Young Dutch woman explains problems with open borders and multiculturalism

MUST WATCH. THIS IS BRILLIANT

Eva Vlaardingerbroek speaking in Hungary April 27 2024

Vlaardingerbroek is a journalist and politician from the Netherlands. She at present serves as a political analyst for Riks Studios. In truth, she joined the media in February 2021. This speech has apparently been removed by YouTube. On X, however, the speech remains, garnering over 50 million views in a week. @EvaVlaar on X

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How debt corrupts

The following short, easy to read paper by Ludwig von Mises is instructive, titled: The Middle of the Road Leads to Socialism. (pdf for download or online read at the link below)

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A warning to America from Paul Harvey

Mr. Harvey’s bio is below the video

“Paul Harvey was an American radio broadcaster, best known for his news and commentary programs, as well as his signature catchphrases and storytelling style. Born on September 4, 1918, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harvey began his radio career in the 1930s and went on to become one of the most widely followed radio personalities in the United States.

Harvey’s career spanned over six decades, during which he broadcast on ABC Radio Networks and reached an estimated 24 million listeners per week. He was known for his distinctive delivery, which was characterized by his firm staccato tone and his ability to convey complex information in a clear and concise manner.

Harvey’s programs, which included “News and Comment” and “The Rest of the Story,” featured a mix of news, commentary, and human interest stories. He was particularly famous for his “Rest of the Story” segments, which told intriguing and often surprising stories about people and events.

Throughout his career, Harvey received numerous awards and accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. He was also a proud veteran of World War II, serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1944.

Harvey was married to Lynne “Angel” Cooper for over 58 years, and the couple had one son, Paul Harvey Jr. He passed away on February 28, 2009, at the age of 90, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most beloved and respected radio personalities in American history.”

bio from Wikipedia

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25 ways the U.S. is being destroyed in under 2 minutes

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The darkness does not accept the light

The gospel of Saint John: I John 9-14

“The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. (9) He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him. (10) He came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him.(11) But to all who did receive Him, who believe in His name, He gave the right to become Children of God, (12) who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”(13)

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Pride?

Pride? Are you kidding me? Is there always a way to make things right?

Here is genius.

Can you handle it?

https://youtu.be/oQpFHQRbqcw

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Biden is not America’s first enfeebled president. Watch President Woodrow Wilson (Dem), the ideological founder of both the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, who was enfeebled by stroke, who failed to achieve U.S. Senate ratification of both the League and the Treaty, both his deep ideals … and the result was WWII .

https://archive.org/details/betweenthewarsreturntoisolationism_201504

28 minute documentary produced in 1978, narrated by journalist Eric Sevareid

Learn from history, or repeat the mistakes.

The video at the link below immediately precedes in chronological time the video above in the same excellent series by Eric Sevareid. In this video, progressive idealist U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (Dem) – who signed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and initially opposed vote for women and blacks … presses his European allies, who were recently victorious in WWI over Germany, into a harshly punitive Treaty of Versailles against Germany, which included impossible to repay war debts, which the led to the rise of Adolph Hitler, Nazism, and WWII only 20 years later.

Caveat Emptor

https://archive.org/details/betweenthewarsversaillesthelostpeace

If these important archived historical videos become unavailable, please let me know.

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Congressman Chip Roy of Texas Exposes How Corrupt US Government Has Become

MUST LISTEN AND WATCH:

