George Soros, the billionaire-financier-cum-philanthropist, has become the bête noire of the global far right. Everyone from radio host Alex Jones, who has referred to the hedge-fund manager as a “fundamentally evil” “Nazi collaborator”; to Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, who passed a “Stop Soros” law that bans “supporting illegal migration”; to Donald Trump confidante Rudy Guiliani, who lambasted the philanthropist as a “horrible human being,” has made Soros central to their politics. To the reactionary right, Soros is the perfect embodiment of the “globalist” (read: Jewish) capitalism they vilify for its supposedly anti-national, anti-Christian, and anti-white cosmopolitanism.

But who, exactly, is the real Soros? Born in Hungary in 1930 as György Schwartz, Soros and his family survived the Holocaust by assuming Christian identities. After World War II, Soros moved to the United Kingdom, where he studied at the London School of Economics under the Austrian-Jewish exile philosopher Karl Popper. In the mid-1950s, Soros migrated to New York City, and in 1970 he launched one of the first — and most successful — hedge funds. He soon racked up a fortune, and, in 1979, founded a philanthropic organization he christened the Open Society Fund, after Popper’s influential 1945 treatise, The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Popper’s book was a foundational text for Cold War liberals, providing a philosophical justification for liberal democracy’s superiority. Popper defined an “open society” as one that “sets free the critical powers of man,” whereas a “closed society” was one in which governments force people to abide by an official doctrine such as Nazism or communism. Open societies were superior to closed societies because they allowed for the free exchange of ideas and thus social progress; closed societies necessarily descended into static decay.