George Soros turns 94 on Aug. 12. The left-wing billionaire, enemy No. 1 of the Republican Party, is losing on many fronts.

His vision was a test trial in progressivism. One laboratory was the self-styled racial justice riots of 2020. It looks, nowadays, like a failed social experiment.

The historic financial nightmare of Black Lives Matter and its pro-defund-the-police movement allies raked in checks from Soros’s Open Society Foundations network. Soros boosted domestic and foreign anti-Israel groups despite their lobbying for the dismantling of the Jewish state and ties to terrorists. Soros-backed open borders groups likely flouted federal law amid growing support for solutions to the migrant crisis the Biden-Harris administration ignored for years.

The Soros vision is one of unrelenting chaos.

Soros helped install more than 70 prosecutors with no less than $40 million in funds. But many of them are getting ousted or leaving office amid a backlash against soft-on-crime policies. Soros’s Open Society Foundations dumped money into a think tank driving the push for hard drug decriminalization. Yet Oregon Democrats rolled back a Soros-linked, pro-drug law as overdoses and homelessness spiraled out of control.

A wellness check may be in order for the minds behind this $25 billion empire.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations is a sprawling grantmaking network that disburses over $1 billion to left-wing causes as its founder bankrolls the Democratic Party. Democratic lawmakers are often later forced to distance themselves from their policy wish list items. But this comes only after pressure boils over into the public eye. Even liberal cities dealing with skyrocketing crime eventually want civil society restored.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow said the quiet part out loud in 2022: “Defund the police is dead,” conceding “not that it was ever wildly popular.” This came after Soros, as Joe Schoffstall reported that year, dropped tens of millions of dollars into the coffers of anti-police groups “used by progressive activists aiming to dismantle law enforcement, and even funding databases to track donations to police department foundations and unions.”

It’s Groundhog Day for Soros. The man who “broke the Bank of England” has developed a rather remarkable ability to affix his name endlessly to organizations and figures producing a conveyor belt of baggage for Democrats. In the telling of one longtime liberal consultant at Soros-funded criminal justice groups, Open Society Foundations staffers are more focused on identity politics than “pragmatic and research-based approaches” to their work.

These DEI-hungry soldiers, key cogs in the machine ensuring things run according to the politically correct plan, have descended “into a reflexive, slogan-driven approach without substance or strategy, the consultant, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to their relationships at Open Society Foundations and other left-of-center philanthropies, told the Washington Examiner.

“Anyone working with a broad array of left-leaning groups is continuously confronted with internal left-leaning purity tests based on progressive rhetoric with no universally agreed-upon meaning or clear systematic approach to meeting ill-defined values,” the liberal consultant said.

To conservatives like Scott Walter who have long tracked the philanthropy of Soros, his giving has grown increasingly extreme — a departure, according to Walter, from Soros’s promotion of democratic values across the globe. Walter, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Capital Research Center think tank, said Soros’s outfit is “now closer to supporting tyranny than undermining it.”

In the 1980s, Soros funded scholarships in Soviet-controlled Eastern and Central Europe for dissidents to travel to the United States. In 1985, his Hungarian foundation launched an arts center in Budapest promoting free expression in art. “Freedom,” Soros said in 1994, “is like the air: People struggle for it only when they are deprived of it. When it is there, they ignore it. But, in another way, freedom is very different. If you do not care for it and do not protect it, it has a tendency to disappear.”

The strain of freedom Soros admired, Walter said, used to be that of helping Eastern Europeans resist Marxist-Leninist tyranny during the Cold War. This was a noble endeavor contrary to Soros-backed groups advocating lawlessness and “demanding criminals be turned loose, the elimination of national borders, and the usage of ‘charitable’ funds to turn out Democratic Party voters,” Walter said. A Holocaust survivor born in Budapest during the Nazi occupation, Soros saw fascism firsthand and would later use his newfound wealth via mastering the art of the hedge fund to fuel the end of the Iron Curtain. He gave scholarships to black people in South Africa under apartheid. He created Central European University to foster free exchange after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“Now he funds groups that defend Hamas’s terrorism and otherwise threaten Jews,” added Walter, a former domestic policy aide in the George W. Bush White House.

The idea that Big Philanthropy has lost its way is an enduring grievance of the Right, whose think tank fellow class pumps out reports on left-wing “wokeness” in grantmaking it contends conflicts with the charitable missions of organizations.

Purportedly woke philanthropist foes of the Right include Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Reid Hoffman, Hansjörg Wyss, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and John Arnold. Pick your eccentric billionaire villain or, as author Seamus Bruner put it in his book last year, “controligarch.”

