The stars belong to everyone. The best things in life are free.

Except for demonstrations and riots, as the long line of chartered buses in Chicago that ferried participants to the Windy City anti-Trump protests reminds us.

It’s unclear where these buses came from — some have the markings of a Wisconsin company on the side — but it’s relatively easy to guesstimate some of the cost online. It varies, of course, with the quality of the motor coach, but seems to average out a bit over a thousand dollars a day, with wifi but not including the driver or drivers. (The latter depends on how far you’re coming from.)

Exactly how many of these vehicles were rented across the country, and for how long, is difficult to gauge, but we all know these events are still ongoing. Indeed, they are likely to be with us, off and on, through the inauguration and beyond.

Then there are meals and per diems for the participants, not to mention a little vigorish for their troubles. But who are these demonstrators? Some of them were evidently wrangled on Craigslist. Jane Velez-Mitchell, who was quasi-debating me on the topic on the Steve Malzberg Show on Newsmax TV Monday, vehemently insisted they were mostly upstanding employed citizens like she is. Salt of the Earth.

I imagine some are, but Jane apparently missed the reports on the Portland demonstrations.

It turns out that more than half of the clowns who were and are ripping up Rip City as if they were trying to do a real-life, no-fun cover of the Little Richard classic weren’t even from Oregon and were hardly likely to be employed at all (except as professional protesters). Not only that, seventy percent of these refugees from Kristallnacht, allegedly so upset about the election of Donald Trump, didn’t even bother to vote in the first place — in Oregon or any other state.

The sacking of Portland is, so far, only the worst of what is happening across the country. There’s plenty more, accompanied by chants of “Love Trumps Hate” alternating with”Kill the Police.”

Not very gentle stuff for supposed peacemakers. But perhaps they were only imitating their leader.

Further, supposed neo-Nazi graffiti linked with Trump’s name is being reported by the MSM, which, not surprisingly, is making no serious attempt to determine if the graffiti is real or the work of provocateurs. (In most cases, I’m betting on the latter.)

The operative questions, however, is just who pays for this mayhem — and what do these funders want.

Asra Nomani posted a list of 100 supporters of the Trump protests on Twitter. You will recognize many names. And 33 of the 100 received money from one man, referred to at the link in proper Twitter syntax as @georgesoros.

(For those who don’t know Nomani, she is the former Wall Street Journal reporter and founder of the Muslim Reform Movement who wrote what I consider the most important and courageous essay of election 2016.)

Meanwhile, from Politico:

George Soros and other rich liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton are gathering in Washington for a three-day, closed door meeting to retool the big-money left to fight back against Donald Trump. The conference, which kicked off Sunday night at Washington’s pricey Mandarin Oriental hotel, is sponsored by the influential Democracy Alliance donor club, and will include appearances by leaders of most leading unions and liberal groups, as well as darlings of the left such as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Keith Ellison, according to an agenda and other documents obtained by POLITICO.

Out of curiosity, I just checked and found a room at the Mandarin Oriental starts at $565. It goes up to $675 if you want breakfast.

But who am I to deny the rich their pleasures? I wouldn’t mind staying at the Mandarin myself. Though it does appear a bit unseemly, doesn’t it? Meeting in such a venue as purported tribunes of the poor and disadvantaged?

It’s hard to believe they’re really serious, or that helping others is what they really want.

If it was, they would have noticed how the Democratic Party has helped immiserate not only those “deplorables” they so evidently revile, but also the African-American community they claim to represent. No, the only people the folks in the Democracy Alliance donor club, known as the DA, actually help are themselves.

Soros is not their titular leader, but certainly their spiritual one. He is an odd man, to say the least, having done evil things and what are putatively good things as well. On the evil side of the ledger is the well-known shorting of the British pound that simultaneously made him his initial fortune while truly shorting the average British citizen. Oh, well. And then there’s the little matter of the Holocaust, when he “shorted” his fellow Jews; astonishingly, he feels no shame to this day.

On the positive side, he did a lot of good in the support of Eastern European countries in the initial phase after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But it was rather downhill from there, as he appears to have his finger in just about every propagandistic progressive pie through a variety of cut-outs so complex it would take years to unsnarl them. It’s hard not to feel the whole thing is some kind of bizarre charade, an almost surreal power game for his own amusement. He too cares little for the results of his fiddling — only for control.

And meanwhile the protesters march and smash, fed by his machine. But for what end?

Can Soros or anyone else really tell us? Do they know themselves? Is it a last-ditch attempt to prove some kind of “benign” Marxism can work, or finally just that blind assertion of power? Or maybe it’s just one massive ego trip.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.