This has been discussed many times, but there is no responsibility on Soros part ; broadly speaking, he speculated that an event would happen, and it did, thus he benefited from it.
That definitely creates a lot of enemies.
At some point he formed an opinion that Hungarian society would be better off if vaguely political organisations had more printers and copiers. (An local organisation to oppose tearing down an old building counts as political in this context. Really anything to do with civil society.)
So he bought several thousand laser printers/copiers and gave them to ~everyone. Several of the thousands went to fairly nasty organisations.
It seems to resemble in use the term "political correctness", just even more so and snappier. It's very useful if you want to denigrate something without an actual discussion of why you're unhappy with it.
It's pretty specific.
I don't know enough about those other topics to ask similar questions, but my educated estimate is at least as much disparity between the origins and typical teaching of those topics compared with the politicized version. It really impedes practical communication on these topics when one side decides to run away with their own definition unmoored from consensual reality.
This is completely incompatible with individual based rights that the western world grew on for the last 50-100-150 years. And by west I mean a broad amount of countries not just the US.
Furthermore, one of the main concepts it uses is intersectionality, which is that all of us belong to multiple categories, e.g. while I’m in a local majority for being white (of skin, and sadly now also a few hairs), I’m also bi, left handed (that used to be seen as sinister, and is literally the etymological origin of the term), and a few other things.
This is pretty much the opposite of what you’re saying it is. However, what you say it is, is what I think most opponents of CRT think it is.
“Gender theory”… well, I googled, and that seems to be a non-standard term for both (a) gender studies, and (b) the anti-gender movement. The latter appears to be a catch-all for various otherwise disconnected groups whose only commonality is their opposition to the former. And I have no idea which one of these (if either) you’re criticising.
Many of the NGO:s have been actively working for mass-immigration, color revolutions in eastern Europe, drug-liberalization and a stronger EU.
If you are against any of those things, you may very well think that Soros influence on the world is a net-negative.
And he has been criticized for it, long before the first Russo-ukrainian war in 2014.
Though as Soros is normally acting as a gray cardinal through his money, the criticism of him tends to become abstract and stupidly conspiratorial.
Sure had the pound sterling been sound, that would not have been enough. But it was at the time a lot of money, and it's unclear what would have happened had he not done it.
A lot of people lost a lot of money that day. Not just speculators or stock-traders, but many home-owners lost their homes, a lot of businesses defaulted and many people became unemployed as a consequence of what happened that day.
So, there's some motivated resentment against him.
- 10 billions is nothing for a currency.
- I don't think there has ever been proof of a collusion, if you have one I'm happy to read through it ; besides, some other people bought the currency, you don't sell to nobody ; had they be right in buying it and benefiting from a subsequent deflationary crisis, they still wouldn't be responsible for it, would they ?
- A currency weakening is actually good for asset prices (btw Soros bought UK stocks and shorted DE and FR stocks at the same time as part of this trade), in particular from in-debt people (most home-owners) ; the fact that some lost their homes have to do with the recession which caused the collapse of the currency in the first place, NOT Soros' trade. In fact, the consequent inflation actually helped the UK to recover after that.
- Besides, people losing their homes is always bad but it also makes for a good headline and it's always good to have a bad guy to point at, but pegging the currency meant spending all of the CB reserves for years and nobody (amongst those unfairly blaming Soros) seem to be questioning that, whereas it's actually the core issue at hand here.
"Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell."
It seems to prove both collusion and that $10 billion was a lot of money for pound sterling at the time.
I think the fact he seems to suggest that "we" were trading more than their position ($15 billion vs. $10 billion) does suggest that there was another company or financier involved. May be my misreading, but then again, I don't believe that there is any real controversy in that this was discussed and coordinated between several trading firms.
Money supply isn't GDP (although there are relationships but that's beyond the scope of this discussion). The government isn't the central bank. And the UK was facing a recession making the peg really hard to maintain, that's about it.
I think Soros in this quote was "mocking" the 15 B part for how pathetic their effort was. You can't save (or destroy) a currency with that kind of money. I don't see any evidence of a coordination although it's clear that some other people were involved, just like a bunch of people took advantage of the GFC, or of oil going negative in 2020, but that doesn't mean those people were involved in provoking it or "coordinating". You have to understand that hedge funds compete against each other, we've seen that many times in history.
It was not enough to maintain the exchange rate and one of the reasons for that was the gigantic short-sale of pounds by Soros and friends.