U.S. Congressman Chip Roy

Congress Rep Chip Roy Exposes How Corrupt US Government Has Become “I’ll be damned if I’m going to empower a government to extend beyond its constitutional limits” “Government that is now tyrannically using its power to: – Go after the American people – Go after former politicians, including the former president – That is spending money we don’t have – That is using that power to regulate us to death on virtually every bill that virtually every Republican on this side of the aisle that claims to be a limited government conservative votes for Why? Because they don’t want the Fraternal Order of Police or other law enforcement organizations to come after them.” “Over the last 16 months, there’s been a battle which represents the larger war brewing within the Republican Party because unfortunately my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are so far gone, down the rabbit hole of radical progressive policies that absolutely destroy our country every single day, littering our country with regulations, littering our country with all sorts of crime, littering our country with open borders, engaging in endless wars. All of the stuff that is happening because our Democratic colleagues are frankly undermining the American dream and undermining Western civilization and undermining everything we hold dear. There’s been a battle going on for the soul of the party in the country within the Republican Party. And I want to tell you, I’m not in the majority. I’m not. Say, Chip, you’re in the majority in the House. You have a razor-thin majority. No, I’m not. I’m not in the majority. I’m in the minority. A minority of Republicans who try to wake up here and change this place rather than just campaign on it.” “I work for 750,000 Texans. I respond to them, to God, and the Constitution of the United States. I do not work for anybody in this chamber. I do not work for any organization. I don’t work for any donor. I work for the people and I work for a people who are sick and damn tired of this institution run by a bunch of people who campaign saying one thing and they get here and do another.” “34.5 trillion of debt, $1 trillion every three months. We already spend more on interest than our defense. We’re about to crack $1 trillion of interest. They say we will hit $2 to $3 trillion of interest by 2030. – Our borders are wide open – We have kids dying. We had Austin, Texas. Four more people the other night died from fentanyl poisoning. Bunch of others had to be resuscitated with Narcan. The people of Texas are continuing to deal with thousands of people pouring across the border. It’s not in the headlines right now because universities are in the headlines. But everybody in Texas who are reeling from inflation, who can’t afford a car, who can’t afford their home, who can’t afford the interest on their mortgage, who can’t afford to buy groceries, who are dealing with crime on their streets, who are dealing with open borders, they all want some sort of sanity coming out of this institution. And what do we do? What do Republicans do in all of their infinite wisdom? We fund more of it. We fund the Department of Homeland Security again. We give the FBI a brand new $200 million headquarters. You can’t even make this stuff up. We give more power to the intelligence community to spy on Americans. Don’t even protect Americans with warrants. You can’t even make it up.“

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An Immigration Crisis Beyond Imagining

by Todd Bensman (bio below)

Center for Immigration Studies

Read it in the original here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/an-immigration-crisis-beyond-imagining/

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 22, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1960, the Eisenhower administration began counting the number of foreign nationals “apprehended” or “encountered” by what was then called the U.S. Border Control when crossing into the U.S. over its southern border with Mexico. These figures have been published and closely monitored through the years, and there has never been anything like the numbers we are seeing now. A human tsunami of previously unfathomable size—Border Patrol has had to handle more than 7.6 million border crossers in 36 months—has smashed every record, with each year’s numbers exceeding the previous year’s record in stair-stepping fashion.

Of the over 7.6 million illegals encountered by Border Patrol since January 2021, the number allowed to stay inside the U.S. is somewhere north of five million. But with the percentage of those allowed to stay now approaching 100 percent, if current trends hold, the total allowed to remain in the U.S. under the Biden administration will reach ten million by next January.

The U.S. has experienced surges of illegal immigration in the past, but these have been brought quickly under control by implementing policies to deter, block, detain, and deport illegal immigrants. Not this time. To put the current numbers in perspective, consider that Jeh Johnson, President Obama’s Director of Homeland Security, told MSNBC that in his time in office—when the number of illegal crossings was relatively low—he considered it bad if apprehensions exceeded 1,000 a day, because anything more than that “overwhelms the system.” Over the past three years, apprehensions have averaged about 6,940 per day.

Even with a surge in illegal crossings in 2019—this was due to a legal loophole that encouraged illegals to cross with minors—the Trump administration had brought apprehensions down to between 800 and 1,500 a day in his final year in office, the lowest numbers in 45 years. Four months into the Biden administration, apprehensions spiked to about 6,000 per day. There were 2.4 million apprehensions in 2022, a daily average of 6,575. In 2023 there were three million apprehensions, a daily average of 8,219. Entering 2024, apprehensions were up to 12,000 to 15,000 per day.

