by dap | Apr 4, 2025 | Daily Signal
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. April 3,
announced it as “Liberation Day.” And by that he meant we were going to be liberated from asymmetrical tariffs of the last 50 years. And it was going to inaugurate a new what he called “golden age” of trade parity, greater investment in the United States, but mostly, greater job opportunities and higher-paying jobs for Americans.
And yet, the world seemed to erupt in anger. It was very strange. Even people on the libertarian right and, of course, the left were very angry. The Wall Street Journal pilloried Donald Trump.
But here’s my question. China has prohibitive tariffs, so does Vietnam, so does Mexico, so does Europe. So do a lot of countries. So does India. But if tariffs are so destructive of their economies, why is China booming? How did India become an economic powerhouse when it has these exorbitant tariffs on American imports? How did Vietnam, of all places, become such a different country even though it has these prohibitive tariffs? Why isn’t Germany, before its energy problems, why wasn’t it a wreck? It’s got tariffs on almost everything that we send them. How is the EU even functioning with these tariffs?
I thought tariffs destroyed an
, but they seem to like them. And they’re angry that they’re no longer asymmetrical. Apparently, people who are tariffing us think tariffs improve their economy. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know.
The second thing is, why would you get angry at the person who is reacting to the asymmetrical tariff and not the people who inaugurated the tariff?
Why is Canada mad at us when it’s running a $63 billion surplus and it has tariffs on some American products at 250%. Doesn’t it seem like the people who started this asymmetrical—if I could use the word—trade war should be the culpable people, not the people who are reluctantly reacting to it?
Sort of like Ukraine and Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine. Do we blame Ukraine for defending itself and trying to reciprocate? No, we don’t. We don’t blame America because it finally woke up and said, “Whatever they tariff us we’re gonna tariff them.” Which brings up another question: Are our tariffs really
?
That is, were they preemptive? Were they leveled against countries that had no tariffs against us? Were they punitive? No. They’re almost leveled on autopilot. Whatever a particular country tariffs us, we reciprocate and just mirror image them. And they go off anytime that country says, “It was a mistake. We’re sorry. You’re an ally. You’re a neutral. We’re not going to tariff this American product.” And we say, “Fine.” Then the autopilot ceases and the automatic tariff ends. In other words, it’s their choice, not ours. We’re just reacting to what they did, not what we did.
Couple of other questions that I’ve had. We haven’t run a trade surplus since 1975—50 years. So, it wasn’t suddenly we woke up and said, “It’s unfair. We want commercial justice.” No. We’ve been watching this happen. For 50 years it’s been going on. And no president, no administration, no Congress in the past has done anything about it. Done anything about what? Leveling tariffs on our products that we don’t level on theirs.
It was all predicated in the postwar period. We were so affluent, so powerful—Europe,
, Russia were in shambles—that we had to take up the burdens of reviving the economy by taking great trade deficits. Fifty years later, we have been deindustrialized. And the countries who did this to us, by these unfair and asymmetrical tariffs, did not fall apart. They did not self-destruct. They apparently thought it was in their self-interest. And if anybody calibrates the recent gross domestic product growth of India or Taiwan or South Korea or Japan, they seem to have some logic to it.
There’s a final irony. The people who are warning us most vehemently about this tariff quote the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. But remember something, that came after the onset of the Depression—after. The stock market crashed in 1929. That law was not passed until 1930. It was not really amplified until ’31.
And here’s the other thing that they were, conveniently, not reminded of: We were running a surplus. That was a preemptive punitive tariff, on our part, against other countries. We had a trade surplus. And it was not 10% or 20%. Some of the tariffs were 40% and 50%. And again, it happened after the collapse of the
.
In conclusion, don’t you find it very ironic that Wall Street is blaming the Trump tariffs for heading us into a recession, if not depression, when the only great depression we’ve ever had was not caused by tariffs but by Wall Street?
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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by dap | Apr 4, 2025 | Daily Signal
Don Devine is proud that The Washington Post once attacked him as President Ronald Reagan’s “terrible swift sword of the civil service,” but even he is blown away by the muscular
.