But the controligarchs aren’t all in lockstep or unequivocal agreement on how their deep-pocketed groups will deal with public scrutiny.

Consider Alliance for Global Justice. As the Washington Examiner reported, the little-known charity in Tucson, Arizona, shares ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist faction. That revelation prompted a collection of payment processors to jump ship, meaning Alliance for Global Justice can no longer fundraise online and must receive checks at an address in the desert. This is a massive blow to the longevity of its fiscally sponsored projects, including the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which has shared employees with the PFLP. News of terrorism ties led the Ford Foundation and $1 billion Arabella Advisors-managed New Venture Fund and Windward Fund, among other backers, to swear off future grants.

Arnold Ventures, the philanthropy of ex-Enron executive John Arnold and his wife, former Cobalt International Energy lawyer Laura Arnold, also vowed no longer to allow their group to back Alliance for Global Justice after just $5,000 flowed to it via an employee-directed donation in 2020. A source close to the Schmidt Family Foundation, an entity steering the wealth of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, told me it does not plan to keep funding the Arizona nonprofit organization.

In the case of all of these philanthropies, who were contacted about their giving to Alliance for Global Justice in 2023 and years prior, it took the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas last year for them to pledge not to fund a terrorist-linked entity. But reached by the Washington Examiner about a $250,000 check the Foundation to Promote Open Society cut in 2020 to Alliance for Global Justice, an Open Society Foundations spokesperson did not say whether it had any regrets.

“I really don’t understand the relevance,” an Open Society Foundations spokesperson wrote over email last month. The Anti-Defamation League sent letters to state attorneys general in Arizona and New York in July requesting an investigation into the tax-exempt status of AFGJ, which fundraised last year for a French group partnered with the PFLP. The ADL also sent a letter to the IRS asking for a formal inquiry. “Our grantmaking dates to four years ago, in 2020, when we made one grant on the issue of climate change,” the Open Society Foundations spokesperson said. “Since then, there has been no further grant activity.”

This reaction to scrutiny over the Alliance for Global Justice funding is “troubling,” particularly as antisemitic college campus groups funded by Soros call for genocide against Jews after Oct. 7, said President Marc Greendorfer of Zachor Legal Institute, a think tank that is also calling for federal investigations into AFGJ.

Alliance for Global Justice’s sponsorship of Samidoun “should be a firm line in the sand” for donors, an ADL spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. Spokesman Itai Reuveni for NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog group that tracks terrorism, added that it is “unfortunate Open Society Foundations will not admit it made a mistake in funding AFGJ, as other foundations.”

“But,” Reuveni said, “it’s unsurprising. Over the years, Open Society Foundations has provided grants to numerous highly biased and politicized groups active in the Israel-Arab conflict.”

Soros has thus remained publicly confident. How could any man with a net worth of around $7 billion not? He told the New York Times in 2018 that through the work, he found a “niche,” his life’s “mission.” He defended his soft-on-crime district attorneys in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2022, arguing that there is “no connection between the election of reform-minded prosecutors and local crime rates.” An Open Society Foundations spokesperson said the entity’s accomplishments include backing groups in Ukraine, delivering COVID-19 vaccines in Africa, and aiding in prosecuting war crimes in Syria.

Open Society Foundations, the spokesperson insisted to the Washington Examiner, is “dedicated to advancing policies that promote inclusive democracy, shared and sustained economic growth, and human rights in the United States and around the world.”

That supposed dedication, the longtime liberal consultant told the Washington Examiner, is deeply undermined by Open Society Foundations staffers “crippled by an attempt to deal with espoused ideals versus realities.”

Those ideals, it happens, culminated in Open Society Foundations funding a Colombian nongovernmental organization advocating expanded prostitution in a country where girls and women face heightened vulnerability to sex trafficking. There’s also been money for an Israeli-designated terrorist group that celebrated Oct. 7 and, likewise, entities such as the London-based Global Disinformation Index, which pressure advertisers to shut down the free and independent press.

Such apparent censorship is a worry to Republicans in Congress due to Soros Fund Management, Open Society’s asset manager and family office chaired by Soros, buying up radio stations across the U.S. Global Witness, another Soros-backed group, works to pressure social media companies to thwart “disinformation” and “misinformation” — an apparent irony given the British group publishes investigations in Al Jazeera, a Hamas-sympathetic outlet banned in Israel.