The reality is even worse, because these numbers do not include the people who entered the U.S. illegally without being apprehended—sometimes referred to as “gotaways”—a number the Border Patrol estimates but does not make public. That estimate over the past three years is two million, bringing the three-year total of illegal immigrants to ten million—a number equivalent to the population of Greater London or Greater Chicago.

But these are just numbers. Who are these people? They are internationally diverse: 45 percent come from 170 countries outside the traditional origin countries of Mexico and Central America. Many are unaccompanied minors: 448,000 to date. More than 330 as of November 2023 are on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. Many are murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and violent criminals. More than a million have been lawfully ordered deported by judges in the U.S. but remain in our country regardless. The dismissal by the executive branch of our government of hundreds of thousands of cases of immigration law violations is unprecedented.

It is worth noting some other firsts: Mexico’s crime syndicates and their paramilitary forces have never earned so much money from cross-border smuggling, and it is reported that their proceeds from human smuggling are surpassing those from drug smuggling for the first time. Never before have the Border Patrol’s 19,000 agents been ordered to abandon vast stretches of the border to conduct administrative intake duty. Never have so many immigrants died to take advantage of policies that all but guarantee quick release into the U.S. Never has our government explicitly refused to enforce immigration laws requiring detention and deportation of illegal immigrants on the grounds that those requirements are cruel and inhumane—instead adopting ad hoc policies aimed at providing “safe, orderly, and humane pathways” into the U.S. for illegal border crossers. And never has there been anything like the current conveyor-belt policy to distribute millions of illegals throughout the American interior.

This crisis is not the result of incompetence, but of purposeful policies. What is more, America’s establishment media has largely abdicated its duty to report on the crisis, refusing to acknowledge an event that is having a greater impact than almost any other in the world today. One can only assume that the reason for this is partisan bias: after all, the crisis can easily be traced to an identifiable moment in time—Inauguration Day 2021.

Prior to that day, the Trump administration had brought the southern border largely under control using four key policies.

  1. Diplomatic Big Sticks: The U.S. gained Mexico’s cooperation by threatening ruinous trade tariffs of up to 28 percent on Mexican goods. We gained the cooperation of Central American nations by threatening to freeze U.S. foreign aid. The cooperation of these countries consisted of two things: accepting deported illegals from the U.S. and using their military and police to block incoming immigrants at their own borders.
  2. Remain in Mexico: Border Patrol was required to return apprehended immigrants immediately to Mexico, where they had to wait out the long duration of asylum processing, rather than releasing them to disappear inside the U.S.
  3. Safe Third Country: Immigrants who had passed through designated “safe third countries” (including Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico) on their way to the U.S. without applying for asylum in one of those countries were automatically deported with no chance to claim asylum in the U.S.
  4. Title 42: This pandemic-control health order required rapid deportations to Mexico, without the option to claim asylum, of all immigrants caught illegally crossing the U.S. border.

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden promised to undo Trump policies within the first 100 days, to include ending detention and deportation of illegal immigrants. On January 20, 2021, he began to follow through. Four new U.S. policies and a new Mexican law are the chief drivers of the immigration tsunami we see today.

  1. The tariff threat against Mexico was withdrawn and full foreign aid to all Central American nations was restored, freeing these countries to end cooperation with U.S. efforts to stem illegal immigration. This marked the end of the Remain in Mexico policy.
  2. The Title 42 pandemic rapid expulsion policy was waived for most families with children under ten, for all unaccompanied minors, for pregnant women, and for many single adults from nations that would not accept deportees.
  3. Two days after the 2020 election, the Mexican government passed a law prohibiting the detention of families, pregnant women, and unaccompanied minors. It then released thousands of families from 58 Mexican detention centers ten days before President Biden took office.
  4. The Biden administration established an ad hoc Border Patrol turnstile honor system by which Title 42-exempted families and others were released into the U.S. with a promise to report back later; this catch-and-release approach came eventually to incorporate the aforementioned conveyor-belt policy, with Border Patrol delivering illegals to non-governmental organizations that would arrange bus and air travel to cities around the U.S.
  5. To give the false impression of fewer illegal crossings, the Biden administration created an ad hoc system that allowed hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to use a cell phone app called CBP One to schedule “pre-approved” entries at border crossings and U.S. airports.