That doesn’t stop him from giving advice on how to slay the deep state leviathan, however.
Devine, who served as the second director of the Office of Personnel Management under Reagan from 1981 to 1985, warned that public-sector unions will always oppose efforts to bring the administrative state to heel, so any conservative will have to take on these issues with steely resolve.
“They’re going to be fighting you no matter what you do,” Devine told
. “The unions in the government, which shouldn’t even be there … The unions, that’s their job, all right? If you do anything, they’re going to go to the courts after you.”
“So, what’s the answer? You got to do it anyway, you got to fight them,” he explained.
Public-sector unions, who represent federal government employees, have
to block President Donald Trump’s reforms on everything from DOGE getting access to federal data to the firing of probationary employees to the removal of collective bargaining privileges.
Trump has just the stomach to face this threat, however, Devine said.
“This
, I mean he’s so brave, it’s incredible,” he added. “But you have to take chances to get anything done in this system.”
Picking Fighters
The president has chosen unconventional appointees to head federal agencies: either individuals without the on-paper qualifications the press prefers or appointees who were attacked by the very institutions they’re now tasked with leading. Examples include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; Director of National Intelligence
; and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya.
Trump’s appointees are “clearly people with more courage than sophistication—and that’s what you need. You need people that are willing to take risks,” Devine argued.
“Every instinct in government goes against what you’re supposed to do,” the former OPM head explained. He recalled giving advice to aspiring Washington, D.C., insiders.
“Who wants to be a success in Washington?” he recalled asking. When everybody raised their hand, he would say, “If you want to be a success, I’ll give you the secret to it. Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. I guarantee you you’ll get out of here in four years and people will say, ‘You know, I never heard anything bad about him. I bet you he was great.’”
“That’s why it’s so wonderful that Trump has picked these people that never would have been picked in any other administration—including ours, I will say,” he remarked. “I mean, this is by far the best transition I’ve ever seen and I follow them pretty closely over the years.”
Few presidents have made tackling the administrative state a key priority. Luckily for Reagan, President Jimmy Carter had worked to pass the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 before he took office.
“They really redid the whole civil service,” Devine recalled.
Democrats today balk at Trump’s reforms, such as the Schedule F reform that makes it easier to fire federal bureaucrats, but the 1978 law laid the groundwork for Trump—and it was passed by a Democratic House and Senate and signed by a Democratic president.
Devine noted that the Civil Service Reform Act established the Office of Personnel Management, which he would become the second person to head.
His old professor at Syracuse University, Alan K. Campbell, advised the government on how to reform the civil service and served as its first director.
“He taught me about how you really run government,” Devine recalled. Yet Campbell lamented that the first administration to get a full chance to use the OPM would be a Republican one.
“I’ve spent the last four years putting this new Civil Service Reform Act into effect that gives you more control over the bureaucracy and you’re gonna get the benefit of it and not us,” he recalled Campbell saying.
Devine wryly recalled that Carter actually campaigned on reforming the government. He recalled the Democrat saying something to the effect of, “Listen, I’m still a good old liberal. The problem is, the government doesn’t work. You’re going to have to give the political people control over the government or it isn’t going to work.”
He said the real problem with government boils down to incentives.
In the private sector, a manager will ask if one facet of the company is making a profit or not. “If it’s not, you know, you get rid of it or change it.”
“You don’t have that mechanism in the government,” Devine noted. “In fact, the mechanism works exactly the opposite way. If you go down and find out that they’re not doing well, ‘Oh, were’ not solving poverty,’ you put more money in.”
The Situation Is Far Worse Now
Reagan achieved a great deal, but he never had a Republican House of Representatives to help him pass transformative legislation. Devine said things are “so much worse” now, in part because Democrats no longer believe in restraining the administrative state and because the national debt has increased a great deal in the last 40 years.
Unlike Reagan, Trump has a majority in the House, but it’s tight.
Ultimately, Devine said Trump’s courage is most important. He held up the Washington Post front page with his picture and the caption, “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword of the Civil Service.”
