Briefly Noted: April 2016

The riot planned and executed by the Left at the canceled Donald Trump campaign rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago on March 11 was just the latest in a long series of mob disturbances manufactured by radicals to advance their political agendas. “The meticulously orchestrated #Chicago assault on our free election process is as unAmerican as it gets,” tweeted actor James Woods. “It is a dangerous precedent.” This so-called protest and the disruptions at subsequent Trump events were carried out by activists associated with MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, all groups that have been enthusiastically embraced by Democrats and funded by radical speculator George Soros.

MoveOn, incidentally, has now officially jumped the shark, launching an over-the-top campaign that treats Trump like an American version of Hitler. In a mass email begging for money the group announced that its members voted 71 to 29 percent “to launch a major campaign to show that our country rejects Donald Trump’s hate-baiting, racism, misogyny, and violence.”

Soros is also bankrolling more conventional politicking against Trump. The billionaire recently contributed $5 million to a new super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win. The PAC’s Federal Election Commission filings indicate it is run out of the Washington, D.C. office of a Soros-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit called Center for Community Change Action (formerly called Campaign for Community Action). ACORN alumnus Deepak Bhargava is the nonprofit’s executive director, and Sixties radical Heather Booth is a member of its board. It is expected to conduct a $15 million voter-mobilization effort against Trump in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada.

Radical left-wingers want to free half the nation’s prisoners—including many violent offenders—a move that would cause an upsurge in crime rates for decades to come. Spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and bankrolled by Soros, the “end mass incarceration” movement wants to reduce the U.S. prison population by 50 percent within the next 10 to 15 years. This specific push is called the “Cut50” project. “The overuse of our criminal justice system has resulted in expanding a caste, a second class of citizens that lose their right to vote, that won’t be able to get loans to go to school, that will probably have difficulty renting an apartment and that is not healthy for our society and it’s actually compromising our safety,” bloviated the ACLU’s Alison Holcomb. Assuming there are 2 million prisoners and a roughly 70 percent recidivism rate among all released prisoners, if half of the prisoners are released and each one commits only one crime, 700,000 criminal acts that otherwise might not have happened will take place. Call it a social justice-inspired crime wave.

Black Lives Matter supporter and New York Assemblyman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn), a former Black Panther, promised riots if former NYPD officer Peter Liang receives a non-custodial sentence in the accidental shooting death of Akai Gurley. Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson (D), who like Barron and Gurley is African-American, recommended 500 hours of community service, six months of home confinement, and five years of probation. “Don’t make us bring Ferguson to New York,” Barron told an angry mob. “Am I saying we should be violent? I’m saying the system will decide.”