Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern over the possibility that the U.S. is funding scientific research in China that could lead to its own demise.

A piece of news that is doubly surprising!

First surprise, lawmakers are contemplating the “demise” of the United States.

Second surprise, there are still some Democrats who object to the possibility. 

Andrew Kerr writes at the Daily Signal:

The State Department issued a fact sheet in May 2020, while Donald Trump was president, revealing that the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in a national strategy of “military-Civil Fusion” intended to eliminate barriers between civilian research and the Chinese military “in order to achieve military dominance”.

“In a clandestine and non-transparent manner, the CCP is acquiring the intellectual property, key research, and technological advancements of the world’s citizens, researchers, scholars, and private industry in order to advance military aims,” the fact sheet stated. “Joint research institutions, academia, and private firms are all being exploited to build the [People’s Liberation Army’s] future military systems—often without their knowledge or consent.”

Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Mark Warner, D-Va., joined Sens. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in a letter Tuesday to President Joe Biden demanding a complete review of all government funding of Chinese entities engaged in research that poses dual-use concerns.

They said:

U.S. taxpayer funding should not support any collaboration with [People’s Republic of China] entities that pose health, economic or security risks for the United States. The PRC has demonstrated lax biosecurity standards, violated the International Health Regulations (2005), attempted to steal intellectual property related to COVID-19 vaccines, and may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. The United States should not be partnering with or funding any country that exhibits these risk factors.

But, Andrew Kerr reports, that is exactly what has been done:

The National Institutes of Health has doled out nearly $46 million in taxpayer funds to 100 Chinese institutions in the form of subgrants since 2011 to conduct research.

U.S. taxpayers [continue to] foot the bill for research in a communist country that has violated international health regulations, stonewalled a proper investigation into the origins of COVID-19, and may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institutes of Health subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, provided $600,000 in subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the COVID-19 pandemic to conduct research that involved the genetic modification of bat-based coronaviruses.

Americans paid for the Covid-19 virus to be developed in a laboratory run by Communist China ?

To serve its military for purposes of conquest and world domination?

If that’s what happened, what were the people responsible thinking? What was Dr. Fauci thinking?

Fauci has defended his agency’s funding of the Wuhan lab amid growing concern that it could be linked to the COVID-19 outbreak, saying it would have been “negligent” for his agency not to do so.

“We have always been very careful. And, looking forward, we will continue to be very careful in what we do,” Fauci said when asked Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper if his agency will continue to collaborate with Chinese institutions in light of China’s resistance to a transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Fauci has vehemently rejected accusations from some in the scientific community and Republican lawmakers that his agency funded risky gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab, a form of research that involves the deliberate modification of dangerous pathogens to make them more infectious toward humans.

But why did he fund Chinese research at all? Why would it be negligent of his agency not to do so?

If Fauci gave tax dollars to Communist China to research infectious diseases, and that research resulted in the Covid pandemic, the outrage is so enormous, it dwarfs any act of treason ever committed against the United States. 

In fact, it is treason against the entire human race. 

And he’s still doing it? Nobody is stopping him?

Then those whose business it is to protect the US from its enemies are all traitors.

Where is the court that will try them? Where the law enforcers that will charge them? Where the public fury that can force them to answer for their colossal crime?

This video is FOR nuclear power, and we too are for it.

(Though we remain unpersuaded that “carbon emissions”- which is to say, emissions of carbon dioxide, the food of green plants – urgently need to be kept low.)

DebkaFile reports:

Anti-government protests spread to Tehran today [Monday, July 27, 2021], after a week of raging demonstrations in Khuzestan over water and power shortages.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters across the capital began shouting such slogans as “Death to the dictator!” (supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ) and “Clerics get lost!”

Some took up on the watchword of the 2006 opposition riots that were brutally quelled:

“No for Gaza, No for Lebanon, My life for Iran.”

– allusions to Iranian support for two terrorist organizations: Hamas, ruling Gaza, and Hezbollah, disastrously holding Lebanon hostage.

Placards carried the words

“Today is the day of mourning, workers’ lives hang in the balance”

– as 31,814 new covid cases were recorded, the highest single-day figure ever, and 322 fatalities took the death toll to 89,122. Altogether 3,500 people were hospitalized in the last 24 hours, according to Iran’s health ministry, with a warning that the fifth wave has yet to peak out.