“That’s what the Trump people should be aiming at,” he said. “The front page of the Post saying how bad you are.”
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by dap | Apr 4, 2025 | Daily Signal
Rep.
, D-N.Y., would trounce Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in a
, according to a poll conducted by Data for Progress, a self-described “progressive” think tank.
The left-wing group surveyed 767 likely primary voters in such a New York Democrat Senate primary contest from March 26 to March 31.
The poll showed the New York congresswoman leading the longtime Democrat senator by a whopping 19 points. AOC—as Ocasio-Cortez is popularly known—drew 55% support in a hypothetical 2028 Senate primary, compared with Schumer’s 36%. The remaining 9% of respondents were unsure.
Schumer also garnered the lowest favorability rating of all the Democrat politicians tested, with just 29% viewing him with a very favorable opinion. By contrast, Sen.
, I-Vt., marshaled the most favorable rating, with 57% of poll respondents having a very favorable opinion of him, while 50% of those polled had a very favorable opinion of Ocasio-Cortez.
Schumer was heavily criticized by many fellow Democrats after he voted in mid-March in support of the Republican-backed budgetary continuing resolution that kept the federal government from shutting down.
“I knew it was a difficult choice, and I knew I’d get a lot of criticism for my choice. But I felt, as a leader, I had to do it,” Schumer
ABC’s “The View” about voting to keep the government open. The New York senator expressed reservations about of letting President Donald Trump decide what parts of the federal government were essential or not had the government shut down.
Schumer was joined by
of his party in the Senate on that vote.
Ocasio-Cortez criticized the Senate Democrat leader’s decision,
, “I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal.”
She described Schumer as essentially bowing down to tech magnate and
head Elon Musk.
“Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think, is a huge slap in the face. And I think there is a wide sense of betrayal if things proceed as currently planned,”
.
While Ocasio-Cortez’s ambitions remain formally unclear, it’s worth noting that Schumer himself was elevated from the lower chamber to the upper chamber of Congress. Schumer represented New York in the House of Representatives from 1981 till 1999, when he became a senator from the Empire State. He has been the leader of the Senate Democrats since 2017.
At 74, Schumer remains relatively young for a profession that has seen members serving even into their late eighties or early nineties. By those standards, Ocasio-Cortez, who is just 35, has decades to ascend up the congressional hierarchy even without displacing Schumer.
In general, Democrat primary voters appear broadly unhappy with how their party has handled the return to power of the Trump administration. Some 84% of the voters surveyed said Democrats in Washington were “not doing enough to stand up to Trump and the MAGA movement.”
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by dap | Apr 4, 2025 | Daily Signal
About 5 million ineligible names were removed from voter registration rolls across the United States since 2019, Judicial Watch announced–with almost 1 million of those coming from New York City.
The conservative-leaning government watchdog group has taken legal action against state and local governments for voter list maintenance under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which includes a requirement that election officials clear voter lists of the names of dead people, as well as the names of people that moved to another jurisdiction.
“Judicial Watch’s clean-up of over five million dirty names from voter rolls is a historic achievement for clean elections,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a
. “I have no doubt that Judicial Watch’s election integrity heavy lifting helped stop the steal in 2024. But there are millions of more names to be removed from voting rolls, which is why we are in federal court in three states.”
New York City, as part of a 2022
with Judicial Watch, removed 918,139 ineligible names from its voter rolls. In February, the city announced 477,056 names were removed since March 2023. Previously, the city announced removing 441,083, according to Judicial Watch.
In a March court filing, the Kentucky Board of Elections reported on its progress since the 2018 consent decree with Judicial Watch.
“Consistent with the NVRA’s purposes ‘to protect the integrity of the electoral process’ and ‘to ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained,’ the State Board of Elections has, since 2019, removed roughly 735,000 ineligible voter registrations from the voter rolls,” the
from March 28 says.
“In its continuous efforts since 2019 to improve the accuracy of the voter rolls for the citizens of the Commonwealth, the Board proceeded with its standard practice of removing those voters who had died, been convicted of a felony, been declared incompetent, moved out of state, or who had duplicate registrations.”
