Leftist billionaire George Soros is injecting big money into a San Diego district attorney race as part of his larger effort to install extremist prosecutors across America who will refuse to enforce inconvenient laws that liberals and progressives don’t like.
Soros, who turns 88 in August, has been underwriting district attorney races across America in an effort to dismantle the criminal justice system, empty the prisons, and sabotage the enforcement of immigration laws. Soros supports state and local efforts to resist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and wants to cripple police in order to advance the neo-Marxist abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex or gender. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are inherently corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else.
Getting people who share Soros’s worldview into public office at every level is key to promoting his ugly vision of how America, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” should look.
Months ago Soros saturation-bombed his Open Society Foundations philanthropy with an $18 billion donation, likely guaranteeing OSF will remain one of the most important players in left-wing activism for decades to come. According to the New York Times, this was “one of the largest transfers of wealth ever made by a private donor to a single foundation.” (Click here for a brief video primer on Soros narrated by yours truly. Click here for an in-depth Discover The Networks profile of Soros.)
So far Soros has pumped $1.5 million into the San Diego County, Calif., prosecutor’s race to support the candidacy of radical left-winger Geneviéve Jones-Wright, the Democrat candidate and deputy public defender in the county, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Schoffstall.
On May 3 Soros’s money was deposited into the California Justice & Public Safety PAC, a political action committee created as a vehicle for his assault on law and order in the county that borders Tijuana, Mexico. Some of the members of the so-called caravan of Central Americans led by Pueblos Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders, in English) have sought asylum at the busy San Ysidro Point of Entry in the county.
The PAC is administered by Whitney Tymas, a longtime treasurer of Soros PACs. From 2011 to 2014, she was director of the Prosecution and Racial Justice Program at the pro-criminal Vera Institute of Justice. Vera has received close to $6.7 million from OSF. The PAC has so far spent $194,884 on TV ads, $100,000 on digital ads, and $107,575.60 on campaign literature and mailings in recent days, according to Schoffstall.
Local elections for district attorney are relatively low-key, small-scale affairs that rarely see the kind of money Soros has been throwing around. By pouring millions of dollars into the campaigns of various extreme-left district attorney candidates across America, Soros has provided his preferred candidates huge financial advantages over their rivals.
And his money has brought results.
Soros money helped to knock off Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas, District Attorney Nico LaHood, a Democrat who opposes sanctuary cities and describes himself as “a conservative guy.” The billionaire’s cash also helped Kim Ogg unseat incumbent Republican Devon Anderson to become DA in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Ogg promised a “significant culture change,” including greater leniency in marijuana possession cases and making it easier for criminal defendants to make bail.
A flood of Soros cash helped elect radical leftist Lawrence (Larry) Krasner (D) as Philadelphia DA. In private practice, Krasner had sued police more than 75 times and represented Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter. Soros lucre also helped reelect Portsmouth, Va., Commonwealth Attorney Stephanie Morales (D).
According to a Daily Signal analysis, in the 2016 election cycle Soros shelled out almost $11 million in 12 DA races. Democrat candidates backed by Soros ended up winning in 10 of those dozen contests. Soros also funded district attorney candidates in Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico.
According to Schoffstall,
Soros operates similarly in every city: His PAC treasurer will establish a committee as an avenue for him to pour his money to back his preferred candidate. Once the money is parked in the PAC, independent expenditures are made in support of his candidate and against their opponent. Soros then refunds himself any excess money at the conclusion of the race and the PAC is dissolved.
And just how radical is San Diego’s Jones-Wright? She is so hostile to law enforcement that she may as well have been recruited from the ranks of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or Occupy Wall Street.
The current DA, Summer Stephan (R), launched a website called ThreatToSanDiego that provides a laundry list of leftist positions embraced by Jones-Wright. The site states that “anti-law enforcement $$$ is coming into San Diego,” and highlights quotations from Soros, such as his statement that he has “always harbored an exaggerated view of self importance” and that he thinks of himself as “some sort of god.”
Stephan campaign strategist Jason Roe told the Washington Free Beacon that Jones-Wright “has fully embraced his [Soros’s] positions on decriminalizing sex crimes, closing jails and prisons, and eliminating bail.” Roe added that the Democrat candidate is “committed to not enforcing what she calls ‘quality of life crimes’ like breaking and entering and other things that are not necessarily violent crimes.”
Jones-Wright made a guest appearance at the shadowy, Soros-cofounded Democracy Alliance’s grant-making conference last fall, participating in a panel discussion titled, “Prosecutor Races – Winning Big in 2018?” The Democracy Alliance is a donors’ collaborative whose members secretly fund left-wing political infrastructure projects, such as think tanks, leadership institutes, and activist groups. Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche, a former Soros lieutenant, wrote in a letter to conference attendees that President Trump’s victory a year ago was “the most cataclysmic election of modern history.”
Jones-Wright refused to comment on what she did at the Democracy Alliance shindig but told the Free Beacon she was “thrilled” to have won the backing of “one of the most generous and progressive donors in the country.”
“People talk a lot about the need to close the gap between the rich and the poor, but George Soros puts his money where his values are,” she said.
“It brings a megaphone to the message of true justice and allow communities that have been marginalized by the status quo to have a shot at representation,” she said. “Criminal justice reform is getting the attention it deserves as a life and death issue for communities.”
On this point Jones-Wright is correct. Criminal justice reform is indeed a life and death issue for communities, but not in the way she means it.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared May 10, 2018, at FrontPageMag.