Deputy governor of Tehran Hamidreza Goodarzi admitted that there was “street unrest” which he attributed to long power outages, some spanning several days. He offered no information on how security forces were dispersing the furious protesters.

In the southern oil-rich Khuzestan, eight demonstrators were killed when the Revolutionary Guards were enlisted to break up protests against water shortages and electricity blackouts.

The lives of Iranians are unlikely to improve when Ibrahim Raisi is sworn in as president in August.

Who is Ibrahim Raisi? A monster who has earned the trust of the ayatollahs.

In 2019 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Kamenei appointed him chairman of the judiciary.

He has the approval of the very powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

He is particularly remembered for his part in a great  binge of zealous cruelty in 1988, ordered by the founder of the republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Raisi was a member of an infamous “death committee” which condemned thousands of Iranians to be hanged from cranes for religious heresy and/or political dissent. 

According to DebkaFile –

Some activists voiced disappointment over the absence of words of support from the Biden administration or condemnation of the clerical regime’s harsh crackdown of dissent.

But they have no reason to expect anything helpful from the “Biden” administration. The Democrat-loyal state department is pursuing Obama’s policy, desperately trying to revive the rotten “deal” Obama made with the Iranian regime to help it become a nuclear power while seeming to restrain it.

Here we go! Arizona Trump Rally (top) vs. Biden’s “town hall” (bottom). #AmericaFirst #Arizona pic.twitter.com/FdgcjhUwH2

— Republican Party of Arizona (@AZGOP) July 24, 2021

Question: Who attracts the greater support, the more enthusiastic crowd, the more votes: Trump or Biden?

The pictures provide a clue.

At the Turning Point Action conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturday, July 24, 2021, President Donald Trump told supporters that Democrats cannot win elections without cheating.

“The facts are coming out,” he said. “The truth is being uncovered and the crime of the century is being fully exposed.”

Turning Point USA, hosting the event, is a young conservative group.

Read more here.

Video of the event (very long) here.

This is a very interesting and convincing account of what has happened in South Africa as a result of a dangerous idea.

It is also a warning to America, threatened by the same dangerous idea.

We reproduce the article in full.

Rian Malan writes at the New York Post:

As South Africa erupted into chaos, my thoughts turned to the United States — a great country brought low by the same toxic and demented racial politics that set afire my homeland last week.

As I write, shell-shocked South Africans are trying to muster a response to an orgy of arson and looting. Cargo vessels are being turned away from some of our largest harbors, because it’s too dangerous to unload them. Hundreds of thousands face hunger thanks to the destruction of warehouses and disruption of food-supply chains. Tens of thousands of jobs and small businesses have been destroyed; the property damage is incalculable.

Former President Jacob Zuma’s refusal to be held accountable for corruption triggered this mayhem. Rather than face the prospect of imprisonment and disgrace, he seems to have attempted a preemptive coup against his successor.

But this is just part of the picture. The overarching truth is that an idea pushed South Africa to the brink. You guys know this idea, because it animates the sermons of critical race theorists trying to force you to take the knee and atone for your supposed sins. I am going to call it the Beautiful Idea, because it is beautiful in a way — but also dangerous.

The Beautiful Idea holds that all humans are born with identical gifts and should turn out to be clones of one another in a just society. Conversely, any situation in which disparity survives is in itself proof of injustice. This is the line promoted by CRT pundit Ibram X. Kendi, who blames all racial disparities on racist policies.

But what policies is he talking about? Kendi is reluctant to be drawn on this score, and with good reason: He can’t name the policies, because they don’t exist anymore. In your country, all discriminatory laws have been repealed, all forms of overt racism outlawed and replaced by laws that enforce preferential black access to jobs, housing and college admissions.

So Kendi must insist that an invisible miasma of “systemic racism” infects white people and propels them to act in ways so subtly racist that most of them aren’t even aware they’re sick until it is pointed out to them by diversity consultants.

Once upon a time, South African revolutionaries would have laughed at this sort of thing. Until the mid-1980s, the aims of our freedom struggle were the eradication of capitalism and the creation of a classless society where equity would be enforced at gunpoint by commissars. But the Soviet Union collapsed just as the African National Congress started its rise to power, forcing our new leaders to embrace economic policies of the neoliberal variety.

