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Democrats Yell ‘Do Something!’ On Guns While Their Prosecutors and Policies Create Our Culture of Crime


REPORTED BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JUNE 08, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/08/democrats-yell-do-something-on-guns-but-their-prosecutors-and-policies-create-our-culture-of-crime/

crime at Robb Elementary School, Joe Biden visits after Uvalde shooting

Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, so our crime wave is a consequence of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice.

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Since a spate of recent shootings, Democrats led by President Joe Biden have been busy exploiting the tragedies to call for more gun control, go after the “gun lobby” bogeyman, and yell that we must “do something!” about firearm-related crime. They’ve been clear that they aren’t interested in talking about effective solutions that don’t involve gun-grabbing, so they probably also don’t want to talk about who’s responsible for America’s unsettling crime wave: the left.

Meanwhile, as of late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected that San Francisco voters had handily recalled left-wing District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose soft-on-crime policies wreaked havoc on the California city.

While a prosecutor recall might seem disconnected from an uptick in mass shootings and subsequent gun-control chatter, the two are intertwined. Just as the humanitarian crisis at the border is the predictable result of the left’s open-borders policies, our crime wave is the inevitable result of their anti-punitive philosophy of criminal justice. And the biggest culprits are progressive prosecutors like Boudin who champion Democrats’ policies and have been installed across the country after being bankrolled by left-wing radicals like George Soros and other groups.

Prosecutors Who Don’t Prosecute

According to a new report out from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), Soros alone has poured a staggering $40 million into prosecutor races to help elect 75 leftists that have contributed to the crime wave, and he’s just one of many billionaires working to destroy law and order, influence elections, control the media, and otherwise destroy the country.

The left and its skeptics continue to use guns as a scapegoat and say there’s no direct correlation between left-wing prosecutorial philosophies and crime, but the evidence suggests otherwise. According to the LELDF report, more than 40 percent of the roughly 22,500 homicides in 2021 — so more than 9,000 — happened in these 75 district attorneys’ jurisdictions, which accounted for more than one-third of last year’s violent crimes and property crime.

These DAs’ decisions produce consequences even in the areas they don’t oversee, however, since there’s nothing keeping released offenders in the prosecutors’ jurisdictions. Light sentences, low cash bail, and other slaps on the wrist send criminals right back onto their streets and those of their neighbors.

“These radical activists now preside over 72 million Americans and 40% of US homicides,” said LELDF President Jason Johnson, noting that Soros has already spent another $1 million to date this year to boost his preferred prosecutors. “Soros is using that campaign money and the hundreds of millions more for supporting organizations to quietly transform the criminal justice system for the worse, promoting dangerous policies and anti-police narratives to advance his radical agenda.”

The country saw the effects of progressive prosecutors up close over the last holiday season. The Waukesha parade murderer didn’t need a firearm. To kill six people and injure 62 more, he needed only a vehicle, a soft-on-crime district attorney’s office that let him out on a pittance of bail, and leftist policies that “guaranteed” offenders would kill people. It’s evil like that, enabled by leftist policy failures, that expose America’s crime problem as being so much bigger than a few psychopaths with guns.

Democrats’ Progressive Dream

But the rise in crime is much bigger than Soros and 75 district attorneys too. More fundamentally, it’s the predictable result of a long list of so-called leftist policy goals and beliefs that are prevalent not only among the radicals of the left, but also among the mainstream Democrat Party.

For a particularly grotesque example, look at cities in blue bastion California — particularly Boudin’s San Francisco, where the sidewalks are littered with used needles, passed-out junkies, and homeless encampments, and street sightings of human feces number in the tens of thousands each year. Facing an explosion in shoplifting, retailers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco were helpless to do anything but reduce store hours. As a Wall Street Journal article noted in October 2021, “Walgreens has closed 22 stores in [San Francisco], where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.”

