Tea at Trianon: How George Soros Built the Empire Without Ever Taking the Throne

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, February 8, 2026

How George Soros Built the Empire Without Ever Taking the Throne

From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

There is a comfortable way to think about political influence in a democracy. Candidates make arguments. Voters choose. The winners pass laws. The losers regroup. Money matters, of course, but in the familiar way, it buys ads, staff, and the occasional glossy mailer. On this picture, a billionaire donor is a loud person with a megaphone. He can amplify a message, but he cannot rewrite the terms of the conversation.
George Soros does not fit that picture. The best way to understand him is not as a rich man with opinions, and not as a philanthropist with a large heart, but as a strategist of systems. He has not merely pushed particular policies. He has built an infrastructure designed to decide, in advance, which policies are even thinkable, which institutions are trusted, which officials are promoted, and which forms of social disorder are excused as “the work of justice.” This is not ordinary politics. It is meta politics.
Start with a simple distinction. There is influence over outcomes, and there is influence over the mechanisms that generate outcomes. The first is visible. It shows up in campaigns, headlines, and election night returns. The second is often invisible. It lives in the training programs, the grant pipelines, the professional associations, the litigation shops, the media “watchdogs,” the academic credentialing, the philanthropic laundries, and the low salience offices that quietly control enforcement. The second kind of influence is vastly more durable. It survives a news cycle, an election, and sometimes an entire generation.
Soros has invested, for decades, in that second kind of influence. He does not need to “control” the world in a literal, comic book sense. A man can be a puppet master without pulling every string. He needs only to fund the stage, hire the lighting crew, select the scripts, and ensure that the critics all review the same play. At that point, the actors and audience can congratulate themselves on their freedom while walking through corridors that have been built for them. (Read more.)