… 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.

Even Californian Democrats – or at least a fair number of them – cannot stomach the abuse of power committed in their state by Governor Gavin Newsom, San Franciso’s district attorney Chese Boudin, and George Gascon the district attorney of Los Angeles. All three are likely to be recalled.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:

The campaign to recall California governor Gavin Newsom has now gathered, 2,060,000 signatures, the California Globe reports, exceeding its goal of 2 million by March 10 and far outpacing the 1.495 million needed to authorize a recall election. Even with a rejection rate of 25 percent, the recall will have enough signatures to be on the ballot this year. …

Also last week, the San Francisco department of elections authorized a recall campaign against district attorney Chesa Boudin, who prior to election in 2019 had never prosecuted a case. Boudin has eliminated entire categories of crime, now surging across the city. …

His mother, Weather Underground alum Kathy Boudin, served 22 years in prison for her role in an armored car assault in Nyack, N.Y. that claimed the lives of police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady along with security guard Peter Paige. Chesa was only 14 months old when the $1.6 million Nyack robbery went down. Radical father David Gilbert drove the getaway car and Chesa was duly adopted by Weather Underground royalty Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Kathy Boudin named her son after Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army, which assassinated at least six police officers in the early 1970s. Kathy Boudin assisted in the armed robbery that funded Chesimard’s jail break in 1979. Chesimard changed her name to Assata Shakur and fled to Cuba, which refuses to extradite the cop-killer. True to form, Chesa touts “restorative justice” and “decarceration”. …

Since taking office, Boudin has tried zero homicides, and essentially shut down the justice system in San Francisco. Boudin released a previously jailed criminal who killed two people and on his watch crime is up 46 percent.

It is serious crime too – “brazen robberies” and “daytime shootings”.

George Gascon, district attorney of Los Angeles, has removed all crime enhancements in trials, ordered prosecutors not to attend parole hearings, and supported the re-sentencing [revisions of sentences?] of those with murder convictions after serving only 15 years. …

These measures sparked a recall effort that will soon be authorized to gather signatures.

Like Gascon and Boudin, Gavin Newsom has a soft spot for violent criminals. In March of 2019, Newsom reprieved all 737 murderers on California’s death row, the worst of the worst, serial killers, cop killers and the like.

A year later, Newsom invoked the “leadership” of his one-time aunt Nancy Pelosi as he locked down the state, with notable exceptions. Newsom released thousands of imprisoned criminals …

During an unemployment scandal that has now surpassed $30 billion, California paid out $421,370 to death row inmates alone …

Nancy Pelosi herself. presiding as Speaker of the House over the passing of H.R.1 which “legalizes” all the methods of cheating in elections that the Democrats tested and found good in November 2020, is another believer in the rule of lawlessness.

So the Democrats have acquired total power. They used every method of cheating in the elections that their criminal minds could think of, and they encouraged their supporters to use terrorism.

It all worked for them. So they won the presidency, and hold a majority in both houses of Congress. And the Supreme Court was complaisant about it, a majority of the justices refusing to hear cases challenging the constitutionality of the proceedings. (See also here and here.)

The anti-American terrorism movement, aka the New Left, has been working to this end – the securing of total power – since 1968.

Michael Anton writes at Law & Liberty:

The biological son of one of the villains of [the Weather Underground terrorist organization] Kathy Boudin [jailed for life for murder], and the adopted son of two others, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn [both now academics “in good standing”], is now the elected District Attorney of San Francisco County. …

Chesa Boudin differs from his parents, biological and adoptive, in one respect only: rather than fighting the system to inflict harm, create chaos, and do evil, he puts the system to work toward those ends. It’s not just that Boudin works to make everyday life more awful by refusing to enforce what he dismisses as mere “quality of life” (e.g., open drug use and public defecation) and “victimless” (e.g., burglary and auto theft) crimes, so that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rates and arguably the worst quality of life of any big city in the nation. Boudin is also against using the powers of his office to go after what even he is forced to admit are non-trivial offenses.

On his second day in office, the brand new radical-chic DA fired his seven most-experienced prosecutors because they were too good at their jobs. Two weeks later, he ordered his office never again to request cash bail for any offense, guaranteeing that dangerous criminals would roam the streets and that many would never face trial for their crimes. Earlier this year, a parolee plowed a stolen car into two pedestrians, killing both. The “driver”—Troy Ramon McAllister—had been arrested by the SFPD five times in the prior eight months, only to be released without charges on Boudin’s orders every single time.

As Boudin has redefined his role, it is no longer to convict criminals but to further “social justice”. He favors babying the violent with so-called “restorative justice”. It’s unclear what, exactly, “restorative justice” entails; it’s easier to say what it’s not: punishment or deterrence. Early in Boudin’s tenure, after two (nonwhite) young men assaulted an elderly man (also nonwhite) who was collecting cans to recycle, the SFPD did its job and arrested the assailants. The DA, though, declined to press charges. This pattern has since been repeated enough times—including, most recently, the homicide of an 84-year-old—that local media and the intelligentsia realize they can no longer ignore it. And so, to cope, they blame … “white supremacy” and Trump.

