Tag Archive for: George Gascon

Movement Grows to Recall Progressive District Attorneys

According to the advocacy group “Fair and Just Prosecution,” the goal of progressive criminal justice reform is to create “a justice system grounded in fairness, equity, compassion, and fiscal responsibility.” Starting around 2016, this movement picked up momentum across the U.S., primarily by funding candidates in County District Attorney elections. There are now dozens of cities and counties with elected district attorneys that are enforcing massive shifts in prosecutorial conduct. Reforms were needed. But so far, they have been a disaster.

While the most visible source of funding for these district attorney candidates is the notorious George Soros, the movement is much bigger than one billionaire. It taps a core belief of progressives, that America’s criminal justice system is punitive and disproportionately targets nonwhite and low income communities. It also taps into a sentiment shared by progressives and libertarians, that “victimless” crimes, primarily drug related, should not be crimes at all.

It would be a mistake to assume that no legitimate motivations inform these progressive district attorneys and their donors. Along with the careerism, hatred for American institutions, desire to wreak havoc on our society, and even well-intentioned but hideously misapplied desire for social justice, there are problems that need to be fixed and ideas that ought to be tried. But so far, in every city and county where progressive district attorneys have taken office, crime is rising, with entire neighborhoods awash in filth, chaos, and lawlessness.

Places where progressive district attorneys are now elected and in office include the major cities of St. Louis, Chicago, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Austinas well as Columbus, Ohio, Aurora, Colorado, and Michigan’s Oakland County, a suburb of Detroit. But California, naturally, is where the progressive prosecutors have achieved the most reach.

Four major counties in California now have progressive prosecutors, Contra Costa, San Joaquin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The San Francisco District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, has a resume that suggests radical “reforms” are in his DNA. This headline, posted by NBC News when he was elected in December 2019, says it all: “Parents guilty of murder and raised by radicals, Chesa Boudin is San Francisco’s next district attorney.”

Boudin has lived up to his stereotypes, to the point where even San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, who would ordinarily be herself considered radical, has become disillusioned. Quoting from an article published by the San Francisco Chronicle in early 2021, “Breed said – without naming anyone – that the criminal justice system could have prevented the death by holding McAlister accountable for his crimes.”

Breed was referring to Troy McAlister, who “allegedly ran a stoplight in San Francisco’s SoMA neighborhood in a stolen car, striking and killing two pedestrians. Police say McAlister had a gun, and methamphetamine and alcohol in his system. McAlister had a lengthy rap sheet dating back years and was released from prison after completing a sentence for robbery in April. Since then, he had been arrested several times, including as recently as December 20, according to the S.F. Chronicle, but his arrests were referred to his parole officer, and he was not charged.”

This is “restorative justice” at work in America’s cities. Mayor Breed went on to say “the criminal justice system in our city has failed.”

If San Francisco has acquired infamy in recent years for ungovernable, crime ridden neighborhoods, a homeless invasion, thousands of heroin addicts, and an app – cleverly named “Snapcrap” – that tracks the incidences of human feces on city sidewalks, its counterpart in Southern California boasts all these same dismal attributes, but on a much larger scale. Los Angeles County hosts the largest unified trial court system in America, and their newly elected district attorney, George Gascon, is working from the same progressive playbook.

As reported in Politico, “Within weeks of taking office, Gascón instructed prosecutors to stop seeking the death penalty and trying juveniles as adults. He ordered a halt to most cash bail requests and banned prosecutors from appearing at parole hearings. Most controversially, he barred prosecutors from seeking various sentencing enhancements.”

What on earth does Gascon think will be the consequences of these moves? Even before progressive district attorneys were elected in some of California’s biggest counties, it was almost impossible to effectively police the state. The turning point in California’s progressive assault on law enforcement was the passage of Prop. 47 in November 2014. Supported by nearly all Democratic politicians, a smattering of libertarians, the ACLU, and several unions including AFSCME and SEIU California, this ballot initiative was misleadingly marketed as the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.”

Ostensibly to empty the jails of expensively housed “nonviolent” offenders, unintended consequences were felt immediately. Five years later, the negative consequences of Prop. 47 continue to compound and intensify. Prop. 47 freed tens of thousands of felons from state prisons and county jails back into communities. It reduced to the penalty for possession of most illegal drugs including heroin and methamphetamine to a misdemeanor, and it also reduced to misdemeanor any crime where the value of property stolen doesn’t exceed $950 – even for multiple offenses.

George Gascon, with plenty of help from the hapless Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, now presides over a county that plays host to the largest homeless population in America, over 60,000 people. These permanent homeless encampments, an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, are a haven for criminal activity. And small wonder. Vagrancy, petty theft, and hard drug use are decriminalized, and now Gascon’s office is preventing effective prosecution of more serious crimes. Crime rates are soaring in Los Angeles County just as they are everywhere that progressive district attorneys have been elected. But resistance is forming.

