Everything in this series is documented. Every claim has a source. The truth is disturbing enough. The Paper Trail Series is a section on my Substack and exists on my website.
I was standing in my living room with a baby on my hip.
It had already been a year of things I didn’t have words for. In February, I watched the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, stand behind President Trump on the floor of Congress and tear his speech in half. On live television. Behind his back. While the chamber cheered or groaned depending on which side of an aisle they occupied that had become something closer to a trench.
By spring we were following arrows on grocery store floors. Masking, some even masked alone in their cars. Keeping six feet of federally recommended distance from other human beings while being assured this was temporary, two weeks, just until we flattened the curve.
By summer Minnesota was burning.
Not a metaphor. Actual fire. The Third Police Precinct. Buildings. Businesses. The life’s work of people who had nothing to do with anything people were burning the city over. And in Seattle, something that officials called an autonomous zone had materialized in the middle of a major American city — a city within a city, ungoverned and celebrated in some quarters as a form of civic expression while the people who actually lived there described something closer to occupation.
A member of the United States Congress, Maxine Waters, told her supporters to confront people in restaurants, in gas stations, in department stores, and make sure they knew they were not welcome anywhere.
The jab was coming. The people who knew something about it were not being encouraged to share what they knew. The message, stripped of its careful language, was this: shut up and take it.
I want to be honest about the timeline. Those years — 2020, 2021, the months that bled into each other without seam — collapsed into something that did not feel like time passing so much as a sustained detonation. The sequence of events gets lost in the blur of it. What doesn’t get lost is the feeling.
The feeling that it was not random.
Chaos does not have a direction. What I was watching had a direction.
His name is George Soros.
You have heard it. Maybe you’ve dismissed it. You may have even been told that saying it out loud is itself a form of bigotry, that the name has become a vessel for antisemitic conspiracy theories and that reasonable people do not traffic in it.
I am going to ask you to set that framing aside for a few minutes. Not because the concern about antisemitism is illegitimate. It is not illegitimate. It is, in fact, a concern George Soros himself has activated deliberately, because the most effective way to insulate a documented record from scrutiny is to make the scrutiny itself the story.
What I am going to show you truly is a paper trail.
It begins in Budapest, in 1944, when a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy named György Schwartz was hidden by his father inside a false identity. His father, a lawyer named Tivadar, had changed the family name to Soros years earlier to avoid the growing tide of antisemitism in Hungary. When the Nazis occupied Budapest, Tivadar arranged for György to pose as the Christian godson of a Hungarian government official named Baumbach. The arrangement kept the boy alive.
Baumbach’s job was to take inventory of Jewish properties being confiscated by the state. György went with him and helped with the inventory. His own father recorded it in his diary.
In December 1998, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, correspondent Steve Kroft asked George Soros — György, now an American billionaire — about that time.
Kroft said: my understanding is that you went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
Soros said: yes, that’s right. Yes.
Kroft asked: was it difficult?
Soros said: not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no problem at all.
Kroft asked: no sense of guilt?
Soros said: no.
Kroft pressed further. He asked whether Soros had ever thought: I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.
Soros said: well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets. That if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow.
In a funny way. Just like markets.
Somebody else would have taken it anyway.
He didn’t offer that as a confession, but as a justification. The logic of a man who had already decided that the social consequences of what he does are not his concern — applied backward, at fourteen, to the confiscation of his own people’s property.
The same logic he would carry forward for the next eighty years.
You will decide what to make of that. What I will show you is what he did with the decades that followed. And what he said, in his own published words, about who he believed himself to be and what he believed the world should become.
In 1987, George Soros published a book called The Alchemy of Finance. In it he wrote this:
I have always harboured an exaggerated view of my self-importance. To put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes, or even better, like Einstein. My sense of reality was strong enough to make me realise that these expectations were excessive, and I kept them hidden as a guilty secret.
Six years later, in 1993, he told The Independent of London that the guilty secret had become something else entirely.
It is sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, he said. But I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.
In 1987 he called it excessive. A guilty secret. Something he kept hidden because reality had not yet caught up with the fantasy. By 1993 he had begun to live it out. And he felt comfortable.
