Fox News host Tucker Carlson has ripped into American-Hungarian investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros, accusing him of using his wealth to quietly “remake” American society.
George Soros was reported to have ploughed over $3 million into district-attorney campaigns in several states in 2016, supporting progressive candidates who would back a criminal justice reform.
“Once elected, these candidates have ended cash bail, treated felonies as misdemeanours and sometimes ignored some crimes entirely,” Carlson said.
He added that Soros’ efforts were on display in Philadelphia, where Democratic candidate Larry Krasner was elected district attorney in 2017. Incidentally, he has reportedly received $1.7 million from Soros in donations.
Larry Krasner’s Republican contender at the time lamented that an “outside individual”, Soros, who “knows nothing” about public safety in Philadelphia, was dishing out massive amounts of cash. She referred to Krasner as a “far-left candidate who has never prosecuted a criminal case in his 30-year career as a criminal defence attorney” and who sued the Philadelphia police over 75 times.
Carlson argued that the consequences of Soros’ involvement and Krasner’s election were statistically bad for Philadelphia.
“In the city of Philadelphia, Soros backed Larry Krasner and the murder rate there is the highest that it has been in a decade,” he said.
According to government data, there were 351 murders in Philadelphia in 2018, up 12 per cent since the previous year and the most since 2007. Police statistics indicated that almost a third of the homicides were drug-related.
Carlson spoke with William McSwain, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
McSwain and Krasner have clashed over the case of a gunman who shot and nearly killed a beer deli owner last year with an AK-47. Under a plea deal, the man was sentenced to 3-and-a-half to 10 years with parole possible at any time after prosecution dropped attempted murder charges against him − a sentence many critics deemed lenient.
McSwain told Carlson that “Philadelphia is the laboratory for where these experiments in Soros-funded prosecutors are playing out.”
“We can look at the data and we can see what has happened to Philadelphia,” he said. “Homicides have skyrocketed, shootings have skyrocketed, the worst kinds of violent crime have really gone up.”
Soros advocates for the reduction of the incarcerated population and perceived racial disparities in sentencing. In 2014, his Open Society Foundations awarded $50 million in grants to the American Civil Liberties Union, which seeks to end mass incarceration and introduce alternatives to incarceration for some categories of convicts.
McSwain maintained that Soros is attempting to implement a “radical agenda”, but doesn’t have enough public support, which is necessary to get a piece of legislation through.
That’s why, according to him, the billionaire takes what he called an “illegitimate, anti-democratic shortcut by trying to purchase [district attorney] elections” and push forward criminal justice reform through his protégés.