My book “
” details fraud cases in misusing the names of deceased or otherwise ineligible voters whose names remain on the voters lists. This included convictions in Texas, Washington state, and Kansas of politicians and operatives related to false voter registration. It also details a 2013 sting operation by the New York City Department of Investigation in which investigators went to the polls signing in with the names of dead people, convicted felons no longer eligible to vote, or people who had moved out of the city, with no pushback from election workers.
The more recent numbers provided by New York City and Kentucky come on top of reporting from
in May 2022, confirming it removed
ineligible names from its rolls as part of a
from a 2017 Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In addition, the states of Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio have also removed ineligible names from the rolls because of legal pressure, according to Judicial Watch.
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by dap | Apr 4, 2025 | Daily Signal
This commentary is part of a series on the rogue prosecutors around the country backed by liberal billionaires such as George Soros and the threat those prosecutors pose to victims and others alike. Previous entries in the series have focused on the rogue prosecutor
in general and on specific prosecutors in?
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To read all our scholarship on rogue prosecutors, click?
or read our
“Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.”
The State of Louisiana has had more than its fair share of shady politicians. Household names include Edwin Edwards, Cleo Fields, Ray Nagin Jr., and one of our favorites, William Jefferson—who was convicted by the Feds of bribery and, at the time of his arrest, had $90,000 in cold hard cash in his household freezer!
Voters in the state, and especially the City of New Orleans, have picked some real corkers over the years. Locals found it unsurprising and strangely amusing when Edwards was convicted of racketeering, Fields was caught on an FBI surveillance video taking $20,000, Nagin was convicted on 20 counts of wire fraud, and Jefferson was pinched for bribery.
But public safety is no laughing matter in the Big Easy, which brings us to Soros rogue prosecutor and District Attorney Jason Williams.
Another Soros-Funded Radical
Williams, like most Soros-backed rogue prosecutors, was a criminal defense attorney before he decided to run for district attorney. He was elected in 2020, in large part because he received
that flowed through Fair and Just Prosecution, Color of Change, and the Louisiana Justice and Public Safety Political Action Committee.
Williams took office in January 2021 and promised to make good on his campaign pledge to end the “tough on crime” approach of his predecessor. A quick aside: When did it become verboten to be tough on crime?
Williams promised to correct the “sins of the past.” This meant lowering the state’s incarceration rate by making sure that his office sent fewer people to prison. Like all of his rogue colleagues, Williams buys into the twin myths of “mass incarceration” and systemic racism in the criminal justice systems. Neither is true, as my colleague Zack Smith and I wrote about in Chapter 11 of our book “
.”
Acting Like a Public Defender
By now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that these Soros-backed rogue prosecutors don’t really consider themselves prosectors, at least not in the normal sense of the word. That is, lawyers who are dedicated to keeping the public safe and enforcing the criminal laws of their jurisdiction by, gasp, prosecuting criminals. To them, the word “prosecution” is a four-letter word.
Need proof?
On the night he was elected in 2017 as Philadelphia DA, criminal defense attorney-turned-prosecutor
called himself a “public defender with power.” Thanks to $1.7M from Soros-funded groups, Krasner won his race and unleashed a tidal wave of crime due to his pro-criminal, anti-victim policies. Like former Los Angeles DA
, Krasner, Williams, and other members of this movement view defendants as the victims.
Every single policy of these pseudo-prosecutors inures to the benefit of criminals. Sadly, Jason Williams is no exception.
All Policies Benefit Criminals
When he ran for office, Williams promised to water down requests for bail, not prosecute violent juveniles as adults, refuse to prosecute illegal drug possession, and not let his prosecutors add sentencing enhancements for career criminals charged with new crimes.
Sound familiar? It should, because that’s the standard fare for Soros-supported rogue prosecutors, and part of the unspoken quid pro quo for getting the money to run for office. Rogues like L.A.’s Gascon, Philly’s Krasner, former Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby, former Chicago DA Kim Foxx, former St. Louis DA Kim Gardner, former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, former Boston DA and U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins all enacted similar policies. They were so notorious that Zack and I gave each an entire chapter in our book.
