Billionaire left-wing mega-donor George Soros has written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal justifying his support for electing radical prosecutors across the country amid a rise in violent crime and recall elections by angry urban residents.
Since 2018, Soros has been responsible for electing dozens of prosecutors in big-city jurisdictions, often ousting centrist Democrats. Their arrival has been accompanied by spikes in violent crime and social disorder, prompting an urban exodus.
In June, voters in the left-wing stronghold of San Francisco ousted radical prosecutor Chesa Boudin in a rare recall vote. Now, voters in Los Angeles are poised to hold a similar recall election to oust Soros-backed prosecutor George Gascón.
In his op-ed, Soros attempts to defend his support for what he calls “reform” prosecutors, describing the “false choice” between “justice” (by which he means left-wing “social justice”) land public safety:
We need to acknowledge that black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people. That is an injustice that undermines our democracy.
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In recent years, reform-minded prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials around the country have been coalescing around an agenda that promises to be more effective and just. This agenda includes prioritizing the resources of the criminal-justice system to protect people against violent crime. It urges that we treat drug addiction as a disease, not a crime. And it seeks to end the criminalization of poverty and mental illness.
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Serious scholars researching causes behind the recent increase in crime have pointed to other factors: a disturbing rise in mental illness among young people due to the isolation imposed by Covid lockdowns, a pullback in policing in the wake of public criminal-justice reform protests, and increases in gun trafficking. Many of the same people who call for more-punitive criminal-justice policies also support looser gun laws.
Soros also repeats a claim — first popularized by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who backed Gascón — that murder rates are highest in Republican-run states, ignoring the fact that they are highest in Democrat-run cities.
Read the full op-ed here.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.