Boudin is hardly alone in his anti-anti-crime fervor. Indeed, we may say that the full consolidation and institutionalization of “The Sixties” is happening only now, as “prosecutors” all over America, elected with Soros money, eliminate bail, empty jails, refuse to prosecute nonviolent offenses, undercharge violent ones, replace punishment with “counseling,” and racialize enforcement (and non-enforcement), all the while vindictively hectoring the law-abiding over trivialities. In most American big cities, and in an increasing number of Blue precincts, government does not effectively protect life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It rather works—from the same ideological zeal that inspired the Weathermen—to make people vulnerable, afraid, and miserable. …

When before has an entire ruling class sided with the forces of evil, ponying up billions to fuel the fire, all the while preening over its superior morality for supporting death and destruction? …

The answer, so far as I know, is never. The very idea is unthinkable without the mainstreaming of the Weather ideology. …  On September 11th, 2001—the very day of an event another Weather Underground terrorist could finally see clearly as “kindred” to her own activities—Ayers, close pal of a future president, was quoted in the New York Times saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

That “feeling” has infused subsequent generations—not least because of the extent to which Weather ideology was allowed to take over not just elite academia but, more sinisterly, schools of education, through which it has taught and continues to teach generations of high school students to hate their country. …

Violence helped the left assert or consolidate power over institutions throughout the land. Violence defanged law enforcement from coast to coast (“defund the police”), yielded an avalanche of public and private money (corporate America pledged more than $1.6 billion to BLM in 2020 alone), and an outpouring of official sympathy to organizations and individuals fomenting violence (the future vice president of the United States intoned last September that it was “critically important” that the riots “protests” continue). …

Most disturbing of all, 2020 may have been the first election in American history—certainly the first national one—in which violence attracted rather than repelled votes. It used to be taken as axiomatic in American politics that law-and-order issues favor Republicans. This is, apparently, no longer the case. Millions have become so convinced of their own and/or the surrounding society’s inexpungable guilt that, to assuage their consciences, must vote against order and life as a way to expiate sin.

Perhaps the supreme moment of 2020 was the sight, in Washington, D.C.’s richest and most liberal suburb, of a mass of overclass winners bowing and begging forgiveness from a group of people none of them had ever harmed. The clear—and only—visible distinction between the penitent and the righteous was demographic. Both groups fervently believe in Manichean wokeness; the only difference is that the righteous feel not guilty but aggrieved. They want revenge. This, let’s call it, Dom-Sub coalition is the heart of the modern Democratic Party, and is a direct legacy of the Weather Underground and New Left insistence that America and Americans (or to be more precise, a certainly part thereof) are irredeemably evil. …

In today’s America, capital—economic no less than political and social—is openly aligned with the hard left. It used to be wary of the left’s more radical elements, muttering empty dodges about “not condoning but understanding” violence. Now capital doesn’t merely understand violence; it underwrites it. Elite opinion, power, and money are on the side of—downright encourage—rioting, looting, arson and death, insisting that the resultant turmoil is necessary redress for past and present grievance. …

The urgent practical questions for statesman and citizen alike are: how much political violence is being committed right now? And by whom? …

The answer is obvious enough: a lot, and the left.

It is Donald Trump’s Republican Party (not the Republican Party that consistently undermined and sabotaged him) that is now the party of the American worker, has been since 2016, and continues to be. And Donald Trump’s Republican Party is the party of genuinely peaceful protest. And, of course, of freedom. His party’s peaceful protests will be called “terrorism” by the Left.

Leftism is the enemy of freedom, the destroyer of humankind. The Left will continue to call its violent “protests” – actually terrorist attacks – “peaceful”.

Leftism is terrorism.

Many of the most celebrated American universities – Princeton, Harvard, Yale, for example – exclude applicants with records of exceptional academic achievement if they are Asian because there are too many such Asian applicants; if they are Jewish because the presence of Jews is an offense to Muslims and Muslim sympathizers; if they are white because the success of the white race makes other races feel oppressed; and if they are conservatives because they offend the Left. If these types were not excluded, the great institutions’ common policy of “diversity and inclusion” would be compromised.

Accepted are: students whose parents pay large bribes; students and staff who falsely claim membership of an ethnic minority; and – most valued – students and staff who are terrorist murderers or the children of terrorist murderers.

On the rewards to be found in a career as a terrorist murderer, we quote an article by Ann Coulter. (We often agree with her political observations, and we enjoy her wit. We generally overlook her devout Christianity. And she doesn’t talk about her faith here. The article is, however, tinged with anti-Semitism in sentences we have omitted.)

Ann Coulter writes at Breitbart:

If you’re looking for a shortcut to get your kid into a prestigious college, but your little one doesn’t have high enough cheekbones to claim to be an Indian, consider the petal-strewn path of the newly elected San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin.