What changed between 1987 and 1993 was not his ambition. What changed was his resources. In September 1992 George Soros shorted the British pound, a single speculative trade that forced the United Kingdom out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, cost the British treasury an estimated three billion pounds in a single day, and made Soros approximately one billion dollars in profit.
He broke the Bank of England. One man. One trade. One day.
He was asked in the same 60 Minutes interview about being blamed for the financial collapse of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and Russia.
He said: all of the above.
He was also asked, in that same interview, about the social consequences of his financial operations.
I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.
That sentence is from his own mouth. On camera. In 1998.
Now read what he published.
The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.
That is from The Crisis of Global Capitalism, 1998.
We need a new international authority that transcends the sovereignty of states to promote an open society.
That is from The Washington Post, 1999.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.
That is from The Atlantic, 2003.
Hijacking fully fueled airliners and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and its execution could not have been more spectacular.
That is also from The Atlantic, December 2003, describing the September 11 attacks.
These are not things written about George Soros. These are things written by George Soros. In his own books. In his own name. Published and available to anyone who wants to read them.
The sovereignty of states must be subordinated. The United States is the main obstacle. The execution of September 11 could not have been more spectacular.
Now look at what he built.
In 1984, George Soros signed a contract with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was the founding document of what would become the Open Society Foundations.
The name came from a book. Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies argued that free societies require active defense against forces that would close them. Soros read it and built an empire around it. By 2025 that empire had distributed more than $32 billion across more than 120 countries.
The New York Times described it as a sprawling political and philanthropic empire that seeks to advance a liberal, democratic agenda around the globe.
That is the New York Times, owned and controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 is certainly not a conservative publication. The newspaper of record describes one man’s private philanthropic network as an empire with a political agenda spanning the globe.
Here is what that empire built in the United States alone.
Beginning in 2015, George Soros began funding district attorney races. Not senate races or presidential campaigns. District attorneys — the men and women who decide, in every county in America, what gets charged, what gets prosecuted, and what gets set aside.
His operation worked through a network of pop-up political action committees established by his longtime treasurer Whitney Tymas. The PACs were created specifically for targeted races. They injected hundreds of thousands of dollars — sometimes millions — into local elections that had never seen that kind of money. Then they dissolved. The candidates won. The PACs disappeared. The money was untraceable to the casual observer but fully documented in campaign finance records available to anyone who looked.
Researchers at the Capital Research Center tracked more than $29 million in documented Soros funding across DA races in at least 30 states between 2016 and 2022.
The names of the recipients are on the record.
Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois — Chicago — boosted into office with $2 million in Soros money. Under Foxx, Chicago recorded its largest spike in homicides in more than thirty years. Her office dropped charges against thirty percent of felony defendants during 2020.
Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, supported by more than $2 million funneled through the Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC. Under Krasner, Philadelphia became the murder capital of the United States among the country’s ten largest cities in 2021. Aggravated assault with a firearm increased eighteen percent. Violent crime overall rose five percent in a single year.
George Gascon in Los Angeles, the beneficiary of nearly $6 million in Soros-connected spending. Murders in Los Angeles climbed from 258 in 2019 to 397 in 2021 — a fifty-five percent increase.
Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. Kim Gardner in St. Louis. Rachael Rollins in Boston. The list runs across thirty states, from the cities you know to the counties you have never heard of.
What all of them shared was a philosophy purchased with the same checkbook. Reduce incarceration. Stop prosecuting quality of life crimes. End cash bail. Treat the criminal justice system as the problem rather than the solution.
And if you asked what institution had the power to reshape the criminal justice system of the most powerful nation on earth without passing a single law or winning a single national election, the answer was sitting in a Manhattan office building with $32 billion and a network of pop-up PACs that dissolved after they had done their work.
Now look at who stood up to celebrate him.
In 1995, George Soros told PBS: I do now have great access in the Clinton administration. There is no question about this. We actually work together as a team.
In 2004, at the Take Back America conference in Washington, Hillary Clinton took the stage to introduce him. She sang his praises. She affirmed a close relationship. She described what he was building as something worth celebrating. The event is preserved on C-SPAN.
