothing hypocritical about it. Thiel and others like him aren’t really opposed to government, per se. They’re opposed to democracy. They prefer an oligarchy — a government controlled by super-wealthy people like themselves.
***
Thiel is part of the anti-democracy movement, of which Trump is the informal leader.
Their antipathy to democracy comes from the same fear that the extremely wealthy have always harbored about democracy — that a majority could vote to take away their money. That fear has been heightened by the fact that more and more of the nation’s wealth is going to the top, combined with demographic trends showing the majority of voters becoming less economically secure, more non-white, and politically left.
Thiel and his ilk see in Trump an authoritarian strongman who won’t allow a majority to take away their wealth. In December 2017, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress engineered a giant tax cut for the super-rich and the companies in which they invest. Many believe that a second Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, will cut their taxes even further.
They also support the Fed. Like most of the world’s central banks, the Fed is removed from democratic accountability, out of fear that financial markets otherwise won’t trust them to do unpopular things like bailing out banks or controlling inflation by slowing economies and causing millions to lose their jobs. The Fed is run largely by bankers. You might say it’s part of America’s oligarchy.
A few years ago, Thiel wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Presumably he was referring to the freedom of oligarchs like himself to be unconstrained by taxes and regulations. In this narrow sense, he’s correct: Oligarchy is incompatible with democracy. Nor is oligarchy compatible with the freedom of the rest of us.
Thiel and others like him want to return to an era when American oligarchs had freer reign. In that same essay, Thiel wrote:
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
But if “capitalist democracy” has become an oxymoron, it’s not due to excessive public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are undermining democracy with giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates.
I’m old enough to remember a former generation of wealthy Republicans who backed candidates like Barry Goldwater. They called themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to conserve American institutions. But Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve anything — at least anything that came after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote (except for the Federal Reserve’s bailouts for the rich and its ability to draft average workers into fighting inflation).
The 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when the richest Americans siphoned off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of America had to go deep into debt to maintain their standard of living and sustain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.
It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.
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