In the waning days of his final term, President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to 19 people at a White House ceremony. One of the recipients was Hillary Clinton, which was controversial enough. Even worse, the Hungarian-born “philanthropist” and Democratic megadonor George Soros, was another.

Addressing the ceremony, Joe Biden said the awardees have used “their remarkable gifts and unwavering passion to strengthen our resolve as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The White House statement said that Soros had “supported organizations and projects across the world that strengthen democracy, human rights, education and social justice.”

This is nonsense. It recalls a similar event six years ago. In December 2018, the Financial Times selected George Soros as its “Person of the Year.” The paper said the choice was made for the values he represents as “the standard bearer of liberal democracy and open society,” battling against authoritarianism, racism, and intolerance:

“Through his long commitment to openness, media freedom and human rights, he has attracted the wrath of authoritarian regimes and, increasingly, the national populists who continue to gain ground, particularly in Europe.”

In truth, this “philanthropist” is a monster who has been relentlessly promoting the Western world’s political, moral, and demographic decay for almost four decades. “Philanthropy” used to be defined as “love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men.” Soros practices  the opposite of that definition. As I wrote at Chronicles back in 2018, through his Open Society Institute and its vast network of affiliates, Soros has provided extensive financial support for groups that advocate lifestyles and causes that are invariably destructive and morally repellant, both in intent and in consequences.

George Soros was born in Budapest, allegedly in 1930, but he lives in New York City: He is no longer welcome in his native land. Not much is known about his early years. He is the only eminent Holocaust survivor who has been accused of outright collaboration with the Nazis in the summer of 1944, and he admitted helping to confiscate property from Jews during the Holocaust in a 1999 interview with 60 Minutes. In 1947, he managed to sneak through the Iron Curtain and, the official story goes, “he landed penniless in London, but by hard work and sheer genius, he rose to become one of the planet’s most successful investors and richest men.” A tall order.

His values, political views, and ideological preferences would be immaterial without the money that he has spent promoting and imposing them on the rest of the world. The bulk of his billions was earned in the minus-sum game of currency and stock speculation, contributing nothing to the creation of new wealth and making millions of ordinary people poorer in the process. His speculations took advantage of the political and economic weaknesses of different countries. In 1992, he famously made a billion dollars in one day by betting against the Bank of England and the pound sterling causing a currency crisis that threw Britain into financial turmoil.

Soros’s approach to making money is not new but his concerted effort to use that fortune to promote his peculiar social and political views is new. In the U.S., Soros has promoted the legalization of hard drugs, heroin included, since the early 1990s. In 1994, Soros, a self-professed atheist, launched his Project on Death  America (PDIA), which supports physician-assisted suicide, and provided $15 million for its initial funding. His mother, a member of the pro-suicide Hemlock Society, killed herself, and in his memoirs Soros mentioned unsympathetically his dying father’s clinging on to life for too long.

Soros is an enthusiastic promoter of open borders and unlimited immigration. He has supported groups advocating amnesty and special rights for immigrants, including National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Law Center, National Immigration Forum, and dozens of others. He also promotes the preservation and expansion of public welfare, and in late 1996 he created the Emma Lazarus Fund, which has given millions in grants to nonprofit legal services groups that have undermined provisions of legislation designed to end immigrant entitlements. 

Soros also supports programs and organizations that further abortion rights and increased access to birth control devices. He advocates ever more stringent gun control. He opposes the death penalty, supports same-sex “marriage” and promotion of homosexuality in schools.

Of his Open Society Network, Soros claims that it seeks “the strengthening of civil society; economic reform; education at all levels; human rights; legal reform and public administration; public health; and arts and culture.” The way his network goes about these tasks is not “philanthropy” but political activism, in pursuit of all “progressive” causes of the radical left.

Soros-funded candidates for the position of public prosecutor invariably promise to use their discretion on choosing which charges to file, divert “low-level, nonviolent cases out of the criminal justice system,” not ask for bail, give lenient plea offers, and focus on violent crimes.

Once they get elected, however, they quickly engage in prosecutorial nullification by refusing to prosecute entire categories of crimes, watering down felonies, refusing to ask for bail, and refusing to prosecute violent juveniles as adults. Violent crime rates predictably exploded in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore—unmitigated disasters all—where DAs had been supported and funded by Soros. They fired career prosecutors or created such a toxic office atmosphere that law-and-order prosecutors left in droves. They were replaced with public defenders and defense-oriented criminal attorneys, and these were ordered to decline to prosecute most drug cases, charge lower gradations of crimes, and offer sweetheart plea deals with shorter probation and parole periods.

Soros’s activities in America have been applied on a grand scale abroad. His network of NGOs has been active primarily in Eastern Europe from its headquarters, the Open Society Institute (OSI) in New York. As early as 1994, his foundations spent a total of $300 million; by 1998 that figure had risen to $574 million. These are truly enormous sums in Eastern Europe, where their effect on the targeted society is far greater than the effect the same amount would have in the West.

George Soros, more than any other individual, has focused on turning the lands of Central and Eastern Europe away from their ancestors, their cultural and spiritual roots. The process is far from over, but his Open Society Institute and its extensive network of subsidiaries east of the Trieste-Stettin line have successfully legitimized notions that only three decades ago would have seemed bizarre, laughable, or demonic to the denizens of the eastern half of Europe.

Regarding “Women’s Health” programs in Central and Southeastern Europe, for instance, one will look in vain for breast cancer detection programs, or for prenatal or postnatal care. Soros’s main goal is “to improve the quality of abortion services.” His Public Health Program has focused on the introduction of easily available abortion in Albania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia, and the introduction of manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) abortion in Northern Macedonia, Moldova, and Russia.

Overpopulation is not the reason Soros is keen to promote more abortions in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the region is experiencing a demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortions cannot be the reason either: only five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000: the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Romania, and Ukraine. The logical answer is that Soros wants as few little Eastern European Christians born into this world as possible.

Starting in the 1990s, the Soros network has given a successful kickstart to previously non-existent “gay” activism in nearly every area of operation. The campaign for LGBT “rights” has long since morphed into aggressive political activism and demands for special treatment all over Eastern Europe. In schools, traditional gender roles were relativized by Soros-sponsored “special projects” that entailed cross-dressing and temporary adoption of opposite gender names.

Education has been a key pillar of Soros’ activities. His leitmotif is that “no-one has a monopoly on the truth” and that civic education should replace the old “authoritarian” model. He knew that even under communism, Eastern Europe had preserved very high educational standards, so he has endeavored to replace the old model with the concept of schools as fields for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline.”

The purpose of education for Soros, then, is not “acquisition of knowledge.” Instead, the teacher is to be the class “designer” and his relationship with students based on “partnership.” Soros’s reformers want an active role for schools in countering the influence of the family on students, which “still carries an imprint of nationalist, sexist, racist, and homophobic prejudices rampant in the society at large.” Schools must be turned from “authoritarian” institutions into polygons for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of interaction with the teacher, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline.”

“Racism” is Soros’ obsession, but he has had a problem finding it in racially nondiverse Eastern European countries. This has been resolved by identifying a designated victim group: Gypsies (the “Roma”). Over two decades ago his protégés in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia started coming up with policy proposals to “protect” this group. The list was the same for local Soros outfits in every country. It included demands for anti-bias training of teachers and administrators; integration of (largely invented) Romani history and culture in the textbooks; legally mandated affirmative action programs for Roma; tax incentives for firms which employ them; access to low-interest credit for Roma small businesses; setting aside a percentage of public funds for Roma firms; legislation to fight “racism and discrimination” in housing; adoption of “comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation” and mechanisms “to monitor implementation of anti-discrimination legislation and assist victims of discrimination in seeking remedies”; recognition by governments of “the Roma slavery and the Holocaust through public apology, along with urgent adoption of a package of reparatory measures.”

A fully fledged race relations industry is now in place, with the self-serving agenda of finding “discrimination” in order to keep itself in place for ever. Gypsy shoplifters and pickpockets in Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia are immune from the law. Perhaps many of them don’t know what exactly is going on, but they have learned that the cry of “Discrimination!” is truly magical. The Rev. Jesse Jackson would approve.

Soros’s agenda in world affairs is apparent from the fact that over the years the leading lights of his “International Crisis Group” have included Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.), who commanded NATO forces in the war against Serbia in 1999; Louise Arbour, the former chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at The Hague; Morton Abramowitz, the leading neocon guru; and the late Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Soros is also a key player behind the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. He uses these groups not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda, and public opinion to further aims which are nothing short of control of the world—indoctrinating its people to take their natural resources and undermining the national sovereignty of traditional nation-states, above all in Europe.

The key ideological foundation for Soros’s foreign activities is that all nation-states are artificial social arrangements that should be temporary as they are potentially dangerous. Like Marx’s proletarian, Soros has no loyalty to a concrete country. He could serve any of them, if they can be turned into his tools. In 1792, it could have been France, in 1917 Russia. Today, the U.S. is his host organism of choice.

Soros’s vision is hostile even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. His core belief is that traditional morality, faith, and community based on shared memories are all evil. These things are at odds even with his notion of the classical “open society” liberalism of Popper and Friedrich Hayek, by whom he swears. His hatred of religion is morbid. He promotes an education system that will neutralize any lingering spiritual yearnings among the young, and the loss of a sense of place and history already experienced by millions of Westerners, whether they are aware of that loss or not. Estranged from their parents, ignorant of their culture, ashamed of their history, millions of Soros-educated youngsters will be on the path of alienation that demands every imaginable form of self-indulgence, or else leads to drugs, or suicide, or conversion to Islam.

In the triumph of liberal capitalism, the enemies of civilization such as Soros have found the seeds of future victory for their paradigm that seeks to eradicate all traditional structures capable of resistance. The revolutionary character of the Open Society project is revealed in its relentless adherence to the mantra of race, gender, and sexuality. His goal is a new global imperium that will be truly totalitarian.

George Soros is a bold and proud promoter of each and every key symptom of the decline of the West—a grandomaniac who, in a New Yorker profile in 1995, reflected on the parallels between himself and the God of the Old Testament, observing that as a child he thought of himself as superhuman and indulged in “messianic fantasies.” His activities indicate that his fantasies have matured into a coherent plan of action. Now that he is seriously old, he apparently no longer only thinks, he knows that he is superhuman.

It is understandable that Soros wants to call his support of such causes “philanthropy,” and it is unsurprising that Biden and the Democratic Party should accept such designation and honor him accordingly. Collectively, they all want to deconstruct and destroy the remaining basis of the good life—traditional values and attitudes—in America and all over the world.

(Editor’s Note: Significant parts of this article are taken from the 2019 Chronicles article “George Soros and the Cult of Death.”)