Those who seek to come to the U.S. illegally are rational actors. They are more willing to pull up stakes and come when they think the effort and expense will pay off. The typical cost for the dangerous journey is $10,000 per person paid to smugglers. Few will take the gamble when the odds are against them. It’s a different matter when the odds move dramatically in favor of success as they did in January 2021.

Toward the end of the Trump administration, Border Patrol used Title 42 to deport nearly 90 percent of apprehended illegals. The Biden administration immediately reduced that number to 60. By 2023, Title 42 deportations were down to 35 percent. And on May 12, 2023, the Biden administration formally ended Title 42, and with it all instant expulsions. U.S. intelligence had predicted that ending Title 42 would lead to between 14,000 and 18,000 crossings a day, and that prediction turned out to be right. As I recently reported, it appears that the Biden administration recently took steps to reduce these numbers—most likely in response to public outrage in an election year—though it remains to be seen how long this will last.

It is too early to gauge the full impact of the ongoing settlement of millions of illegal foreign nationals in the U.S. We know that the initial financial cost is high—$400 billion, by one estimate, to feed, house, clothe, and resettle the illegals who have been allowed to stay. Then there is the burden placed on public school districts that have no choice but to take in millions of new children who often speak no English and whose educations are not commensurate with those of their schoolmates. It is probably not coincidental that hospital systems across the nation have fallen deep into the red since the great mass migration crisis began. And large cities across the nation are looking to Washington for help with unfunded and unexpected fiscal burdens reaching into the tens of billions to care for the hundreds of thousands showing up with hands out.

Expense, of course, is only one part of the equation in terms of impact. Public safety, criminal justice, and national security systems face unprecedented new burdens as the personal histories and criminal backgrounds of most of the millions allowed easy entry are unknown and, often, unknowable. Some percentage will commit crimes and—in addition to the often horrendous effects on the victims of their crimes—increase the load on our already over-burdened courts and prisons. One prays not, but some may also commit acts of terrorism. Last but not least, this great influx will increase joblessness and put immense downward pressure on wages for American workers.

It is not rocket science to figure out how to solve the immigration crisis. Nor is it hard to tell whether a politician is serious when he proposes a solution—one can simply ask whether the proposal will increase or decrease the odds that an aspiring illegal immigrant will decide to make the significant effort and financial sacrifice. For instance, in the ongoing standoff in Texas, placing razor wire at the border as the Texas Governor ordered done will clearly decrease the odds, and removing the razor wire as the Biden administration seeks to do will increase the odds. Similarly, any politician who proposes a solution that begins by granting amnesty to illegals currently in the U.S. is increasing the odds and not serious.

There are two essential steps we must take to begin to solve the border crisis:

  1. Enforce current immigration law, specifically the requirements under the Immigration and Nationality Act to detain and deport illegal entrants.
  2. Restore the threat of trade tariffs on Mexican goods to ensure Mexico’s cooperation with reinstituting the Remain in Mexico policy, forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their asylum claims are processed.

Three additional steps will help to solve the problem:

  1. Withdraw from the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees treaty, which requires the U.S. to meet outdated standards for handling asylum claimants; then institute an asylum law that ends the current catch-and-release system and requires that an asylum claim first be made in a suitable departure or transit country, such as Mexico.
  2. Put diplomatic and financial pressure on Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico to implement their own policies of detention and deportation of foreign nationals who are in those countries illegally.
  3. Close loopholes in U.S. immigration law such as the Flores Settlement Agreement—which circumvents Immigration and Nationality Act requirements for detention and deportation during asylum claims and forces the release of asylum-seeking families within 21 days—and the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which requires the quick release of immigrant minors if they are from anywhere but Mexico.