By 2016, Soros had donated nearly $11 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and three main super PACs. His foundation had given up to $6 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Meanwhile, sovereign governments around the world were reaching a different conclusion about the team.
In 2015, Russia formally declared Open Society Foundations an undesirable organization and banned it from operating on Russian territory. The official statement said the activities of Open Society Foundations represent a threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation and the security of the state.
In 2016, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs placed Open Society on a watchlist, forbidding it from extending financial assistance to any NGO or individual without prior government permission.
In 2017, Pakistan ordered the foundation to cease operations.
In 2018, Hungary passed what it called the Stop Soros laws, criminalizing the act of aiding undocumented immigrants seeking asylum. Open Society closed its Budapest office and moved to Berlin. Viktor Orbán, who was born in the same country as Soros, called it foreign interference in domestic affairs.
In 2018, Turkey announced the closure of Open Society operations.
During the second presidency of Donald Trump, federal prosecutors were directed to investigate Open Society Foundations.
Russia. India. Pakistan. Hungary. Turkey. The United States.
These are not ideologically aligned governments. They don’t agree on much. What they agreed on — through their own separate processes, in their own separate languages, for their own separately stated reasons — is that one man’s network of privately funded organizations had gone beyond philanthropy into something that threatened the sovereignty of the state.
George Soros wrote in 1998 that the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international institutions.
Several states declined the invitation.
In 2023, George Soros transferred control of Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander. Thirty-two billion dollars. One hundred and twenty countries. A network of prosecutors, media organizations, civil society groups, and political action committees built over four decades — passed to the next generation like an inheritance.
No election. No accountability. No vote. Because that is precisely what a non-governmental organization is — non-governmental, by definition, unaccountable by design, and in this case, actively shaping the government the rest of us have to live under.
I was standing in my living room with a baby on my hip, watching a country come apart, and feeling something I did not yet have words for.
I have the words now.
What I was watching was not spontaneous. The burning cities had prosecutors who had been purchased in advance. The arrows on the grocery store floors and the mandate to take a jab that no one was permitted to question were products of the same institutional machinery I had been documenting for months — the Event 201 recommendation to flood media with approved information and suppress everything else, the financial incentives that paid hospitals to code everything as COVID, the PCR methodology revised without explanation on inauguration day.
And underneath all of it, funding the organizations that trained the activists, backed the prosecutors, shaped the media narrative, and worked — in the words of the New York Times — to advance a liberal democratic agenda around the globe, was one man.
A man who said in 1987 that he fancied himself a god and kept it as a guilty secret.
A man who said in 1993 that he had begun to live it out and felt comfortable.
A man who said in 1998 that the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international institutions.
A man who said in 2003 that the United States is the main obstacle to a stable world order.
A man who said on national television that the confiscation of his fellow Jews’ property created no problem at all and that he felt no guilt.
A man who said he cannot and does not look at the social consequences of what he does.
He has been looking at them. For forty years. He has been funding them. He has been building the infrastructure that makes them possible and then stepping back while the pop-up PACs dissolve and the prosecutors take their seats and the sovereign governments that noticed what was happening get labeled authoritarian for noticing.
George Soros didn’t burn Minneapolis. He didn’t write the Event 201 recommendation. He didn’t sign the nursing home directive or falsify the death counts or send the hospital ships that sat empty in the harbor.
He funded the network of organizations and prosecutors and political operations that reshaped the institutional landscape of this country while most people were following arrows on grocery store floors and trying to figure out why their city was on fire.
The baby on my hip is older now. She will inherit whatever we allow to be built while we are not looking.
I am looking.
The man who fancied himself a god donated $32 billion to make his fantasy real, transferred it to his son so it would outlast him, and said on camera that he feels no guilt and sees no problem.
He was not hiding anymore.
And neither are we.
The paper trail continues.
Sources
1. CBS News: Nancy Pelosi tears up copy of Trump’s State of the Union address. February 4, 2020. C-SPAN preserved footage. c-span.org
2. Minneapolis Third Police Precinct fire, May 28, 2020. Associated Press and Reuters documented reporting.
3. Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ/CHOP), Seattle. Established June 8, 2020. Seattle Times and AP documentation.