One of Williams’ “solutions” was to void hard-fought convictions or reduce the sentences of violent felons. This wasn’t a new or original idea in the rogue prosecutor community. Those who were elected before him, like Foxx (2017), Gascon (2017), Krasner (2018), Rollins (2019) and Boudin (2019) all did the same thing.
Williams is a piker compared to Gascon, who created a “resentencing unit” immediately upon taking office. That unit was charged with expediting the review of 20,000 to 30,000 cases where his office had earned a conviction, but the sentences were, in his view, “out of policy.” For Gascon, an “out of policy” sentence was any sentence longer than 15 years.
Williams’ unique way of unwinding cases, voiding convictions, or reducing sentences was through a process called “post-conviction relief.” This is when the court is allowed to consider new evidence after all other appeals have been exhausted. Williams claims that he took that action to undo “past wrongs of his predecessors.”
Mainstream prosecutors are obligated to alert the court and opposing counsel if/when new evidence is discovered after a conviction that calls into question the culpability of the defendant. Not only does the law require that, but it’s also the right thing to do. But that’s not what Williams was doing. There was no “new evidence” at all. Nor was there any evidence provided of these “wrongdoings” or specific
on the numbers of resentencing cases his office’s Civil Rights Division has handled.
The post-conviction relief process is supposed to be, and had been used sparingly, up until “just-let-em-out Jason” was elected. In fact, St. Tammany, Jefferson, and East Baton Rouge parishes (counties) each only had one case where the post-conviction relief was granted in 2024. East Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish are the largest and second largest parishes by population.
Compare this to the Orleans parish which had
hearings in 2024 alone, and 349 offenders who have been resentenced since Williams was elected.
A Contentious Senate Hearing
Williams’ policies and practices were so controversial that the Judiciary Committee of the Louisiana State Senate held a hearing on Sept. 5, 2024, to find out more about the justification, if any, of his approach and the impact of his policies.
During the hearing, Laura Rodrique (former Orleans parish prosecutor and daughter of the former DA Leon Cannizzaro) and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill railed against Williams’ approach.
In summing up her concerns with Williams’ abuse of the post-conviction process, Murrill
that “it is not the job of the district attorney to disagree with the legislature, the judge and the jury on criminal justice policy.” She stated that her office is reviewing approximately 40 resentencing cases from Williams’ office to ensure that the law was followed, and that Williams did not abuse his authority.
Williams attempted to justify his actions to state senators, going so far as to say that his policies are “working and we have the public safety numbers to prove it.”
Ignoring Victims and Unjustified Leniency
One of hallmarks of Soros-backed rogue prosecutors is their blatant and deliberate violation of victims’ rights. That’s because in their minds, the “real” victims are those accused of crimes. Actual victims of crimes don’t matter to these modern-day radicals.
One of the worst examples in the country was former Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon. He issued a policy directive immediately upon taking office that forbade his deputy district attorneys from attending parole hearings. Victims had to face the convicted felon at his parole hearing alone, rather than have a line prosecutor there to remind the parole board what the criminal did, how he did it, and why he should remain behind bars. Talk about disregarding, and disrespecting, victims!
While Jason Williams isn’t as bad as Gascon when it comes to victims and victim’s rights, he’s close.
In Feb. 2025, following completion of her office’s review of the 40 cases she mentioned during her Senate testimony, Murrill
that there were “at least 35 murder cases that involve first-degree or second-degree murder” where she believed that sentencing relief was “improperly granted.” Murrill is exploring whether her office can get the original convictions and sentences reinstated.
Giving Violent Teens a Pass
Another trademark policy for Soros rogue prosecutors is their abject refusal to prosecute violent teens, even 17-year-olds, as adults, even when they commit murder.
When he took office in Jan. 2021, Williams deployed the same playbook, only later realizing in a very personal way that his hands-off-violent-juvenile scheme poses safety risks.
