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1/ In 1991, George Soros founded Central European University to counteract the possibility of a “regional brain drain.” He hoped the university would compensate for the sorry condition of higher education that had emerged from communism. 
2/ Soros was worried about people leaving the region, and was also concerned that those who remained would consist of the uneducated and the disengaged—people susceptible to political manipulation.
3/ The university lived in the ruins of an old television production company in Soros’s native city. Its buildings were ramshackle, the neighborhood even shabbier. But the university was a church key that opened a bottle of intellectual energies.
4/ Soros’s friends in Hungary’s liberal intelligentsia recommended Viktor Orbán as one of their own. Soros was captivated by Orbán’s activist charisma, and even gave Orbán a scholarship to study at Oxford.
5/ When Orbán entered politics, he lost two elections after his first stint as prime minister and vowed to never suffer defeat again.
6/ In a leaked closed-door speech in 2009, Orbán said he wanted to create “a central political force field” that would allow conservatives to rule for the next 15 to 20 years.
7/ His masterstroke was to use time-honored, anti-Semitic tropes to describe the 2015 migration crisis as the handiwork of an odious cabal, orchestrated by a Jewish puppet master, George Soros.
8/ Soros’s fears started to materialize: Educated Hungarians began leaving the country in droves. But Orbán knew that if one generation of critics exits, the universities can always generate another, so his government set out to shred the academy, too.
9/ When Orbán moved against CEU, it wasn’t just political posturing or spleen. Destroying Hungary’s finest institution was a crucial step in his quest for eternal political life.
10/10 Read @FranklinFoer on how Soros’s grim vision is becoming Hungary’s reality: bit.ly/2Jbv1jt