That little $950 tidbit is courtesy of Democrats’ woke Proposition 47, which more than doubled the amount a person could steal before facing a felony. In other words, Prop 47 reclassified felonies as no-biggie misdemeanors. Crime in the Bay Area has gotten so bad that even Democrat Mayor London Breed was forced to admit that the left’s soft-on-crime approach has led to “all the bullsh-t that has destroyed” San Francisco.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Los Angeles experienced its highest number of homicides in 15 years, and looters ran rampant on that area’s train tracks, with some railroad companies reporting a “160% increase in criminal rail theft,” and “approximately $5 million in claims, losses and damages” to the train companies alone.

The Left’s Culture of Crime

The crime wave isn’t confined to California, though. It’s swept through Democrats’ strongholds across the rest of the country too. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote in January, New YorkD.C., and Chicago all saw ‘record-high‘ murders in 2021 while Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Louisville, Kentucky; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, ‘had their deadliest years on record.’”

And let’s not forget the scores of rioters, looters, and vandals who went unpunished after the 2020 summer of rage that resulted in billions of dollars in damages. In fact, rather than condemn them, prominent Democrats including our very own Vice President Kamala Harris helped bail out of jail those who were caught. It was Minneapolis Democrats who voted to dismantle its police department in 2020, enabling a crime wave there. And Democrat lawmakers joined the chorus of those calling to “defund the police,” only stopping when they realized that abhorrent position could hurt them politically.

This approach to law and order is to say nothing of the left’s other principles that cultivate a culture of death, such as the celebration of snuffing out human life in the womb and exploiting children as sex objects.

It’s hard to take Democrats’ tired calls for gun control seriously anyway, given their debunked talking points and faulty logic. But it’s especially disqualifying for the left when you take into account all the lawlessness and violence they enable as hallmarks of their criminal justice platforms. If voters in far-left San Francisco can see it, it’s a safe bet the rest of the country can too. America’s culture of crime belongs to Democrats, and no amount of gun control can fix it.


Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Giving Violent Criminals A Free Pass Only Punishes Innocent Americans And Rewards The Left


REPORTED BY: JORDAN BOYD | MARCH 18, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/18/giving-violent-criminals-a-free-pass-only-punishes-innocent-americans-and-rewards-the-left/

crime rewarded by progressives

Gerald Brevard III, a 30-year-old known criminal who was released early from prison because of Democrat criminal justice policies, was arrested this week after he allegedly went on a multi-state shooting spree targeting homeless people.

Brevard faced felony charges in 2020 when he tried to abduct and defile one woman and burgle another in Herndon, Va. Despite the fact that Brevard had “88 prior criminal charges dating back to 2009,” leftist Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano, a former Obama-era federal prosecutor, reduced the abduction charge to a misdemeanor. This allowed the criminal to return to the streets after serving possibly as few as five months of an 11-month prison sentence.

Because Descano was preoccupied with reducing sentences for violent criminals under his “progressive justice” initiative, Brevard walked free and used his freedom to allegedly attack multiple vulnerable people that social justice preeners such as Descano claim to prioritize.

Brevard was released because a Democrat attorney saw him as his next social justice cause. The criminal’s freedom, however, appears to have cost the lives of several innocent people.

A similar incident happened in Dallas last week when leftist Judge Chika Anyiam lowered violent criminal Julio Guerrero’s bond from $2 million to $500,000, which only requires a $50,000 down payment for release from jail.

Guerrero was arrested last year after allegedly shooting at police officers during an hours-long standoff. He was accused of killing a father of five children after they rubbed elbows at a club, and of shooting a 3-year-old girl in the head in a fit of road rage days later.

Guerro’s attorney Tom Cox, who has donated at least $5,000 to Anyiam since 2015, quickly posted the bail. After backlash from law enforcement and other members of her Texas community, Anyiam, who brags on her website about going soft on crimeraised the bond for the murder chargem but only to $600,000.

“These irresponsible decisions, do not make our cities safer,” Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia tweeted.