In 2020, 15-year-old John Honore and two 17-year-old friends were charged as adults for carjacking by former New Orleans District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro. After Williams took office, instead of pursuing the case in adult court, or removing the case back to juvenile court, he dropped the charges altogether.
Two years later, the 17-year-old John Honore and three teen friends were
of second-degree murder after they carjacked 73-year-old Linda Frickey in broad daylight and dragged her for more than a block.
In Nov. 2023, Honore’s three friends pleaded
to attempted manslaughter. Honore was found guilty at trial, and on Jan.12, 2024, was sentenced to life in prison. During his
Honore did not apologize to the Frickey family. Frickey, like so many other victims of violent crime, would be alive today had the prosecutor held the juvenile violent assailant accountable for the previous charge of carjacking.
Williams’ lenient approach to violent juvenile crime came back to haunt him and his 78-year-old mother. On Oct. 16, 2023, they were the victims of an armed carjacking committed by four teens. The attorney general’s office charged each of the four violent teens as adults. Not surprisingly, Williams did not object to the juveniles being tried as adults. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Missing Deadlines Has Deadly Consequences
Another common attribute of Soros-backed rogue prosecutors is that, for the most part, none has been a district attorney before they were propped up and hoisted into office. They have little-to-no management experience, much less experience running a prosecutor’s office where tight timelines, punctuality, court orders, and the like matter.
Defendants have a Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial. The onus falls, as it should, on the government to charge and try a person accused of a crime in a timely manner, not only to uphold the defendant’s constitutional rights, but also statutory or court-created speedy trial timelines.
Under our Constitution and state laws, criminal suspects (who are presumed innocent) are not supposed to languish in jail while the DA dilly-dallies and tries to figure out whether to charge the person. Professional career prosecutors know this. Soros-supported rogue prosecutors for the most part don’t.
Which brings us to Williams and inexcusable 701 releases.
Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure Article 701 is the state speedy trial statute. If a person is charged with a felony in Louisiana and is in custody, the state must bring the defendant to trial within 120 days. If the state doesn’t bring the defendant to trial within those 120 days, he must be released from custody. The charges aren’t dropped, but the defendant, regardless of what he may have done, is to be released.
In rare instances, this time deadline can be excused, such as when a prosecutor cannot bring a defendant to trial within 120 days because of delays in processing forensic evidence, witness issues, or other complications in a case.
But that’s not what happened once Williams took office.
Once Williams took control, the 701 release rate exploded and was
higher than his predecessor. In 2021, 125 people facing at least one felony count were in pretrial detention. Because of Williams’ lackluster approach, his office failed to bring them to trial within 120 days and 100 were released from jail. To make matters worse, at least 50 of those suspects were accused of violent crimes or domestic violence.
is one of the worst examples of a Williams 701 release. Wyatt was arrested by the New Orleans Police Department for being the triggerman in a double shooting committed in July 2021. One of the victims died and the other sustained serious injuries. Wyatt was
and placed in pretrial detention in the Orleans Justice Center on suspicion of second-degree murder.
After Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans a month later, and his pretrial hearings were rescheduled several times, Wyatt walked out of jail in Dec. 2021 as a 701 release. Six months later, Williams dropped the case altogether. In Aug. 2023, Wyatt allegedly murdered Johnny Huntley by shooting him in the forehead.
Arrests Down and Crime Is Up
Not surprisingly, Soros-backed rogue district attorneys refuse to accept any responsibility for rising crime rates that naturally occur after they inflict their pro-criminal, anti-victim policies on an unsuspecting electorate. Denial and deflection are their specialty.
Confronted with rising crime rates in their cities, rogue prosecutors blame anyone but themselves. Williams blames the New Orleans Police Department, but they aren’t taking that allegation laying down.
According to a Metropolitan Crime Commission
covering Williams’ first year in office, there has “been a drastic decline in accountability for violent felony offenders.” To help solve crimes, New Orleans police have “secured the cooperation of victims and witnesses to make 1,411 violent felony arrests between Jan. 11, 2021 [when Williams took office] to Sept. 10, 2021.”
