Over the past decade, tycoon Democrat George Soros has backed candidates for criminal justice positions from New York to Los Angeles. Soros candidates usually win because the sums he puts up are unusually princely for such races. In the 2016 election cycle alone, he spent $11 million on 12 District Attorney races.
He can afford to. Soros’ fortune, amassed through international currency manipulation and his hedge fund, is estimated at $25 billion.
From Soros’ perspective his outlays have been successful, embedding his novel policies on criminal justice in major American cities and enriching the Democrat machines there.
From the perspective of non-billionaires in the cities Soros has targeted, his influence has been less successful. His big sacks of money have tilted the scales of crime and punishment, dramatically raising the former while lowering the latter.
Put aside his $2 million that took out a Soros-unacceptable sheriff in Arizona — $2 million to defeat a sheriff, no kidding. Put aside many Soros-sponsored DAs. Just consider two of them.
Take Los Angeles (but maybe you should take it from a distance). Over $2 million in Soros money paved the road for George Gascón to cruise to Los Angeles County’s District Attorney office last December. Soros also helped advance the defund-the-police movement there (and elsewhere).
Gascón quickly ended cash bail requirement and other tools for controlling crime in crime-happy LA. And he implemented the core Soros agenda of decarceration: Decline, at the Soros-sponsored DA’s discretion, to prosecute many criminal cases, which means the charged suspects walk. The impact was swift. The first five months of Gascón’s term produced a 92% increase in homicides.
Homicide is one of California’s remaining growth industries.
Take Chicago (but keep your head down, even on the Gold Coast). Soros money helped elect Kim Foxx the District Attorney of Chicago’s Cook County in 2016. Foxx has now spent nearly five years advancing Soros-ian criminal justice in Chicago, declining to prosecute many cases of gang shootings, crimes by repeat criminals, even ludicrously obvious crimes, including Jussie Smollett’s martyrdom-to-MAGA hoax.
The result, of course: more and more adults and children gunned down, more lives ruined by freed repeat criminals, more Chicagoans fleeing to the suburbs if they’re crime-desperate, to a different state if they’re crime-and-tax desperate.
The criminal-friendly policies of Soros-backed DAs have had serious consequences in LA, Chicago, and elsewhere. Once-great cities now descend into dystopias managed by dopes.
In July, 2020 John Kass, then a Chicago Tribune columnist, pulled back the curtain on the wizardry of Soros-sponsored prosecutors in Democrat-run cities experiencing, as he noted, “overwhelming lawlessness.” Kass was quickly attacked, primarily by his own co-worker journalists guild. He was called an anti-Semite simply because Soros is Jewish, an irrelevancy never mentioned by Kass.
Characterizing Kass’ criticism of Soros as anti-Semitic wasn’t just slander, it was also the logic you’d expect from the weakest member of a high school debate team. But the woke mob doesn’t use logic, just outrage.
It’s not easy to defend or even understand the motive of Soros’ crusade to send as many criminally-charged people as possible back to the streets. If you try, you run into intellectual dead ends . . . and dead people.
But let’s try.
The Soros axis claims its crusade to arrest and prosecute fewer lawbreakers is based on high arrest rates for racial minorities and the inequity of cash bail requirement for poorer defendants.
During the 2020 George Floyd protests, leftist anger at bail requirement became angrier. Then-Senator Kamala Harris promoted donations to the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
The protests nationwide, incessantly reported as “mostly peaceful,” produced about $2 billion in direct economic damage and over 25 deaths in 2020. The mostly peaceful mayhem has continued this year, especially in woke capital Portland.
Significant numbers of those “on the ground” protested through arson, looting and assault, and at least 14,000 were arrested. Was it wise to promote quickly sending those arrestees back to the streets without even knowing who they were?
The bail beneficiaries of MFF are hard to identify since MFF shields their names. But Minneapolis station KMSP and (even) The Washington Post managed to identify one who shot at police officers, a convicted repeat sex offender, and a woman accused of killing a friend of hers.
One former domestic abuser murdered a driver in a road-rage incident after he was bailed out by MFF.
Some 19 months after championing her bail-posting cause, Harris became Vice President. Anyway, she has that title.
Is racial justice promoted by letting potentially dangerous charged lawbreakers walk free? Of course, that notion is nonsense. The victims of serious crimes are themselves disproportionately racial and ethnic minorities. Is it justice to increase the number of minorities victimized by crime? Or is it racist?
Soros and his fellow criminal advocates are never called racists. They can’t be. They’re Democrats.
If Soros is just a sincere leftist mega-billionaire who really cares about the less fortunate, why is he obsessed with setting free charged lawbreakers who so often resume preying on the less fortunate? What is the common feature of Soros, District Attorneys like Gascón and Foxx, and the leftists dominant in academia, show business, social media and most news media?
One answer is suggested by the famous 14th century theorem known as Occam’s razor, often expressed as “the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.” William of Ockham might have identified a feature common to pro-criminal advocates:
They must not be very bright.
But Soros made a fortune playing financial markets, so wouldn’t he have to be smart? Others who support Soros’ set-‘em-free agenda tend to be prosperous-to-wealthy, often living in gated communities protected from the crime waves produced by Soros-promoted policies. They’re smart — or at least shrewd, right?
Trick questions. Leftists have a special strain of stupidity: the impersonated intelligence of good intentions.
So what if the welfare programs of the Democrats’ “Great Society” have chased away fathers and thinned out intact families over three generations? So what if liberals’ patriarchal politics have insulted minorities, effectively treating them like helpless children? So what if liberals’ caring-and-sharing-and-healing-and-feeling policies end up creating increasing plagues of violent crime by repeat criminals — crime that specially hurts the people liberals claim to care for?
Good intentions forgive all that.
But with our major cities turning into sprawling crime scenes, a coherent motive for Soros’ decarceration crusade gets harder to figure. If Occam’s razor doesn’t cut it here, if Soros and his subordinates are not simply dumb, what’s going on? Could there be an ulterior motive?
There might be one, but it seems tinfoil-hat stuff, far-fetched. “Deliberately destroying American cities” is a possibility, but a grim one. That motive would be far more ominous than “dumb.”