Unfortunately for innocent, law-abiding, and vulnerable Americans who count on the justice system to keep them safe, anecdotes like these are increasing and will only get worse. Pro-criminal attorneys and judges repeatedly lower penalties for offenders in the name of achieving “equity.”

Why do leftist lawyers and judges repeatedly release criminals who end up harming people? Because they profit from it.

In exchange for their reckless policies, many of these radical legal officials are showered with donations by leftist megadonors such as George Soros, who has poured millions through “pro-criminal justice” PACs into district attorney races across the country. Letting criminals onto the streets is now a lucrative business for leftist politicians, which makes them less likely to change their ways and risk losing funding.

These “criminal bail reform” activists plaguing the American justice system may claim it is humane and just to lower the bar for criminals, but true justice does not include the harm and slaughter of innocent men, women, and children.

Remember when Darrell Brooks Jr. allegedly used his SUV to plow over a crowd in Waukesha, Wis., killing six people and injuring 62 others just days after being let out on bail? That decision wasn’t humane, just, or equitable. Even the Democrat district attorney in Wisconsin admitted that his progressive policies were “guaranteed” to kill someone someday.

Giving violent criminals a free pass only punishes innocent Americans. It’s neither humane nor just to sacrifice law-abiding lives on the premise that releasing creeps from jail is more humane than keeping them locked up. If they truly cared about people, Democrats wouldn’t allow their failed criminal justice experiment which has already cost too many lives to continue.


Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordangdavidson.

Wisconsin Parents Join National Crusade To Wrestle Their Kids Back From Left-Wing Government Schools


Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 11, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/wisconsin-parents-join-national-crusade-to-wrestle-their-kids-back-from-left-wing-government-schools/

Wisconsin parents town hall with Rebecca Kleefisch

WAUKESHA, Wis. — The banquet hall buzzed with impassioned chatter as parents, friends, first-time school board candidates, and other locals congregated for a Saturday morning town hall that felt more like a strategy session. After two major public school districts, Milwaukee and Madison, shut down yet again and blamed COVID, parents were fired up. Talk of critical race theory, leftist administrators, mask mandates, and school shutdowns hummed through conversations with the kind of first-hand animation that could propel once-complacent Wisconsin parents into a movement of activists capable of unleashing an unquenchable red wave in the Dairy State. They saw what happened in Virginia, and now they want to bring it home.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who’s now running to unseat Democrat Gov. Tony Evers in November, organized the event. Although Kleefisch is in campaign mode, the overarching energy of the gathering wasn’t as much, “Help get me elected,” as it was, “How can we get more of you elected?”

Calling All Parents

“We need more parent activists. This is that important,” Kleefisch said while moderating a panel of concerned moms-turned-activists.

One of those moms was Scarlett Johnson, a mother of five who, after discovering the apathy in the Mequon-Thiensville School Board, decided she needed to run for a seat.

“We just started paying closer attention,” Johnson said to the room of eager fellow parents. “I hadn’t attended school board meetings. I vote, but I never voted for a school board candidate.”

But that all changed this last year. Johnson said she and a group of other moms started getting together and doing their research. When they did, they found toxic racial propaganda in their kids’ classrooms, such as teachers assigning books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” The moms started making phone calls and sending emails to school officials. “It started a movement,” Johnson said.

In the course of her run for school board, Johnson said she’s been called a white supremacist and received death threats, but noted, “I’m still here, I’m still fighting.”

Kylee Zempel/The Federalist

No Room for Apathy

Parents aren’t just fired up about nefarious actors in the school systems, however. They’re also on the lookout for complacent school board members and district officials. Another mom on the panel, Alyssa Pallow, is getting involved simply because her school board doesn’t seem to really know anything about dangerous ideologies such as critical race theory. Kleefisch agreed, stressing to parents that they don’t have to wait to get involved until one of their kids cracks a textbook or assignment that makes their jaw drop open. “It can be that you’re horrified by the apathy,” Kleefisch said.

“It snowballs,” said another mom, Amber Schroeder, regarding parent activism. “You will inspire people to get involved.” Schroeder and Johnson worked together in the Mequon-Thiensville district to organize a recall election of four school board members.