Our politicians know these actions are the ones needed. The problem is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of political will. Too many of our elected leaders have selfish reasons to let the border crisis continue, no matter what their constituents demand. Whether they will be able to continue in their inaction is in the hands of the American people.

Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He earned a B.A. from Northern Arizona University, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri, and an M.A. in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School. A former counterterrorism programs specialist with the Texas Department of Public Safety, he worked for 23 years as a journalist, including for The Dallas Morning News, CBS, and Hearst Newspapers, and had assignments as a foreign correspondent in over 30 countries. A recipient of two National Press Club Awards, he writes for numerous publications, including Homeland Security Today, the New York PostThe Federalist, and The National Interest. He is the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in

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Rogue Prosecutors and the Rise of Crime, by Cully Stimson

bio below

Published in Imprimis, March 24, 2024, Vol 53, Number 3. Link below.

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on March 11, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes.

But what happens when district attorneys—members of their states’ executive branches—refuse to execute the laws of the land? We are witnessing the results today in blue cities across America.

Approximately 90 percent of criminal cases in the U.S. are handled by the 2,300 elected district attorneys spread across 3,143 counties. The rest are prosecuted by U.S. attorneys operating under the Department of Justice. Until recently, elected county district attorneys upheld their end of the social contract by firmly and fairly enforcing state criminal laws and protecting citizens’ rights. Regardless of party affiliation, these gatekeepers of the criminal justice system did their job. Over the last 30 years, they played a critical role in driving down crime rates, which peaked in 1992, by prosecuting violent criminals, while at the same time creating thousands of alternatives to incarceration, such as drug courts, domestic violence courts, mental health courts, and other highly successful programs.

That changed in 2015 with the launching of the George Soros-funded “progressive prosecutor” movement. This movement is animated by two beliefs. The first is that the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist. The second is that the only way to fix the system is to dismantle it by replacing law-and-order district attorneys with pro-criminal and anti-police district attorneys. The sick irony of this movement is that in the areas where it has prevailed, the most harm has been done to the racial minorities whose interests it purports to represent.

Origins of the Movement

The progressive prosecutor movement—more accurately called the rogue prosecutor movement—is the predictable outgrowth of efforts by earlier Marxist radicals to alter or destroy the American way of life. At its root is the belief that our country and its institutions, including capitalism, are racist. One of the early leaders of the movement to abolish prisons is the infamous Angela Davis, now in her 80s, who in her 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, equated prisons to modern-day slavery. “The prison,” she wrote, “has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited”; throwing people into prison, she continued, “relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

Patrisse Kahn-Cullors and Alicia Garza (a.k.a. Alicia Schwartz), co-founders of Black Lives Matter, have also had an enormous influence. Cullors, a militant radical and convicted felon, is a protégé of the director of the Labor Community Strategy Center, whose purpose is to build an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist united front. Garza said at an international gathering of Marxists in 2015: “It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism. And it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression and gender oppression.” During a 2017 PBS interview, Garza heaped praise on Angela Davis for her work exposing the “carceral state”—i.e., a state in which people are incarcerated in prisons—and called for its dismantling.

The involvement in this movement of billionaire George Soros, who had been funding liberal causes for years, can be traced to his hiring of attorney Whitney Tymas in 2015. Tymas, who had worked as a public defender and prosecutor, was connected to the Vera Institute of Justice, where she focused on “the role of prosecutors in perpetuating racial disparity.” There she met the ACLU’s Chloe Cockburn, who was working to end “mass incarceration,” and they discussed the role of prosecutors, the low visibility of elections for county district attorneys, and the fact that most people don’t even know who their local D.A. is.

As opponents of the death penalty, Tymas and Cockburn hatched a plan to elect anti-death penalty prosecutors and persuaded Soros to give over $1 million to groups that were successful in electing such district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi. Eventually, that modest aim—to unseat pro-death penalty prosecutors—grew into a national movement with a more ambitious goal. Emily Bazelon, New York Times Magazine staff writer and Soros media fellow, summed up the goal in terms of “mak[ing] the system operate differently” by electing “prosecutors who will open the locks” of prisons. Rachel Barkow, a law professor and former member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission who supports the rogue prosecutor movement, summed up its goal as follows: “to reverse-engineer and dismantle the criminal justice infrastructure.”