4. Representative Maxine Waters. Statement at Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, April 17, 2021. Congressional Record and C-SPAN footage.
5. Kaufman, Michael T. Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. Knopf, 2002.
6. CBS 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft interview with George Soros. December 20, 1998. Full transcript available via CBS News archives.
7. Soros, Tivadar. Masquerade: The Incredible True Story of How George Soros’ Father Outsmarted the Gestapo. Arcade Publishing, 2001.
8. Soros, George. The Alchemy of Finance. Simon & Schuster, 1987. Republished 2003.
9. The Independent (London). Profile: George Soros: God of All He Surveys. June 3, 1993.
10. Bank of England Black Wednesday documentation, September 16, 1992. HM Treasury records.
11. CBS 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft interview with George Soros. December 20, 1998. Exchange on social consequences of financial speculation.
12. Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. PublicAffairs, 1998. Quote: sovereignty of states must be subordinated.
13. Soros, George. The Washington Post op-ed, 1999. Quote: new international authority that transcends sovereignty of states.
14. Soros, George. The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Atlantic, December 2003. Quote: main obstacle to stable world order is the United States.
15. Soros, George. The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Atlantic, December 2003. Quote: execution could not have been more spectacular.
16. Open Society Foundations founding document. Contract between Soros Foundation/New York City and Hungarian Academy of Sciences. May 28, 1984.
17. Open Society Foundations. Reported expenditures exceeding $24.2 billion since establishment. opensocietyfoundations.org
18. New York Times description of Open Society Foundations as sprawling political and philanthropic empire. Referenced in multiple NYT profiles.
19. Capital Research Center. Living Room Pundit’s Guide to Soros District Attorneys. Parker Thayer. January 2022. capitalresearch.org
20. Capital Research Center / Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. Justice for Sale: How George Soros Put Radical Prosecutors in Power. June 2022. policedefense.org
21. Fox News. George Soros-backed district attorney candidates sweep elections. Joe Schoffstall. November 2022.
22. Washington Times. George Soros-funded DAs oversee big cities with skyrocketing crime. August 2020.
23. Campaign finance records: Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC. Larry Krasner 2017 DA race. State campaign finance filings.
24. Campaign finance records: Soros funding of George Gascon, Los Angeles DA race 2020. California campaign finance filings.
25. Chicago homicide statistics 2020-2021. Chicago Police Department annual reports.
26. Philadelphia homicide statistics 2021. Philadelphia Police Department. Philadelphia became murder capital among 10 largest US cities.
27. Los Angeles homicide statistics 2019-2021. LAPD annual crime reports.
28. George Soros. PBS interview, 1995. Quote: I do now have great access in the Clinton administration. We actually work together as a team.
29. Hillary Clinton introduces George Soros at Take Back America Conference, 2004. C-SPAN archived footage. c-span.org/clip/5154643
30. Washington Times. Hillary Clinton embraces George Soros radical vision. October 20, 2016. Campaign finance analysis: $11 million to Clinton campaign and super PACs.
31. Clinton Foundation IRS Form 990 filings: Open Society Foundations contributions up to $6 million.
32. Russia prosecutor general’s office. Declaration of Open Society Foundations as undesirable organization. November 2015. Reuters documented report.
33. India Ministry of Home Affairs. Open Society Foundations placed on watchlist. 2016. Official government notification.
34. Pakistan government order to Open Society Foundations to cease operations. December 2017. Reuters.
35. Hungary Stop Soros legislation. Passed June 2018. Hungarian Parliament official records.
36. Open Society Foundations announcement of Budapest office closure, relocation to Berlin. May 2018. opensocietyfoundations.org
37. Turkey: Open Society Foundations announced closure of Istanbul and Ankara offices. November 2018.
38. Trump administration direction to federal prosecutors to investigate Open Society Foundations. 2025. Documented in multiple press reports.
39. Open Society Foundations. George Soros transfers leadership to son Alexander Soros, 2023. Announcement: opensocietyfoundations.org
40. Alexander Soros announced layoffs of 40 percent of international staff and significant changes to operating model. 2023.