George Soros Defends Radical Prosecutors in WSJ Op-ed

Billionaire financier George Soros speaks during a forum at Hong …
AP Photo/Kin Cheung

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.

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.

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.

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