This didn’t set well with the hard left, which openly reviled President Thabo Mbeki (1999-2008) as a sellout. To mollify them, Mbeki set about building a black middle and upper class that would reap the fruits of neoliberalism and thank him for it.

The object of this new game was not to destroy capitalism, but to force it to open its doors to aspirant blacks. Starting in l999, Mbeki’s government enacted a phalanx of American-sounding laws intended to eradicate racial disparities of the sort that exercise Kendi. The old revolutionary songs were dusted off at rallies, but somewhere along the line, the Beautiful Idea replaced socialism as our ideological lodestar.

At the turn of the new millennium, Mbeki let it be known that he was displeased by the national rugby team’s slow progress towards full racial representation. Athletic failure, he suggested, was preferable to lack of full representation. Equity before victory.

At least initially, Mbeki’s scheme worked fairly well. Some blacks became billionaires. Many others joined the white suburban elite and sent their kids to private schools. Transformation of the civil service spurred the growth of a new black middle class, generally commanding salaries far higher than in the private economy.

But in the longer term, the economic consequences were devastating. In addition to paying taxes at Scandinavian levels, South African corporations were required to cede large ownership stakes to black partners, whether or not they brought anything to the table besides black skin and connections in high places

Firms were also required to meet racial quotas in hiring and ensure that management was racially representative, meaning roughly 88 percent black. Tendering for government business became increasingly pointless, because contracts were invariably awarded to black-owned firms, even if their prices were double, triple or tenfold.

Investment dried up. Brains drained. The economy stagnated, causing unemployment to surge to 11.4 million today, from 3.3 million in l994. The upshot: utter misery for the underclass, doomed to sit in tin shacks, half-starved, watching the black elite grow fat on the pickings of equity laws and rampant corruption.

This was an especially bitter experience for young black people, 63 percent of whom are now jobless, too broke even for booze and drugs to dull the pain. Last week, it proved easy for Zuma and his acolytes to tempt them onto the streets with the promise of loot.

And so we come to the moral of this story. It’s a warning about the practical consequences of ideas like those propounded by Kendi and CRT superstar Robin DiAngelo, who in the name of “equity” maintains it is racist to talk of work ethic or to expect all workers to show up on time, regardless of race.

It is exactly these values that have brought South Africa to its knees. We created a society where nothing was expected of blacks save “blackness.” Honor and diligence were not demanded of government appointees. Sloth was tolerated. Failures and corruption went unpunished. Blind pursuit of equity began to achieve its opposite: a staggering equality gap among blacks themselves, with a fortunate few benefitting hugely and the masses sinking into abject misery.

Most black South Africans recognize this. By 2021, only 3 percent of them cited racism as a serious problem, according to a survey by the Institute of Race Relations. The same survey found that 83 percent of black South Africans were in full or partial agreement with the following statement: “Politicians are talking about racism to excuse their own failures.”

Which brings us to the slender silver lining in this dark story. Many black South Africans who oppose this lawlessness were out in force last week, manning roadblocks to keep the mobs away from their homes and businesses.

I can hear their voices on the radio, clamoring for change. By the sound of it, they want a country where human outcomes are determined by the content of one’s character, not by pigmentation or friends in the ruling party. Martin Luther King would appreciate their message. Kendi & Co. wouldn’t.

Edward Chang writes at American Greatness:

The battlelines … in South Africa today fall along racial lines—whites and Indians defending against mostly black rioters. …

It’s an alarming situation for South Africans, sure, but why should Americans care about what’s happening there? …

Because, Chang argues –

The United States, along with much of the West, experienced tremendous mass social unrest unseen for generations in 2020. Ignited by the [death in police custody] of George Floyd, race was the central issue underpinning the unrest and has dominated nearly every sphere of American life since. As in South Africa, dozens died, with an estimated $2 billion in property loss incurred. In some places, like the Pacific Northwest, the unrest never ended. …

Crime is a grave concern [in the US], one both the local governments and the Biden Administration seem at a loss to address, in no small part due to their support for last year’s unrest and ambivalent attitude towards law and order. …

A small but increasing number of analysts believe the United States is entering or already engaged in a low-intensity conflict, pointing to … lingering political discontent, increased crime, economic uncertainty, and rampant illegal immigration … The worst may be yet to come.