“People are afraid to do it alone,” Schroeder continued. “Once you realize you’re not alone, a lot more people get involved. … If you build it, they will come.”

A Time for Choosing

Other parents have been shocked to watch their children become casualties in the left’s Covid crackdowns. Mattie Allen stressed the importance of school choice after her kids had a horrible academic year due to lockdowns. Allen’s son spent his first year in school doing it virtually, “which was horrendous,” she said. Her daughter spent one year at Milwaukee Public Schools, where her GPA plummeted, and it was “one of the worst years.” Thanks to school choice, they’re now in a charter school with just one grade per class. “Their school is so open, and I love it,” Allen said, noting that her daughter’s GPA is back up, she’s on the honor roll, and she’s playing volleyball.

But some families aren’t so fortunate. One of Allen’s friends who is stuck with her kids in Milwaukee Public Schools is watching the district once again shut down. This single mom has a first-grader and a third-grader, meaning she had to switch to third shift just so she could fulfill the roles of both teacher and provider. She’s “up all day, up all night,” Allen said, getting choked up. “How do we give all moms that [school choice] option?”

[WATCH: Meet The Parents: How The Moms And Dads Of Loudoun County Took Back Virginia]

Maggie Vinopal, a mom in the Eau Claire school district, has also had enough with the COVID madness, saying school officials are weaponizing Statute 252, a state quarantine law, to punish and quarantine unvaccinated kids. Her healthy seventh-grade daughter has been quarantined four different times for a total of 14 schools days, despite coronavirus posing almost zero risk of severity to healthy children. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 is required to “isolate,” Vinopal told The Federalist. But when students come into contact with a positive case, only the unvaccinated have to “quarantine,” despite the ability of the vaccinated to contract and spread COVID.

On the very first day of school, Vinopal’s daughter was seated at the same lunch table as a vaccinated student who later tested positive and had to isolate. While the vaccinated students at the table were allowed to proceed as normal, Vinopal’s daughter was required to quarantine and provide proof of a negative test.

Jumping in the Ring

Covid nonsense like this is what inspired people like first-time Waukesha School Board member Kelly Piacsek to run. When a number of people decided to “abuse our children in the name of science, I got really mad,” said Piacsek, who is now known for holding firm on a decision to end a harmful federally-funded school lunch program in the face of vicious and dishonest attacks. “That’s what motivated me.” Running for school board is “absolutely worth it,” she told parents. “We’ve got to take this on because we have a front-row seat to the consequences.”

Piacsek inspired people like Slinger parent Bill Brewer to run for his school board. Brewer, a veteran, has lived in Slinger for approximately 18 years. He coaches youth football there and is now involved in the league’s leadership. But the school board’s apathy and lack of urgency against dangerous ideologies have prompted him to get involved.

“Marxism doesn’t come and punch you in the face in round one. It creeps in,” Brewer said.
“I just can’t have that, not for my community, not for these kids. They deserve better.”

Rebecca Kleefisch Campaign

Brewer said his strategy isn’t so much a campaign “as a giant, three-month listening tour.”

“Once I get elected, that’s not going to stop,” Brewer said.

That seems to be the Kleefisch campaign strategy too. Rather than spending two hours rattling off campaign promises, the gubernatorial candidate opened the floor on Saturday for parents to voice their concerns and asked attendees to fill out cards with the top three issues that matter to them to help guide her policy. That’s more than these weary parents have gotten from Evers, who has worked to keep parents in the dark. In December, the governor — who was the state superintendent of public instruction for a decade — vetoed education transparency legislation that would have required districts to publish classroom materials online. This anti-parent action from Evers followed his school-closing impulse that kept kids home and tanked their academic advancement.

“We need you to be successful and aggressive,” Kleefisch rallied, encouraging the parents fighting in local races. If the energy in the Waukesha banquet hall was any indication, these parents won’t have any problem with that.


Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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