By Roger L. Simon
It’s darkly ironic that roughly the same time Attorney General William Barr called out George Soros for the billionaire’s financing of the campaigns of “progressive” (in his view anyway) district attorneys throughout the country, we had yet another blood bath in Chicago.
From the Daily Mail:
“Thirteen people were shot and wounded, four of them critically, in a mass shooting at a large memorial gathering early Sunday in Chicago’s South Side.”
“The event was to honor the birthday of gunshot victim Lonell Irvin, a 22-year-old man who was killed in April during a carjacking attempt.”
Barr on Martha MacCullum’s The Story:
“There’s this recent development [where] George Soros has been coming in, in largely Democratic primaries where there has not been much voter turnout and putting in a lot of money to elect people who are not very supportive of law enforcement and don’t view the office as bringing to trial and prosecuting criminals but pursuing other social agendas. They have started to win in a number of cities and they have, in my view, not given the proper support to the police.”
Barr went on to note that such elections have led police to believe the municipalities don’t “have their backs.”
The attorney general—in many ways Soros’ opposite—has just launched a crime-reduction operation in major cities from Detroit to Baltimore with respect for law enforcement as a given.
Soros, for his part, may be playing out a personal psychodrama that stems from a teenage role in the Holocaust—he helped his lawyer father confiscate the goods of his fellow Jews for the Nazis—for which, as he declared on Sixty Minutes, he insists he has no guilt or shame.
This is the man, remember, who began his road to riches by shorting the British pound, irrespective of the consequences for millions of citizens of that country.
Whether expiating his guilt or not, Soros did begin his political activity in a laudable direction, using his copious funds to help with the democratization of Eastern Europe. But soon enough he was turning left, far left, to the extent that he is now using that bankroll to turn social justice warriors into district attorneys. (If you want a sense of where that will lead, take a look at today’s college campuses where the social justice warriors rule.)
Lately, those criticizing Soros have been accused of anti-Semitism. As a Jew, and the author of two Holocaust-related films, I find that, to put it mildly, offensive.
But Soros is only tangentially the point here. The real problem is what to do about events like the one that just happened in Chicago and that seem to occur in that city and some others on a regular basis.
The flag of racial justice is always waved, but we have to ask—who are the actual racists here? The ones handcuffing the police and enabling violence in those communities or the police themselves? (A new peer-reviewed study shows police are not more likely to shoot and kill minority suspects.)
Sure, there are bad cops—from the precinct level to, we now learn, the executive offices of the FBI. And they should be rooted out and punished to the full extent of the law.
But the average cop is not that way. He or she is a working-class person devoting his or her life at mediocre pay to keep their community safe, often at great risk to themselves. To oppose them is to be in essence reactionary while telling yourself in some self-congratulatory manner that you are progressive.
When I see the anti-cop fever today, I am reminded of my youth at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, hearing the ad infinitum shouts of “Off the pig!” Of course it was middle-class, even upper-middle and upper-class, kids that were yelling that.
Sometimes, in honest moments, we asked ourselves what we’d do if we were being robbed or attacked? “Call a hippie!” we exclaimed in unison. We all knew that was a joke.
The same joke still applies.
Senior Political Analyst Roger L. Simon’s new novel “The GOAT” is available in Kindle, paperback, hardback, and audio editions.
