Soros backing turn-’em-loose DA candidates
THE crime wave sweeping across the country is the direct result of a years-long campaign by George Soros to bankroll the election of far-left district attorneys committed to undermining law and order.
Over the past six years or so, Soros has poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaigns of DA candidates from coast to coast, achieving a remarkable degree of success by simply overwhelming all the other candidates. Whereas normal DA candidates typically run on five-figure budgets, Soros-backed DA candidates routinely enjoy seven-figure war chests.
Soros is able to do this because federal campaign-finance limitations do not apply to local races. Many states have adopted their own laws capping the amounts that individuals and/or political action committees can contribute to candidates, but those laws are often riddled with loopholes. In some cases, the limits only apply to statewide races. In other cases, Soros can circumvent individual contribution limits by funneling money through the PACs he has set up for this purpose, which generally go by the ironic name of “Safety and Justice.”
The reason Soros has spent so much money on races that used to be relatively obscure, local affairs is straightforward. Just as President Barack Obama seized upon the notion of “prosecutorial discretion” to grant de facto amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants after failing to get amnesty passed by Congress, Soros recognizes that local prosecutors can exercise the same discretion to selectively enforce laws.
Rather than spending tens of millions of dollars per state on numerous higher-profile races for state lawmakers, he can spend comparatively smaller amounts on DA races knowing that the outcome will determine how — and even whether — laws are enforced.
It’s part of the Hungarian-born investor’s push of progressive policies around the world through his Open Society Foundations.
The candidates Soros backs are so unapologetically far left that they make Bernie Sanders sound like Richard Nixon. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner received $1.7 million from Soros. Chicago DA Kim Foxx, who treated Jussie Smollett with kid gloves after he allegedly concocted a wild story about a late-night assault, got a cool $2 million. Kim Gardner, the St. Louis circuit attorney who prosecuted the McCloskeys for defending their property, also received backing from Soros. Thanks to Soros,
San Francisco’s
DA is Chesa
Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists (and convicted murderers), who once served as a translator for Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez.
Once in office, these prosecutors implement policies that are tailor-made to increase crime and reduce public safety. They eliminate or significantly lower bail requirements, making it easier for criminals to get back out on the streets after being arrested. They refuse to prosecute certain crimes, such as vagrancy, prostitution and public urination. In recent years, they’ve even used the COVID pandemic as an excuse to release convicted criminals from prison, many of whom have gone on to reoffend.
Soros pursues the same goals through other means, too. The Bail Project, which describes its purpose as “disrupting the money bail system” while it pursues its “mission to end cash bail,” counts alumni of Sorosbacked organizations among its leadership.
The results are as tragic as they are predictable:
a surge in violent crime as criminals take advantage of indulgent prosecutors more interested in enforcing their peculiar conceptions of “fairness” than enforcing the law or punishing those who victimize their fellow citizens.
The Soros approach shocked the entire country recently when the soft-on-crime policies of one of his prosecutors led directly to the massacre of innocent paradegoers — including children and elderly grandmothers — in Waukesha, Wis.
The culprit was a career criminal who had just been released from Milwaukee County jail on a mere $1,000 bail despite a history of violent crime and bail-jumping. Although John Chisholm, the DA who set him free, subsequently acknowledged that bail was set “inappropriately low,” he has a long history of fighting to reduce bail with the express intention of minimizing the amount of time that criminals spend in jail. Chisholm congratulated Boudin on winning election in 2019, writing, “I look forward to working with DA Boudin and reformers across the US to forge a justice system defined by fairness, equity and proportionality.”
It’s not just the high-profile tragedies that demonstrate the dangers of the Soros DA network, though. Every single day, Soros-backed prosecutors are cultivating a culture of lawlessness that puts residents at risk.
In Philadelphia, homicides have more than doubled since Krasner was elected DA in 2017, reaching an all-time high this year. Cook County, Ill. (Chicago), has recorded more than 1,000 homicides so far in 2021 — the most since 1994. In San Francisco, where so-called “quality of life” crimes are no longer prosecuted, homelessness is now being described as a “humanitarian crisis.”
The solution is simple: Stop letting Soros purchase DA races by adequately funding candidates who will enforce the law, and start publicly connecting the dots between Soros-funded prosecutors and crime. We must make those who take his money unelectable.
I’ve been warning establishment Republicans for years that they need to get off their rear ends and do something about the growing network of Soros-backed prosecutors. The longer we let the far left execute this strategy unchallenged, the more innocent citizens will be made to suffer.
One of the reasons I’m running for Congress in Tennessee next year is to challenge this sort of establishment apathy. There are few issues that even come close to matching the importance of law and order — lives are literally at stake.
Until conservatives start funding viable challengers to the Soros prosecutors, the crime wave that’s taking place in communities all over the country is going to keep getting worse, and many more people will needlessly die.
Robby Starbuck is a CubanAmerican award-winning filmmaker and a candidate for Congress in Tennessee in 2022.