Soros gambled that he could swing district attorney elections by heavily funding candidates who favored his version of justice, which focuses on de-prosecution and decarceration in the name of racial equity. Prosecutors like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago, George Gascón in Los Angeles, and Alvin Bragg in New York rode Soros’s funding to victory.

In pursuing this strategy, Soros made some successful calculations and some mistakes—both leading to ruinous consequences for American cities. …

Soros’s publicly stated premise was that the de-prosecution and decarceration reforms ushered in by his prosecutors would not degrade but in fact improve safety in American cities. That belief was a major miscalculation. In poor cities, homicides have spiked, including the largest single-year increase in American history in 2020, continued escalation in 2021, and lingering high rates of murder clustered in cities with progressive prosecutors even after the end of Covid restrictions. (Apologists who blame Covid for homicide increases should note that murders were rising in cities with progressive prosecutors before the pandemic hit.)

[Are we sure it *was* a bad bet and that these outcomes were unintended? Because any depth on the issue of crime and policing in America would have predicted these outcomes, and no small number of observers *did* predict them. We could give Soros the benefit of the doubt and assume he was entirely ignorant on these issues, or we could recognize his grasp and posit that chaos and destruction was his preferred end — with the intention of creating an authoritarian, emergency-rule state. And not coincidentally, that’s exactly what we have now. — Ed]