As reported in the Los Angeles Times, several of Gascon’s “reforms” have been blocked by a L.A. County judge. In particular, the judge ruled that Gascon cannot stop prosecutors from using sentencing enhancements. This lawsuit was brought forward by the union representing L.A. prosecutors, who argued that it was a violation of state law and, among other things, made it harder to keep gang members off the streets. Now police officers are joining the rebellion, led by L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

Perhaps inspired by the unprecedented success of the recall campaign against Gavin Newsom, a nearly all volunteer effort that collected over 2.0 million signatures to force California’s governor to fight for his political life in a special election later this year, earlier this month in Los Angeles, Villanueva’s Recall George Gascon committee filed a notice of intent to collect recall signatures. If the petition is approved for circulation by the L.A. County Clerk’s office, supporters will have 160 days to gather 590,000 signatures to get a George Gascon recall on the ballot.

In California these days, recalls are contagious. In San Francisco, the Recall Chesa Boudin campaign filed notice of intent to recall on February 8, and they were approved for circulation by the San Francisco Department of Elections on March 4. Petitioners have until August 11 to collect and submit 51,325 valid signatures.

Criminal justice reform can put an end to overreliance on often coerced plea bargains and punitive incarceration. But reform doesn’t have to condemn our cities to lawlessness. As balance is restored and the electorate becomes more aware of the issues, genuine progress can be made. The injustice of harsh sentencing has to be weighed against its overall value in deterring crime. The staggering expense of incarceration, or, for that matter, the staggering expense of homeless shelters in cities riddled with corruption, has to be confronted and corrected. Not every jail has to be a supermax. Not every homeless shelter has to cost $100,000 (or more) per bed. The liberty of individuals to consume drugs has to be balanced against the rights of the people who live on the streets they’ve taken over.

If George Soros and the progressive movement he represents have done one good thing, it’s that they’ve removed district attorney elections from the backwoods of political theater. These elections, which Soros and a handful of other major donors were able to quietly dominate for the last few years, picking off city after city, are no longer obscure. Candidates, and the philosophy they intend to bring to the office of district attorney, are finally getting the scrutiny they deserve.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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George Gascon, Prop of the Techno Tyrants

As “president elect” Biden stocks his cabinet with Wall Street warmongers and big tech supremacists, all the far left slogans he simultaneously stammers his way through cannot stave off grassroots disillusionment. Belatedly, progressives are realizing that they’ve been conned, used, and abandoned; that they have more in common with the disenfranchised MAGA voters than they’d ever imagined. Corporations are taking over the world, and elected officials have become mere stage props.

As usual, it is in California where the naked power grab by woke corporatism finds its most advanced expression. How else to explain the election of George Gascon, an avatar of woke extremism, to become the next district attorney of Los Angeles County? In a bitter, hard fought campaign where Gascon’s strategy relied on demonizing the incumbent Jackie Lacy – a black female – Gascon was the recipient of millions in donations. The most notable of these donors was the notorious George Soros. But even more money came from a collection of high tech billionaires and Hollywood moguls.

The most generous among Gascon’s big tech benefactors were Netflix founder Reed Hastings and his wife Patricia Quillan. Together they contributed $2,153,000, nearly edging out Soros’s $2,250,000 to be Gascon’s biggest donors.

Whatever else one may say about high tech billionaires, they’re not stupid. Many of them have experienced extraordinary luck, since not every nerd with a college website dedicated to rating the physical attractiveness of coeds ends up parlaying that prurient diversion into a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. But only luck combined with brains, and only ambition combined with an unimaginably rigorous work ethic, enables someone to ride a concept all the way from a dorm room to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley power. Whether it comes from Zuckerberg, Hastings, or even the bedraggled Dorsey, this is smart money.

So what are they thinking? Why did California’s elite digerati join the Hollywood glitterati to support George Gascon, a man whose previous act as San Francisco’s district attorney was so destructive that even that city’s ultra liberal mayor, London Breed, declined to endorse his candidacy for Los Angeles County district attorney? Getting into the mind of someone like Reed Hastings is not easy, the man “does not comment on his personal donations,” but we have to try. Because understanding his motivation, and by extension, the motivation of all the big tech money behind the far Left, may lend coherence to what on the surface seems inexplicable.

An intriguing article by Sara Roos, published just before the election in the obscure Los Angeles Education Examiner, attempts to connect the dots. In her article entitled “Big money for pro-charter school board candidates, picks George Gascón for DA,” Roos claims the same ideology that informs the charter school movement is at work in these hotly contested races for district attorney.

Roos may be mistaken to consider charter schools a poor alternative, charters in Los Angeles Unified School District tend to outperform the traditional public schools both in terms of dollar cost per pupil and in terms of educational outcomes. LAUSD badly needs competition, so long as one monopoly isn’t replaced with another. But her larger point addresses privatization, and deserves careful consideration. She writes:

“LAUSD’s school boardroom has become a surrogate battlefield for neoliberalism, public-private partnerships and the leveraging of public goods for private gain. So, too, it would seem might the race for LAC’s District Attorney (LAC-DA) signal a new incursion on privatization in criminal justice.”