South Africa seems far away from the United States … but given it, too, was once a developed, industrialized country with a distinctly European character, Americans ought to view the current situation as a warning: nothing is too big, powerful, nor prosperous to fall. As warehouses burn and food supplies run out, with no hope of relief, it appears South Africa as it exists today might have reached its last line of defense.

It’s not the end for America, but if the end can be seen anywhere on the globe, it’s in South Africa.

If America were to go the way of South Africa, it would mean the end of Western civilization.

But surely Americans will not let that happen.

PAUL ALLARD HODGKINS

KNIGHT TRUMPIST

Breitbart reports this:

A man who engaged in non-violent protest at the Capitol on January 6 was sentenced to eight months in prison this week for obstructing an official proceeding, while hundreds charged in violent riots last summer have seen their cases dropped.

Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, of Tampa, Florida, was sentenced Monday after he pleaded guilty to a single felony count of obstructing an official proceeding, after he was identified in videos and photos inside the Senate chamber carrying a Trump 2020 flag.

Absurdly –

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss told Hodgkins, “Although you were only one member of a larger mob, you actively participated in a larger event that threatened the Capitol and democracy itself. The damage that was caused that way was way beyond a several-hour delay of the vote certification. It is a damage that will persist in this country for several decades.”

Mona Sedky, an assistant U.S. attorney argued, “Imposing prison time “will send a loud and clear message to other would-be rioters that if and when they’re caught, they will face a serious sentence. So there won’t be a next time.”

Will it indeed?

Let’s see what clear messages against rioting are being sent from the courts:

Hundreds of people who were arrested in connection with riots last summer have seen their charges dismissed.  There were 485 arrests in Manhattan, but 222 had their cases were dropped and 73 got lesser counts. Another 40 cases involved juveniles and were sent to family court, and 128 cases remained open. In the Bronx, of 118 arrests made, 73 cases were dismissed, 18 cases remained open, and there were only 19 convictions on counts like trespassing that carried no jail time.

There  were already more than 300 arrests on federal crimes since George Floyd’s death – violent crimes including arson for throwing Molotov cocktails and burning police cars, and injuring law enforcement.

About one-third of the cases were for crimes in Portland, including assaulting a deputy U.S. marshal with a baseball bat, setting fires and setting off explosives at the federal courthouse and throwing rocks at officers. [But] federal prosecutors in Portland have moved to dismiss almost half the cases. Of 96 cases the U.S. attorney’s office filed last year charging protesters with federal crimes, including assaulting federal officers, civil disorder, and failing to obey, prosecutors have dropped 47 of them. Only 10 people have pleaded guilty to related charges and two were ordered detained pending trial, but none had yet gone to trial. The penalties levied against any federal defendants largely consisted of “community service, such as working in a food bank or encouraging people to vote” [!].

Four rioters who took part in pro-BLM riots last summer did receive jail time, however, but for setting fire to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct headquarters and causing $12 million in damages. There was an estimated $1 billion-plus in riot damage after Floyd’s death — the most expensive in history.

The message this record conveys is clear enough, but it is not a warning against rioting.

The message is: “Vote Democrat and support BLM to help destroy America.” 

Rightly or wrongly, the US  has been ostensibly fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for twenty years.

Now the US is withdrawing. The Taliban have won.

This means that: –

It will be mandatory for Afghan men to wear large beards and women to wear burqas.

TV, music, cinema will be banned.

Women will not be allowed to work.

Girls will be prohibited from going to school after the age of ten. The doors of all schools, colleges, and universities will be closed for girls. Women who run girls’ schools at home will be killed in front of their families and students

A woman will be isolated if she goes out of the house without a male relative.

A woman or girl will be isolated if a male doctor conducts a checkup. But women are banned from becoming nurses and doctors.

Women accused of adultery or of having sexual relations outside marriage will be stoned to death in public.  

So if an Afghan woman or girl is gravely ill, or if she has no husband or male relatives, nothing can be done for her and she can do nothing to help herself. She will be left to die.

News Track (India) provided this information, and reports:

The Taliban are Sunni Islamic fundamentalists. Their movement began in southern Afghanistan in 1994. “Taliban” is a Pashto word which means student.

Bad days are about to begin for Afghanistan’s people because the US has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s strength is increasing day by day. The Taliban recently claimed that it has captured 85% of the country.

Will the Taliban completely destroy human rights?

The Taliban previously ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Sharia law was in force during this period. Strict restrictions were imposed on women and gruesome methods of punishment.