This well-funded and organized movement is not about liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican, or black versus white. It is about power.

From the start, the movement focused on the fact that prosecutors, not police, are the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. District attorneys decide whether to file charges and which charges to file. By replacing traditional prosecutors with attorneys who see defendants as victims, it would be possible to “reverse-engineer” and “dismantle” the existing criminal justice system.

It is no coincidence that Soros, the various political action committees that he controls or funds, and his wealthy far-Left allies have given huge financial support to rogue prosecutor candidates in deep blue cities. They target these cities because their electorates are not paying close attention to down-ballot races and can be misled through a bombardment of often misleading advertisements.

Over the past decade, Soros has spent more than $40 million on campaigns to elect rogue prosecutors. One group has estimated that he has donated as much as $1 billion to the cause, if policy infrastructure, media relations, sponsored academic and think tank papers, lobbying campaigns, and grassroots organizing are taken into account. Other billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, and Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, have also generously contributed to the cause.

The Playbook

One of the hallmarks of the rogue prosecutor movement has been its usurpation of the constitutional role of state legislatures. Once elected, rogue prosecutors refuse to prosecute entire categories of crimes that are on the books in their states, justifying their refusal by claiming “prosecutorial discretion.” But in fact, their refusal to prosecute crimes violates the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government and distorts the entire legal system.

Prosecutorial discretion is not limitless. The principle behind it requires the enforcement of laws except in cases when prosecutors believe in good faith that an applicable law is unconstitutional. It does not give prosecutors the power to redefine crime and punishment. By refusing to prosecute entire categories of crime, they are in effect repealing criminal statutes—acting in place of the legislature. This is prosecutorial nullification, not discretion.

Valid prosecutorial discretion takes many forms, but when we allow for the chronic violation of law, we erode the foundation of our cities and civilization—and respect for the rule of law evaporates.

Today, there more than 70 rogue prosecutors across the country. They represent more than 72 million people, or one in five Americans, and they proudly refuse to prosecute most misdemeanors, claiming that these are essentially harmless “quality of life” crimes that divert scarce resources. To take one example, Rachael Rollins, the former district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), posted a list of 15 misdemeanors her office would not prosecute, including trespassing, shoplifting, larceny under $250, disturbing the peace, receiving stolen property, operating a vehicle with a suspended or revoked license, wanton or malicious destruction of property, and possession with intent to distribute illegal drugs.

Other rogue prosecutors have followed suit. George Gascon, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, issued a written directive to his 1,000 prosecutors detailing the 13 misdemeanors that “shall be declined or dismissed before arraignment and without conditions” unless certain exceptions or other “factors” exist. In the same directive, he said it is not “an exhaustive list,” and that each prosecutor has the discretion to decline any of the hundreds of other misdemeanors in the California penal code that fall within the “spirit” of his directive.

Two weeks into the job, Kim Foxx of Chicago, the first big city Soros-funded rogue prosecutor, unilaterally raised the bar for prosecuting felony shoplifting from $300 per incident to $1,000 per incident, essentially declaring open season on retail stores. Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, San Francisco’s former district attorney Chesa Boudin, New York City’s Alvin Bragg, and others have acted similarly, contributing to the tsunami of shoplifting and organized theft from retail stores and pharmacies to national chains and family-run stores. Not surprisingly, many stores in these cities have closed.

Krasner was elected to office in Philadelphia in 2018 with the help of $1.7 million from Soros-funded groups. He celebrated on election night by calling himself a “public defender with power.” The first day in office he fired 31 experienced violent crimes prosecutors, referring to them as “ticks.” This is common practice among the rogue prosecutors, who replace career prosecutors with public defenders or law students who sympathize with defendants and view the police suspiciously.

