Original subtitles

Nice to meet you.

- Okay. - Yes.

[Sacha Baron Cohen] In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,

I lived with two conspiracy theorists,

in character, for several days.

- Vaccines. - Bill Gates.

- Mail-in ballots. - Chinese virus.

-Drink their blood. -Not nice.

[Sacha] The myths and misinformation

they shared with Borat

fuel a dangerous rhetoric

that is tearing apart societies

in front of our eyes.

In this series of episodes,

we'll introduce Jim and Jerry to world-leading experts,

doctors and academics, who will address

some of the most dangerous conspiracies head-on

and debunk them face-to-face.

Hello, Jim and Jerry.

This is Hillary Rodham Clinton.

[Jim] Do you know

who George Soros is?

He's a Hungarian Nazi, or a Hungarian Jewish person.

When he was a kid, he was passed off as a Christian boy

and given to a Nazi guy.

And this Nazi guy, um,

claimed him as his godson, if I remember correctly.

So, anyway, he didn't get shipped off to the camp,

but he helped ship a bunch of Jewish people off to the camps

and stole their prop... helped steal their property, whatnot.

So he's just as guilty as the Nazis were.

[narrator] For decades the Jewish philanthropist

and billionaire investor George Soros

has been the target of multiple

conspiracy theories accusing him of being

a global puppet master who controls everything

from the world economy to the protests following

the killing of George Floyd.

At the heart of this anti-Semitic fallacy

is the long-held conviction that powerful Jews

are bent on world domination.

Today George Soros is a frequent target

at the center of it all.

Soros made his money in the world of finance

and investments, was one of the financiers to profit

from the pounds fall in 1992, which earned him

the nickname "the man who broke the Bank of England,"

and is a generous philanthropist and benefactor,

having given away over $32 billion

to a wide variety of causes.

As early as 1979,

he funded scholarships in South Africa during apartheid.

He expanded from there to Europe, Asia, Latin America,

and the U.S.

with endeavors as diverse as promoting democracy,

funding Ebola treatment, hate crime prevention,

and was an early LGBTQ rights supporter.

In 1998, the news program 60 Minutes profiled Soros.

In it, the reporter explored how, as a teenager,

Soros survived the Holocaust by pretending to be the godson

of a Christian government official in Budapest.

When pressed about his experience,

Soros answered that he had witnessed his godfather

confiscating the property of other Jews.

This complicated chapter in Soros's life has been pointed to

by conspiracy theorists as proof that he was either

complicit in these actions or else a Nazi himself.

Further supported by a photo of an Auschwitz bookkeeper

that was falsely identified as him,

these lies spread rapidly, defaming his character.

Hi. [laughs]

- Hi, Imran. I'm Jim. - I'm Jerry.

Hi, Jim and Jerry. My name's Imran Ahmed.

Uh, I run the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The Center for what? I'm sorry.

And it's good to meet you, by the way, first.

What, now, is it?

It's the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

-Counting... Countering Digital Hate. -Countering.

[newswoman] I want to bring in Imran Ahmed.

He is the founder and CEO of the Center

for Countering Digital Hate.

Misinformation intermingles seamlessly with information,

with no way of telling what's right and what's wrong.

So we should be making sure

that good information is being pushed out.

There's this theory that George Soros,

he was a Nazi during the Second World War.

I've heard that.

Do you remember where you heard it?

All I saw was a picture somewhere,

and it was, he was in a Nazi uniform,

and that's all I know about the guy.

[Imran] He wasn't a Nazi

during the Second World War.

No 14-year-old child can ever be credibly called a Nazi.

- Especially a Jewish child... - [laughter]

uh, during the Holocaust.

[Jim] What I really wonder

is how Hitler got all of those people

- to follow him. - That's easy.

It's just, it-it just baffles my mind.

Throughout history,

anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,

they're like the original.

The aim of them

is to give you the rationale

to go and kill Jewish people.

There is a fake book called

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It said that it was the proceedings

of a meeting of the Elders of Zion,

who are meant to be the leaders of the Jewish community,

to talk about how they were going to take over the world.

Well, that book,

which was a forgery, of course,

because there are no Elders of Zion,

quite specifically Hitler used it as one of his justifications

for the Holocaust.

It takes a lot of misinformation, a lot of lies,

to persuade someone to hate that much.

'Cause we ain't born that way, are we?

- No. - No.

- Absolutely not. - Right?

And it shows you how fragile

our society can be.

Especially when we live

in this social media age where

conspiracy theories and lies can be transmitted

like that.

[Sir Richard J. Evans] You can look at the Internet

and see Soros involved

in a web of conspiracies to undermine civilization.

On a broader scale, these conspiracy theories

about George Soros perpetuate the image

of the Jewish financier as an evil plotter behind the scenes.

[Glenn Beck] The strings that are being pulled

by the puppet master.

Guess who controls most of the most powerful.

George Soros.

His thoughts and his... and his beliefs

that he's wanting to push on people...

His way of trying to control funneling his money down

in different ways

and setting up different organizations.

It's, in my opinion, I think, the reason why we're having

a lot of the problems that we're having today.

[Andrew Marantz] George Soros is Jewish, and because he

does a bunch of politically controversial things

with his money, that then morphs, very easily,

into George Soros is part of a secret Jewish cabal

that is controlling the world.

The world of conspiracy theories is a world of black and white

and right and wrong and good and evil.

And it is

comforting, I think, for many people to believe

that bad things that happen happen because some bad person

wanted them to happen.

Soros is the bogeyman, in that sense.

♪ ♪