The Taliban are in high spirits today after the US called in its troops from Afghanistan.

They are attacking Afghan security forces. More than 1000 Afghan army personnel have escaped to neighboring Tajikistan.

In recent months, they have killed 229 civilians. 

Despite all this, organizations and for human rights and women’s safety are  silent all over the world.

The Taliban observe no rules of war, as this video shows:

… and the thinker whose reputation it befouls.

1.The Monster

George Soros is a real-world supervillain and he is able to direct the law, constitutional and political culture of entire nations using his money and his vision of what society ought to look like. He is able to get away with it thanks to general ignorance of just how effective he is and a coordinated effort by the media to smear anyone who calls him out as a dangerous fanatic.

George Soros is a dangerous fanatic.

He is gunning for you, your property, your children, and ultimately your way of life.

So Sam Jacobs explains at Ammo.com.

George Soros is bankrolling and influencing public policy and opinion from the local level all the way up to the national level. Entire nations have been made to bow to the Soros agenda, but perhaps more importantly for us, key local officials in government are increasingly wholly owned subsidiaries of the Soros machine.

He distributes money to subvert governments and institutions mainly through The Open Society Foundations, an umbrella organization with many subsidiaries.

He spreads his destructive ideology through a “think-tank” called New America. 

Ever wonder why urban terrorists can burn down cities with no consequences but the McCloskeys are prosecuted for defending their home against the same? The answer is George Soros, his money, and his influence.

How does Soros go about his subversive work, his treasonous work in America?

We partly quote, partly summarize the article by Jacobs:

The Soros operation aims to abolish the police. It has invested $1.5 million in the “Community Resource Hub for Safety & Responsibility”, one of these blandly named organizations working to undo the American way of life.

Soros funded urban unrest in Ferguson in 2014.

He spent $33 million fomenting chaos in the formerly safe suburb of St. Louis, and another $33 million on Black Lives Matter (BLM) alone.

BLM is a communist racist organization.

And he has been quietly funding a campaign to place district attorneys amenable to his agenda across the United States.

As of September 2020, there were 31 Soros-backed DAs in the United States. That might not sound like a lot, but it includes the DAs of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and St. Louis. All told, tens of millions of Americans are now victims of the Soros racket in the form of their local top prosecutor.

Some examples of the Soros machine at work in America’s DA offices include:

• • After the last round of rioting, looting, and arson in St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner dismissed charges against all 36 people arrested. She’s on the take from Soros for $307,000. This is also the prosecutor who filed charges against the McCloskeys.
  • Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon got over $2 million from the Soros operation, he ended cash bail and is no longer prosecuting the crimes of trespassing, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, prostitution, or driving without a license.
  • Kim Foxx is the Illinois State’s Attorney and has received $807,000 from Soros. She also declined to prosecute rioters, saying “The question it comes down to is, is it a good use of our time and resources? No, it’s not.” Foxx likewise declined to prosecute hate crime hoaxer, Jussie Smollett.
  • Philly District Attorney Larry Krasner has received $1.7 million from Soros. He won’t be prosecuting rioters, looters, and arsonists. Krasner was very open about the ideology driving his permitting chaos in the city: “Prosecution alone will achieve nothing close to justice—not when power imbalances and lack of accountability make it possible for government actors including police or prosecutors to regularly take life or liberty unjustly and face no criminal or career penalty.”
  • Krasner is worth calling out for special attention because he filed 75 cases against the police and has represented both Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter. At his victory party, supporters chanted, “F*** the police! F*** the police!” He generally declines to call himself a prosecutor, instead labelling himself a “public defender with power”.
  • The results in Philadelphia are stunning as charges are dropped in 60 percent of all shooting cases – though we suspect your odds of being a conservative self-defense case and having your charges waived are rather slim. Shootings in Philadelphia were up 57 percent year after year from 2019 to 2020.
  • San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who’s working off $620,000 in Soros money, proclaims, “The criminal justice system isn’t just massive and brutal, it’s also racist.” He doesn’t prosecute crimes such as solicitation, public camping, or public urination. Homicide rates, burglary cases, motor vehicle theft, and arson rates have all hugely increased. He was formerly an advisor to Hugo Chavez and his parents were members of the Weather Underground, a far-left terrorist organization. [They murdered police officers – see here and note the 1981 killings.] Chesa Boudin’s victory party included obscene anti-police chants.
  • DA Mike Schmidt of Portland, who has received $230,000 in Soros money, also declined to prosecute rioters who burned the city for months and besieged a federal building. He openly sympathized with the rioters.