Maybe it was always supposed to be this way. After all, Open Society Foundations, like its ideological allies at the California-based Tides Foundation and Arabella Advisors dark money network, is a crucial incubator of the progressive movement. For Soros to spread the holy gospel of social justice, money must be burned and experimented with like a mad scientist to fulfill the long march through the institutions.

How that long march persists will depend on many factors. There is a new sheriff in town.

At 38, nepo baby and Hamptons partier Alex Soros has succeeded his Hungarian-born father as chairman of the board of directors for the Open Society Foundations. Alex Soros, who often touts his meetings with top Democratic lawmakers and celebrities on social media, is a frequent visitor to President Joe Biden’s White House. His meetings there have coincided with groups backed by Open Society Foundations shaping key Biden administration policies.

In a portion of an internal email to staff this May obtained by the Washington Examiner, Alex Soros asserted Open Society Foundations “won’t always” find ideas poised to shape the future “in the old places we found them in the past.”

The Soros son, who told his soldiers they “must be comfortable taking risks” plus “willing to experiment and accept that sometimes we will fail,” is already shaking things up. Since last summer, Open Society Foundations has laid off roughly 40% of its staff, according to a spokesperson for the foundations. The powerful philanthropy network is also cutting certain grant programs in Europe, to the ire of some foreign recipients of the largesse and Open Society Foundations’s staff union.

It also has a new president: Binaifer Nowrojee has taken over for Mark Malloch Brown, the former United Nations deputy secretary and British diplomat who oversaw its accelerated push for left-wing criminal justice reform and the DEI agenda following the death of George Floyd. Nowrojee, a loyal Soros aide, vowed in a recent social media post to stay committed to George Soros’s “vision of critical thinking, local knowledge, and risk-taking.” She also has the support of veteran figures in the world of progressive philanthropy, including Gara LaMarche, the former president of the secretive Democracy Alliance that George Soros helped found. The Democracy Alliance, which then-Politico reporter Ken Vogel in 2014 likened to “a secretive club of wealthy liberals that’s the closest thing the left has to the vaunted Koch brothers’ political network,” has also included George Soros’s son Jonathan — who was long suspected by those close to his father to be the successor of Open Society Foundations before a reported falling-out, documents show.

Nowrojee “seems to me hugely well-suited for this leadership role” based on her “three decades of experience in human rights advocacy across Asia, Africa, and the U.S,” LaMarche, former director of U.S. programs for the Soros grantmaking network, told me in an email.

Coupled with public scrutiny of Open Society Foundations’s grantmaking, how Alex Soros and Nowrojee handle internal frustrations among staff will be the big test.

One senior Open Society Foundations employee, who was granted anonymity by the Washington Examiner to speak freely, said there is a continued lack of communication between leadership and staff about the future of Open Society Foundations.

It’s a concern shared by the Open Society Foundations staff union, which penned an open letter in October of last year raising concerns over job and program cuts. “We want to ensure that Open Society Foundation’s resources are stewarded ethically and responsibly, enabling us to strengthen, or at least maintain, our collective ability to advance open societies,” the union wrote in the letter.

Alex Soros’s decisions since taking over, the senior Open Society Foundations employee told me in an interview, have been “incredibly disruptive” to the network’s mission and the ability of staff to carry it out. “I think for a lot of people it would be helpful if we can actually hear from Alex,” the employee said. “We haven’t really seen that, and that’s caused a lot of discomfort and concern.”

“Why aren’t we hearing from Alex? Why aren’t we having meetings with Alex for him to say, ‘Hey, this is the direction of the organization’?” the employee asked.

“I think it’s not clear what direction they’re really trying to go,” the employee said. “It would be great if they gave more clarity. Are we planning for the long term? It’s concerning to a lot of staff that there doesn’t seem to be clarity for the long term.”

The direction of Open Society Foundations, one that isn’t clear to his employees, will be challenged in the years ahead as its kingmaker takes a back seat. George Soros turns 94 this month. And if it’s true that Alex Soros is, as he told the Wall Street Journal, “more political” than his father, the largest donor in 2022 thanks to him dropping $120 million in the midterm elections, what does that mean for a Democratic Party that accrues riches from the Soroses but, in certain senses, aims to strike a centrist pose in the face of This Chaotically Failed Progressive Experiment™?

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But soon, in a poetic political fashion, Alex Soros will wed Huma Abedin, the wired political consultant whose ex-husband’s sexting scandal blew up the 2016 presidential campaign of her old boss, Hillary Clinton. Alex and Abedin — a lust for power amid national dysfunction.

Perhaps the perfect match for the modern Democratic Party.

Gabe Kaminsky is an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner.