Macbeth famously saw a dagger that did not exist, but it is just as possible not to see something that does. Decades after knowing of George Soros it occurred to me that his last name is a palindrome. Were this a mark of the devil it would be entirely appropriate, inasmuch as Soros helped to dispose of the property of Jews sent to the death camps, and subsequently, in the flimsy guise of reform, has devoted his life to undermining fundamental institutions such as criminal justice. But in regard to what’s in a name, and to something that exists in plain sight and yet is not seen, why stop there?

His organizations are called the Open Society Foundations. Presumably this refers to the virtues of an open society, but it also brilliantly and perhaps mischievously lays out for anyone to see—even if hardly anyone does—the essence of his strategy. That is, to exploit the liberties of a free society so as to replace it with an entirely different regime, less open, less free, perhaps not free at all. In this he is no more original than Antonio Gramsci, Saul Alinsky, or the fundamentally-transforming-the-United-States-of-America Barack Obama, the Mount Everest of presumption, megalomania, and gall. But, better resourced and not needing to be either read or elected, Soros is more stealthy and more persistent.

The extraordinary freedoms of American society dictate