The commission report noted that Williams’ office either refused to prosecute or dismissed 937 violent felony cases during that time, including against defendants charged with murder, attempted murder and robbery.
By comparison, the commission noted that under the previous district attorney, the New Orleans DA’s office accepted 67% of violent felony arrests in 2019 and 75% in 2020 for prosecution. Under Williams, the acceptance rate fell to 54%.
In virtually every city that has elected a Soros-backed rogue prosecutor, crime rates have skyrocketed compared to their “tough on crime” predecessors. Williams is no exception.
Murder
After New Orleans saw its lowest homicide rates in 2019 under the leadership of Cannizzaro (122 murders), the city faced its worse homicide rate in 2022 (266 murders), a 131% increase just two years after Williams took office. While the murder rate has dropped since then, it has not returned to the (already too high) rate experienced under his predecessor.
Rape
In 2019, there was 794 cases of rape, which decreased to 708 cases in 2020. In 2021, after Williams’ first year in office, that number increased to 808, although it did appear to drop to 756 in 2024.
Carjacking
In 2019, there were only 109 carjackings. By the end of Williams’ first year in 2021, there were 288. The number of carjackings once again increased in 2022 to 382, but have dropped to 215 in 2023 and 111 in 2024.
Shootings
Between 2019 and 2022, shootings increased
. There were 256 shootings in 2019 and 490 shootings in 2021. The number of shootings dropped in 2022 to 470 and have continued to decline in 2023 and 2024.
Robbery
In 2019, there were 747 robberies. In 2021 this number had decreased to 722 and then rose again in 2022 to 823. This number once again dropped in 2024 to 417.
Soft on Crime Impact
As Zack and I have written elsewhere, violent crime is geographically and demographically concentrated in the inner cities. The vast majority of homicide victims in the inner city are minority men, and New Orleans is no exception. Their perpetrators are, for the most part, other minority men.
But a less obvious impact of a soft-on-crime approach is the devastating impact it has had on police moral, recruiting, and retention. When the district attorney refuses to prosecute most misdemeanors, and waters down felonies or simply refuses to prosecute some felonies, refuses to prosecute violent juveniles as adults, and refuses to prosecute those who resist arrest, such policies increase the risk to police officers and decrease their motivation to patrol dangerous areas and make arrests.
In turn, police officers in those jurisdictions think—because it’s true—that the district attorney is not for law and order and is not interested in keeping communities safe.
The cumulative impact of those policies has caused police officers to quit.
The Metropolitan Crime Commission
that police officers’ efforts to hold violent offenders accountable were “undermined by the DA’s office,” and that “safety in New Orleans deteriorated from 2019 to 2022 as major violent crime surged 69%.” As a result, the report found that there were 23% fewer commissioned police officers in 2022 compared to 2019, from 1,226 to 940 officers.
On Thin Ice
Of the 2,300 elected district attorneys across the country, only about 72 or so are Soros-funded or inspired rogue prosecutors. But they reign over 65% of the population in the country, as they tend to be elected in large blue cities with dense populations.
When first arriving on the national stage in 2017 with the election of Chicago’s Kim Foxx, they were all the rage. Voters had high hopes that their lofty language about “reimagining” prosecution and reforms will result in a new way of addressing criminal justice matters. But they also wanted public safety, which, they assumed would come along with these edgy new candidates.
Voters were deceived. They found out the hard way that there is nothing progressive about the progressive prosector movement.
The electoral backlash took time, but eventually voters ousted rogues such as Chesa Boudin, George Gascon, and Marilyn Mosby. Others faltered under their own incompetence or ethical lapses like Kim Gardner and Rachel Rollins. Kim Foxx was urged not to run for reelection last year because her abysmal track record was a political albatross for the Democratic Party, which held its national convention in her town of Chicago, and party elders didn’t want a repeat of the 1968 protests surrounding the Democratic Convention.
Each of them failed because voters in their cities realized, eventually, that their district attorney’s pro-criminal, anti-victim, cop-hating policies were the reason that crime exploded in their cities.
It’s only a matter of time before voters in New Orleans do the same thing.
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