Chesa’s sparkling credentials are: He is the son of celebrated cop-killers Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert! That was enough to win him admission to Yale, Oxford, and Yale Law School.

His mother consciously parlayed her way to success by becoming a violent revolutionary after realizing that she wasn’t going to set the world on fire with her SAT and LSAT scores.

Poor Kathy couldn’t get into Oberlin — and then she couldn’t get into Yale Law. …

The only thing Kathy could do to impress her father — and our nation’s elite institutions — was to become a domestic terrorist.

It worked. Her parents showily displayed Kathy’s motorcycle helmet from her participation in the “Days of Rage” in Chicago. …

In addition to the “Days of Rage”, which left a Democratic politician paralyzed, Kathy was part of the Weather Underground brain trust that blew up a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970, killing three of the radicals. The bomb they were building was intended to kill servicemen and their dates at a Fort Dix dance. With body parts flying and walls collapsing around her, Kathy made it out of the house one step ahead of the police.

Again, Kathy’s parents were delighted with the townhouse bombing. Her mother had always envied the owners for their wealth, anyway. Her father thought seeing his daughter on FBI “wanted” posters was “good for his legend”.

As luck would have it, going underground after the townhouse explosion finally gave Kathy an excuse to get a nose job. She also dyed her hair bright red, mimicking Bernadine Dohrn …

While Kathy and David play-acted being on the run, the FBI wasn’t even looking for them anymore. A newspaper in Wisconsin published David Gilbert’s whereabouts and — Oh my gosh … nothing happened. …

It was time for drastic action. Those LSAT scores weren’t going to bury themselves. So in 1981, Kathy conspired with violent drug-addicted members of the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brinks armored truck in Rockland County, New York. They wanted drug money and she wanted fame.

At the Nanuet Mall, her BLA co-conspirators murdered Brinks guard Peter Paige and wounded two others, then hopped in the getaway truck being driven by Kathy and David.

The truck was stopped by the police minutes later, but 38-year-old Kathy emerged from the truck’s cab, playing an innocent housewife, frightened by all the guns. She begged the perplexed police to lower their weapons. No sooner were their firearms holstered than six BLA members leapt out, guns blazing. They instantly killed the force’s only black officer, Waverly Brown. Sergeant Edward O’Grady died a few hours later on the operating table.

She’d done it. Kathy was a bona fide success! In jail, she received a string of celebrity visitors and fawning journalists. There would be documentaries, glorious write-ups, Oscar nominations, and poetry awards.

After decades of recounting her sufferings since the robbery that left Brown dead, Kathy was told that Brown’s son still attended the memorial service held for his father and Sgt. O’Grady at 4 p.m. every Oct. 20.

“Really?” Kathy said. “I never knew the guy had a son.”

According to our betters, that’s an “idealist.”

She was granted parole in 2003 — supported by none other than William F. Buckley. (The elites circle the wagons!) Soon she was a professor at Columbia University and director of the school’s Center for Justice.

That stands repeating: SOON THIS COLD-BLOODED TERRORIST MURDERER BECAME A PROFESSOR AT COLOMBIA UNIVERSITY AND DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL’S CENTER FOR JUSTICE.

These status-obsessed Yale rejects became “radicals” in order to win a lifetime of good press and cushy academic positions unavailable to them any other way.

Look at David Hogg, rejected from a half-dozen non-elite schools, only to be accepted by Harvard — all for raising his scrawny little arm in a preposterous one-arm salute after a speech denouncing the National Rifle Association. True, Hogg’s SAT score (1270) was far below that of the average Harvard student (1484). It was even below that of recruited athletes at Harvard (1297). But he had turned himself into a left-wing activist just in the nick of time. Harvard here I come!

The two “idealists” who raised Chesa Boudin were William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. On account of putting a bomb in the Pentagon, Ayers became a distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For praising the Manson family and leading a group of protesters in a little ditty that mocked the government official paralyzed during the “Days of Rage” rampage, Dohrn was made a professor at Northwestern University School of Law.

Another leftist celebrity, Susan Rosenberg, had conspired to kill cops, blow up buildings and rob a Brinks truck; she was sentenced to 58 years in prison for felony murder and possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives. She was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

A couple years later, Rosenberg was offered a teaching position at Hamilton College. Apart from her fondness for bombs and cop-killing, Rosenberg’s credentials consisted of: a master’s degree in writing from a correspondence course in prison. …

It’s one thing to say a person shouldn’t be punished for the sins of his parents. But America’s elite institutions treat cop-killing — even merely being the child of cop-killers — as the equivalent of being a star athlete or getting double-800s on your SATs.

No – with much more esteem than they treat Asian, Jewish, white and conservative applicants who gets double-800s on their SATs.  

Furious indignation is the only decent, civilized, humane response to this inversion of values now adopted and applied by America’s greatest intellectual institutions, news media, prize-giving panels and self-appointed guardians of virtue.

*

Post Script:

Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who told a monstrous lie in an effort to ruin the life and reputation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been honored by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California with an award for courage.