I’ve long wondered: if you were trying to wreck the home countries of liberal (in the 19^th century, “classical liberal” sense) democracy – the English-speaking countries, as Churchill famously put it – what would you do differently than George Soros has done throughout his long, sordid career?

Scott Shepard

Now it appears that I’ve been joined in these speculations by, of all people, Elon Musk, who’s turning into a real champion of human liberty and progress, whatever his other quirks. In a recent appearance with Joe Rogan, and of course on his own X platform, Musk has reviewed some of Soros’ clearest attempts to wreck American civilization. In particular he highlighted Soros’ funding of hard-left candidates in most of the great cities of the U.S. He noted that “[t]he value for money in local races is much higher than in national races. … Soros realized you don’t actually need to change the laws – you just need to change how they’re enforced; if nobody chooses to enforce the law – or the law’s differentially enforced – it’s like changing the laws.”

This is quite right, and an extension of a principle that the American left has understood while the right has not: civilizational change happens, as it were, at home – in families and schools and neighborhoods. A significant part of the left’s long march through the institutions has therefore focused on forcing its views into all of those venues, including by getting their minions elected to city councils, school boards, and, with Soros’ latest move, DAs’ offices.

The results of these efforts haven’t been noticeably good for … anybody, really, or at least anybody with a legitimate purpose. The hard left has infused public-school curricula with gender confusion, the new racism, and absurd educational theories that leave students confused, angry and bereft of prospects. Consider the recent confirmation that in some Baltimore schools, 75 percent of high school students are reading and doing math (sums, really) at elementary school levels, while at 40 percent of them no students at all showed proficiency in math. This developed despite Baltimore’s schools receiving the highest average funding in the state, and is replicated in cities nationwide.

Meanwhile, cities in which Soros has successfully installed DAs have become ungovernable and profoundly dangerous because the DAs refuse to arrest, prosecute or jail criminals who primarily attack what are generally called the “most vulnerable” of the cities’ citizens, and their means of living plausible lives – leaving them far more vulnerable. (Sometimes a bit of genuine justice occurs, as when, a few days ago, a Soros-funded DA in Oakland was robbed and her car broken into. The police, per the DA’sown policies, never showed up to investigate.)

Soros and his allies claim that their efforts advance “social justice,” but it’s impossible to see how subjecting residents to vastly increased crime while leaving their kids incapable of advancement or even of basic self-sustenance helps them, or anyone else.

The true effect of the efforts is to create chaos, social division, despair and anger unto hatred. As Musk rightly concludes, the real effect of George Soros and the other masterminds of “social justice is to “erode the fabric of civilization.”

Soros has also played a massive role, along with Mark Zuckerberg, in destroying the reliability and honesty of American elections. Thanks to them and their cohort states have removed ID requirements and other proofs of honest voting while they have funded vote-harvesting and other efforts designed to sweep up votes in untraceable ways, further undermining our representative system. Again they justify these efforts by claiming that ensuring election integrity is “racist,” though the vast majority of the supposedly discriminated against favor election integrity measures.

One barometer of Soros’ malignancy is the lengths to which the once-mainstream press goes to obstruct any efforts to reveal his efforts and their effects. Any criticism of Soros, who was born Jewish, but then converted to Christianity and then became an atheist, is labeled antisemitism. Consider the monstrous and genuine antisemitism that the same press outlets have recently protected from that designation.

Soros’ machinations against English speaking democracies are neither recent nor limited to the United States. As long ago as 1992, Soros made billions at the expense of the British people by “breaking the pound,” betting long against that currency and pulling Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. It’s true that Britain went into that mechanism at too high an exchange rate, but in our fiat-money world, currency arbitrage opportunities arise all the time. It was only Britain, though, and a newly elected Conservative government in particular, that Soros intervened to break.

Soros appears to have a healthy disrespect for the increasingly reauthoritarianizing China, calling CCP Chairman Xi “the greatest threat that open societies face today.” That’s nice, and suggests that it’s just possible that he’s inexplicably – incomprehensibly – deluded rather than purposely malevolent. But the fact remains: if my goal were to destroy the United States and the great English-speaking democracies, I think I’d be following his playbook pretty much exactly.

Perhaps it was modesty that kept Soros from adding to his analysis of Xi “… except for me, of course.”