In addition to not prosecuting misdemeanors, rogue prosecutors often reduce felonies to misdemeanors and limit the number of charges a prosecutor can bring in a case to one, even though a suspect may have committed multiple offenses. One of Gascon’s most controversial directives in Los Angeles prohibits prosecutors from adding sentencing enhancements or allegations that would support such enhancements to an indictment—even though in some circumstances, California law requires prosecutors to do so. Prosecutors working in Gascon’s office cannot allege any three- or five-year priors, add gang enhancements, file three-strikes allegations, or allege special circumstances that would result in a sentence of life without parole or the death penalty.

In many cities, young gang recruits commit violent felonies to prove their “street cred.” Yet most rogue prosecutors refuse to prosecute violent teenagers as adults, instead sending them to juvenile court, where the worst punishment they can get is juvenile detention until they turn 21.

One of the most pernicious policies to come out of the rogue prosecutor movement is the refusal to ask for cash bail, which represents a guarantee by a defendant (or by a person acting on behalf of a defendant) that the defendant will show up for trial. The amount required for bail varies by jurisdiction and by crime. Those who cannot afford to post bail remain in custody pending trial. But district attorneys including Foxx, Gascon, and Boudin have directed their prosecutors not to ask for cash bail in many cases. And they do not seem bothered by the fact that this has led to additional crimes, including murder.

Predictable Results

Crime rates have exploded in the cities that have elected rogue prosecutors.

In the five years before 2018, when Larry Krasner was elected in Philadelphia, there was an average of 271 homicides per year. Since 2018, there has been an average of 457 per year—of which 83 percent of the victims were black. Non-fatal shootings have risen from an average of 1,047 per year to 1,588 per year; aggravated assault while armed with a handgun went from 2,209 per year to 3,116 per year; retail thefts went from 7,412 per year to 9,084 per year; and auto theft went from 5,691 to 8,665 per year.

In Chicago, in the six years before Kim Foxx became state’s attorney for Cook County in 2017, there was an average of 510 homicides per year. That number rose to 660 in her first year, and through 2022 it averaged 666 per year—with over 75 percent of the victims being black.

To put this carnage into perspective, between 2003 and 2010, there were 3,481 Americans killed in action in Iraq, an average of 435 per year. In the war in Afghanistan, between 2001 and 2014, there were 1,833 Americans killed in action, an average of 141 per year. Chicago’s annual murder rate dwarfs these figures. It is not an exaggeration to say that parts of Chicago, on any given weekend, have become domestic war zones.

***

Although the rogue prosecutor movement is incredibly well funded, it is showing signs of electoral vulnerability. Voters in blue cities who were initially persuaded to vote for “reform minded” candidates who talked about “reimagining” the criminal justice system and eliminating so-called mass incarceration, are increasingly coming to their senses given the harsh reality of rising crime rates.

Voters in Baltimore and San Francisco have ousted rogue prosecutors Marilyn Mosby and Chesa Boudin, respectively. Ethically challenged rogue prosecutors Kim Gardner of St. Louis and Rachael Rollins of Boston have had to resign from their posts. George Gascon has barely survived two recall petitions in Los Angeles and most recently received only 25 percent of the primary vote in a field of eleven candidates.

The lesson for voters across America is to pay close attention to “low visibility” local races—such as district attorney races, which directly impact public safety—to protect their communities against the kind of devastation we see in so many of America’s once great cities.

Read the original here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/rogue-prosecutors-and-the-rise-of-crime/

Join me in contributing to Hillsdale College if you can.

Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, is free by mailed hardcopy or by email or their website.


Charles “Cully” Stimson
 is deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, manager of the National Security Law Program, and a senior advisor to the president at The Heritage Foundation. A graduate of Kenyon College, he received his J.D. from the George Mason University School of Law. He served in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps for 30 years, including three tours on active duty, and has served as a prosecutor in San Diego and in Maryland and as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. He is co-author, with Zack Smith, of Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.

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