“The idea that we need to choose between justice and safety is false,” George Soros wrote in 2022. “They reinforce each other: If people trust the justice system, it will work. And if the system works, public safety will improve.” In practice, however, Soros’ influence operation has somehow managed to comprehensively dismantle justice, safety, and trust. In practically every American community that the left-wing financier has touched, the justice system is substantially more broken than it was before.
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What is remarkable is that the Soros project — which involves flooding city and county prosecutor races with record-breaking amounts of cash, thereby stacking the deck with far-left ideologues — appears to have left a sour taste in the mouth of even the most left-wing voter bases. (Ideology is a powerful thing, but even ideology is often no match for the visceral experience of watching one’s city be transformed into a violent trash heap.) That much was evident Tuesday night, when voters in Multnomah County — the largest county in Portland, Oregon — ousted incumbent Soros prosecutor Mike Schmidt. Schmidt was handily defeated by Nathan Vasquez, a long-time Republican running on a tough-on-crime platform — no small feat in one of the most left-wing cities in the nation.
For my sins, I am a native of Portland, Oregon, and I’ve watched the city — once a quirky and eccentric town with an enormous amount of native charm — decline steeply since 2020 (when Schmidt was first elected with 77 percent of the vote). As I wrote in 2021:
Portland’s approach to governance over the past two years has been a paradox: an unholy marriage of lax prosecution of real crime and draconian crackdowns against law-abiding small-business owners and citizens. The district attorney for Multnomah County, where Portland is located, declined to prosecute 70 percent of cases related to Black Lives Matter protests last year, and the Portland Police Bureau leaves 911 callers on hold for hours. The city surpassed its all-time annual record for shootings in late September, with three months left to go in the year — and as is often tragically the case, black Portlanders were killed by shootings at twelve times the rate of white Portlanders. After the municipal government effectively stopped enforcing vagrancy laws, the homeless population exploded from about six large encampments to over 100. At the same time, Oregon has consistently led the country in public-health restrictions throughout the pandemic, with Governor Kate Brown routinely forcing businesses to close at unpredictable intervals, even after vaccines became widely available. Oregon’s outdoor mask mandate — which applied to vaccinated and unvaccinated residents alike — was the last remaining in the country, until it was finally repealed at the end of November.
Schmidt was the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of Soros dollars in the run-up to this most recent election but still lost to Vasquez by almost 10 points (as of this writing; the votes aren’t all counted yet). And Portland is only the last in a long line of defeats for the Soros progressive-prosecutor cartel. One year ago this week, Rachael Rollins resigned under the cloud of an ethics investigation from her post as the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts. That same month, Kim Gardner resigned in disgrace from her post as circuit attorney for St. Louis, Missouri, after a long line of widely criticized radical policies delivered predictably devastating results. A month prior to that, Kim Foxx announced she wouldn’t seek reelection to her office as Chicago’s top prosecutor for similar reasons. In July 2022, Baltimore state attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her primary to a more moderate, conventionally tough-on-crime challenger. In June 2022, Chesa Boudin — the infamously radical son of murderous communist revolutionaries — went down in a recall election in deep-blue San Francisco.
All these prosecutors swept into office on the back of the Soros big-dollar gravy train. And all of them promptly set about doing exactly what they were paid to do: wage a sustained war against their own police force, refuse to prosecute crime, coddle criminals while tormenting victims, and dismantle any semblance of a public order. For years, conservatives have been awestruck by the sheer amount of abuse and degradation that voters in cities like Portland and San Francisco appeared to be willing to endure. But if the past two years are any indication, even those famously left-wing populations have a breaking point. Soros and his merry band of anarchists may have just found it.