• The Open Society Foundations announced a plan to spend $220 million on “efforts to achieve racial equality in America”. What Soros deems “racial equality” might more accurately be called “racial revenge”.

Which is what the Left means by the term “racial equity”.

Soros has caused political upheaval in many other countries.

He has spent and continues to spend multi millions on trying to bring about Leftist revolutions that would turn existing open societies into closed societies. He promotes Marxism, communism, socialism. As a youth he helped the Nazis round up Jews to be mass murdered – although he is Jewish himself, and dares to complain that any criticism of him is “anti-Semitic”! And he is trying to destroy Israel.

Some of the revolutions he has promoted have succeeded not so much in overthrowing an existing government but in forcing it to accept radical concessions that dramatically remake the political culture in the country. Revolutions which were effectively regime change were those in the Republic of Georgia (twice), Ukraine, the Arab World, and Belarus.

There are some common themes to all these revolutions. A disputed election where there is widespread cheating generally kicks things off. There are then street rallies where violent operatives – actually terrorists using human shields – hide in crowds of otherwise peaceful protesters. The government then responds and there is outcry from [Soros funded] “humanitarian” organizations.

The playbook should look familiar to Americans after the summer riots of 2019 and 2020, and in the aftermath of the 2020 elections.

All of which is true and appalling.

2.The Great Thinker

But Jacobs goes on to say this:

So what is an “Open Society?” Well it’s based on a phrase used by Karl Popper, a somewhat obscure 20th Century thinker known best for his “paradox of tolerance” which essentially says that liberals should stop tolerating diversity of opinion when it begins to threaten liberalism.

NO, that is not what Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” means. What it does mean is that tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance.

Jacobs continues to misunderstand and mislead:

There are some key takeaways about what an open society actually is. First, the open society is an atomized society. People are to be seen not as part of any kind of social organism, but rather as radically separate individuals. The individual is not an essential building block of society, it is the end to itself. Social norms and traditions are seen as necessarily oppressive.

That is not what Karl Popper meant by an open society. Certainly he asserted that each individual is an end in himself but not “radically separate” from others; and nowhere does he say or imply that “social norms and traditions are oppressive”.  He was a conservative, and the observing of norms and the keeping of traditions are what conservatism is all about.

Karl Popper is an extremely illustrious and famous (not”somewhat obscure”) political philosopher and philosopher of science. One thing he is famous for is his “fallibility test” of scientific theory. It distinguishes real scientific theory from pseudo-scientific theory. In the case of a real scientific theory, something could happen, something could be discovered, that would show it to be wrong. (Scientists test their theories by trying to disprove them.) But nothing could ever happen, or be imagined, that would disprove to believers the dogmatic contentions of (eg.) Freud, or Marx, or the propounders of catastrophic man-made global warming.  

It is as a political philosopher that Karl Popper is invoked in this context. His two-volume work titled The Open Society and its Enemies is a monumental defense of freedom.

An open society is one in which there are no government-imposed barriers to individual achievement. In an open society, government has limited powers and is the servant of the people; the members of an open society make personal decisions for themselves. A closed society is a collectivist society; all lives are regulated by government.

Popper critically examines the ideologies of closed societies from ancient Greece to the present, mainly those of Plato and Marx, and explains lucidly what is wrong with them. Collectivist ideologies  of our time are called Marxism, communism, socialism, national socialism (Nazism), international socialism (such as Trotskyism), New Leftism, or  – the most recently preferred “ism” on the Left –  “wokeism” (a term that became common after Popper died in 1994). All of them are tyrannies and all of them could also accurately be called Sorosisms.

Jacobs seems to be trying to find fault with Popper’s political vision as part of his criticism of Soros, finding Soros’s inspiration where it cannot possibly be found. It is unmistakably obvious that Soros uses the phrase “open society” cynically, sarcastically, as if it is his aim, while he tirelessly promotes the creation of closed societies, collectivist regimes, wherever he possibly can.

The Open Society and its Enemies is one of the essential political books of our culture. 

For more about George Soros, including lists of the many organizations he funds, see the entry on him in that excellent resource, Discover the Networks.