George Soros has reportedly handed over control of his huge financial empire to his son, but the work of the left-wing prosecutors he’s nurtured continues unabated. They’re still acting as midwives for social disarray, and they have now apparently delivered a new arrival.

It seems we are now required to surrender public spaces to persons inhabiting the outer fringes of sanity; further, they are to be provided stages and captive audiences for performances of haranguing, threatening outbursts of profane hatred. Often these displays go beyond mere words: becoming unspeakably revolting scatological acts. Not infrequently, these close quarter confrontations devolve into actual physical violence, resulting in serious injury or death.

In the developing manslaughter charges filed against subway Good Samaritan Daniel Penny, we are witnessing another disturbing feature of the quickly expanding Soros-sphere. This sad outburst, the likes of which is seen every day throughout NYC’s vast transit system, was atypical only because Mr. Penny and the others sitting near him chose to fight back. The death of Jordan Neely, the clearly deranged aggressor in this sad, avoidable incident, has thrust it squarely into the public’s consciousness.  According to the Bizarro World rules Mr. Soros’s new deputies endeavor to establish, it was the completely unintended demise of Mr. Neely under restraint that represented the genuine cause of moral outrage and the impetus for immediate legal intervention.

The pressing need for citizens to walk the streets and ride the subways free of harassment and physical threat is now a strictly a subsidiary consideration.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, faithful to the convoluted ethos he and his shadowy backers seek to impose, therefore withholds any benefit of the doubt upon the actions and motives of Mr. Penny --- a mere passenger minding his own business until he and his fellow riders were threatened beyond reasonable tolerance by the serially violent Mr. Neely.  

The racial ambulance chasers hovering over New York couldn’t believe their luck: a white, blond-haired former Marine involved in the death of a black man.  Daniel Penny therefore by definition must be that most dangerous of Caucasian predators: a vigilante.

But this tragedy has nothing to do with race despite the best efforts of some to make it so.

Mr. Penny’s great misfortune may be his residence in New York, one of the states that limit the right of self-defense and impose upon their citizens a duty to retreat in life threatening situations; i.e., the legal obligation not to confront a dangerous aggressor if there is any reasonable escape route available. Whether such avenues of retreat exist on a moving train or bus, or even a subway platform or bus stop, is doubtful to say the least.

What that means in practice is that New York is one of the places in the nation where the need --- growing every day to anyone with eyes to see --- to take personal safety into one’s own hands is least recognized or tolerated.

Indeed, it’s routinely dismissed and ridiculed, resulting in a state of affairs where the price of simply getting around town can often far exceed a simple train or bus fare.

The duty to retreat has metastasized into a duty to cower --- to accept being routinely terrorized, frightened and reduced to helpless victimhood --- and tolerate it if you want to stay out of the crosshairs of the law.

Of course, this unfortunate reality of current city life is considerably worsened by the ongoing campaigns to hamper and hamstring police, preventing confident and aggressive enforcement of the law.

The NYPD, despite the just announced resignation of the current Commissioner, is without question the finest law enforcement organization in the world. It is one of the last remaining bulwarks against the societal disintegration that is so obviously the aim of George Soros and his acolytes. Defeat those who courageously remain ‘on the job’, force them to retreat, contract their radius of protection, make them hesitate to react quickly enough for fear of legal retribution against responding officers, and the anarchy seekers have gone a long way in accomplishing their goals.

Has this withdrawal from decency and minimal order --- turning simple common sense on its head --- become some manner of unspoken, de-facto redress for the myriad sins supposedly visited upon these permanently oppressed subgroups of minorities? Does it count for nothing that we’ve undertaken multi-generational efforts at affirmative action and the expenditure of trillions of dollars in the good faith attempt to level the socio-economic playing field?

Apparently so in the eyes of a hard-core few.

How much blame for this unravelling falls upon Mr. Soros? He’s a convenient villain for those who need a focal point for their anger and disgust. But it would be inaccurate to place all of the responsibility upon his head. Soros is a culprit --- a very large one --- but he’s got lots of help. It’s now sadly evident that there’s a small but noisy and violent portion of the American population that for reasons of their own loathe this country and would like to see it crippled, if not destroyed.

Soros is not the only billionaire willing to cough up boatloads of money to aid or appease the merchants of mayhem. Sadly, that list is uncomfortably large. It just happens that he’s the most intriguing; someone who has a diabolical insight into our vulnerabilities, and the cleverness to exploit them.  

Why would such an evidently brilliant man, with uniquely non-conformist ideas --- the very type who would ostensibly rely upon constitutional protections such as the ones we enjoy --- nevertheless invest enormous sums into projects designed to bring our whole way of life crashing down?  Hypocritically, he utilizes those very same guarantees to provide personal security for himself and his family and unfettered access to his vast wealth.

Many have attempted to psychoanalyze Soros, his motivations, the ghosts from the Holocaust that may haunt him due to the collaborative role he played as a teen in Hungary struggling to save himself from the ovens. No one who has not faced a similar horror can reasonably judge his actions back then.

But perhaps it has left him with a feeling of disgust and contempt for humanity that, nearing the end of his long life, prompts him to consider people as lab creatures in a great manipulative experiment. He appears to have taken the largest “short” position in history: betting on the downfall of America, and indeed all of western civilization.

This planet-sized short sale anticipates no great profit at its realization. There’s no huge payoff in treasure or even political gain at its culmination; just the knowledge --- perhaps gained only in the hereafter --- that it could indeed be done. I truly don’t think that Soros is deeply motivated by left-wing beliefs. Race, wokeness and all of the other tools used to chip away at our culture are just those: tools. So too, are his allies on the left merely objects for manipulation; their ultimate Marxist goals are their affair, not his.

Back here on Earth however, we mortals will have to pay the price of this giant exercise in civilizational fission. We’ll be left to deal with the mundane issues of law enforcement, the defense of lives and property, and all that comes with maintaining those temporal goals.

If the American people possess the will and courage to stand up to these efforts to smother us, we’ll be seeing more Daniel Pennys in the future.  Because when the operation of the law becomes arbitrary, capricious and unjust --- even bigoted --- nothing is left for decent people of any color to do but bypass it and adopt their own means and methods of insuring their personal safety.

Let the mischief makers cry foul, but that is not vigilantism, or any manner of rebellion or insurrection.

It’s merely self-preservation.

Photo credit: Niccolò Caranti  CC BY-SA 4.0 license