How else to explain the decision by someone like Reed Hastings to go big in support of someone like George Gascon? What Gascon is going to do, widely reported and hence not necessary to reiterate here, is dismantle current modes of law enforcement and criminal justice. But what is the end game? What is going to fill the vacuum in law enforcement and follow-up prosecutions, when crime in Los Angeles, already way up in the last few years, continues to soar?

Answers to this question point repeatedly towards either private solutions, or “public/private” solutions, or, as Roos puts it, “a vast satellite system of private vendors and service providers embedded amongst the public in competition for public dollars.”

This is already seen in the scandalous waste of public resources on privately constructed “supportive housing” for the homeless and low income residents of Los Angeles County. The average per unit cost of “supportive housing” comes in at over $500,000, with that money, all of it sourced from taxpayers, spread lavishly among “stakeholders” including the cost of government fees and permits, the operations of powerful nonprofits, and “a vast satellite system” of private-sector consultants, developers, construction companies, brokers, attorneys, and public relations firms.

This ongoing corruption, barely legal at best, does more than just deliver obscene profits to the players involved. It can also be designed to delay effective solutions to homelessness until targeted areas are ruined, and as productive residents flee, private sector developers move in to demolish and rebuild, creating additional overpriced monstrosities designated as “supportive housing.” And yes, there is a connection here to law enforcement, and there is a connection to the high tech industry as well. For starters, anyone living in housing of this nature is under constant supervision, and subject to remotely activated “lockdown.” But why stop there?

A troubling article published on December 15 by John Whitehead, president at the Rutherford Institute, explains the opportunity for big tech to take over much of the role currently relegated to law enforcement, as well as how big tech has the capacity to greatly surpass conventional law enforcement in the scope of behaviors it will monitor and control – in your home, in your car, and everywhere you go.

Entitled “Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order,” Whitehead’s article leads off with a quote from George Orwell, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” Elaborating on how that quote describes the world we’re living in today, he writes “This is not freedom. This is not even progress. This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.”

Imagine the additional trillions that Silicon Valley tech companies are going to make, as they move from addictive communications platforms to the internet of things. And every one of these things, from driverless cars to smart light bulbs, thermostats, and doorbells, will be recording everything you do. This in-turn leads to predictive policing, which in some opportunistic inversion of logic, is not the same as “profiling.”

Eventually, and by “eventually” we’re talking within the next ten years, it will be possible to monitor not just individual behavior, but individual moods if not actual thoughts. At the least, expect your body to be continuously wired to a very sophisticated version of lie detector equipment, tracking your pulse, respiration and body temperature. Incentives will be provided to encourage participation, and failure to participate will identify candidates for enhanced surveillance. In the name of combatting climate change, racism, pandemics, elections – there are no boundaries on what is necessary to keep us “safe” – not just speech, but all activity will be controlled. And to augment the defunded, reinvented police, all manner of auxiliary government and private entities will be weaponized. And augmenting these auxiliaries will be robots and drones. Resistance is futile.

What Sara Roos alludes to, the privatization and “public/private” morphing of government, connects with this even more ominous vision of Whitehead’s in two ways. First, and most obvious, this is an opportunity for profits to the high tech industry that boggle the mind. Trillions will be made. Somewhat less obvious, but if anything more important, is that we have done a poor job so far in understanding how the Bill of Rights applies to private space. The unchecked abuses we have witnessed on the monopolistic communications platforms over the past few years, and especially over the past few months, is just the beginning.

How will the Bill of Rights protect anyone, if the entire public sphere is privatized? From the playgrounds to the prisons, private ownership means house rules. Imagine straying unauthorized into a privatized space in, say, 2027, and encountering a swarm of slap drones. After you’ve awakened, if you’re lucky, from your Ketamine injection – precisely administered via a dart launched from a hovering drone – your attorney will explain how the castle doctrine now pretty much informs every square inch of planet earth.

We cannot stop technology, we can only try to manage the rollout, preserving as many of our freedoms as possible. In this context, the public sector, answerable to people instead of corporations, may be our only hope. And maybe, just maybe, Bernie Bros and Trump supporters, equally disenfranchised, equally discarded, will unite on one common principle: monopolies harm ordinary Americans no matter where they appear. When concentrations of wealth in the private sector render the public sector “monopoly” impotent, you’re looking at a paradigm shift. And new paradigms generate new politics.

Ultimately, the true clash of civilizations in the world is not between ideologies. It’s a technology-driven power struggle between Westernized nations and China. A struggle, that is, so long as Silicon Valley doesn’t sell its soul to the Chinese. Either way, and even in this broader context, George Gascon is a useful prop. The actors wielding him along with all the other elected props, are multinational corporations led by the – collectively speaking – trillionaires of Silicon Valley. Moreover, this sort of technological evolution cannot simply be stopped, even if we were willing to throw away the many good things in order to eliminate the bad.

Ultimately, the world we inhabit in a few short years will very likely be either China’s Orwellian “1984” version of techno-tyranny, or Huxley’s somewhat more benevolent “Brave New World” techno-tyranny, courtesy of Silicon Valley.

You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy. Go to work George. The world holds its breath.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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