BUCK: You may have seen — this got a lot of attention just a couple of days ago — the New York Post called it “the nation’s crisis in a can,” and it has to do with a can of Spam, which my… I remember the first time I ever heard of Spam was my grandfather who was in the Navy, he was an officer in the Navy in World War II, served on the USS Bataan when he would tell me Navy stories. He rarely talked about it, only when he got much older and a few years before he passed. He rarely talked about the kamikazes, the combat, the manning of the anti-aircraft guns and those things. He didn’t really speak about it.
But he would talk about other stuff in the Navy. He’s talk about the food and talk about playing T-ball and things like that with his fellow service members. I remember he told me about this thing called Spam. I remember saying, “Grandpa, what is Spam? Tell me more about this,” ‘cause he said that this was, in his mind, like a delicacy. He said, “We had Spam all the time,” and he liked Spam. He was a Spam fan. He liked this meat product, and now everyone is reacting to this loss prevention device at the Port Authority Duane Reed because it was referred to as a Jeff Koons homage, I believe in reference to the artist, right, isn’t Jeff Koons a famous artist?
Am I right about that? Am I assuming that’s true? We gotta check. Anyway, but everyone was looking at this saying, well, hold on. They’re locking down the cans of Spam in — remember, it’s a can with a plastic anti-theft case around it. And to this I just want to say, to borrow from John McClane of the NYPD and the Nakatomi Tower fame, “Welcome to the party, pal.” This has been going for years now. I go into the pharmacy on my corner where I live in Midtown Manhattan, and everything other than like birthday cards and seasonal items is pretty much under lock and key and behind locked plexiglass with theft protection alarms on it.
And the poor store clerks have to go through this nonsense of, you know, if I need five different things, they gotta walk with me to go to all the different aisles, and I’ve asked them before, just out of curiosity, like, really? They gotta lock this down or razor blades locked down, chocolate locked down, skin care products, locked down. Whatever. You name it. You know, when I need my exfoliant, I don’t like to have to — just kidding. I don’t use an exfoliant, but I don’t know. Maybe I should. But the point is it’s all under lock and key because theft just happens all the time.
And theft is not really punished in New York. You have people that shoplift. They’re not shoplifting out of desperation. They’re shoplifting as a business decision, for themselves. They’re shoplifting because they can make hundreds of dollars at a time, obviously pay no taxes on it, by selling this stuff either on a street corner or, a lot of times they’ll just park it online on eBay. Depends on the products you can get. And, you know, if it’s in its brand-new packaging people will buy it, half price, here you go, right? Razor blades, right, a little package of razors for those cartridges, 30, 40 bucks, steal 10 of those, that’s pretty good, right?
You can make a lot of money. But you’re destroying these businesses. And you’re also destroying these communities where the businesses then leave and people can’t get the products they need. And this is all happening because of a change — ’cause this was not the case. I grew up in New York City. It was true and then we made it not true, and now it is true again. So, we are having to relearn the painful lessons of the past when it comes to the enforcement of the law, including on these less serious crimes.
Now when I say “less serious,” it’s not that they’re unserious but it’s obviously not a murder. We’re not talking about violent assaults, although those are up too. And then you have the entire system that has decided that this is the way we’re gonna approach this. The system in New York, the system in Portland, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Houston, in St. Louis, in Phoenix, the system in all these places deciding we’re gonna have, because of criminal justice reform — who’s pushing that? Obviously, the Democrat Party. But what is really being reformed? And who is making the decisions about what that looks like?
This brings us to the progressive prosecutor movement, which has been one of the most disastrous things this country has engaged in and certainly from a public safety perspective it is probably the single dumbest thing that we have done. I mean, defund police wrapped in with progressive prosecutors has resulted in thousands of more people dying that are just from the spike in crime nationwide, has resulted in just uncountable destruction and theft and increased anxiety in society, and people have to be worried.
You know, just over the weekend on the Upper East Side — which is a very expensive part of New York City — there was some guy walking along, just bashed a woman in the face with a foreign object because he felt like it. It’s all on video, and they’re still looking for him. They haven’t found the guy. She was walking down the street, broad daylight on a beautiful Sunday, just decided to smash her in the face with… I don’t know if it was the end of a screwdriver or something. It’s just… It’s all on video.
Do you think we’re gonna find this guy eventually? And, you know, he’s a pillar of his community, he’s working three jobs, he just had a bad day? No. We’re gonna find that he’s been arrested 15 times or 25 times or whatever. And they’re gonna say, “Oh, but, we don’t want to punish him too harshly now, so, he’ll be out and he’ll get a minimal sentence. Why? Because of these libs in prosecutors’ offices pushed by George Soros. Now, George Soros realizes, we’re on to him now. This guy, this billionaire, do you think he’s ever — has he experienced violent crime in America?
When was the last time you think George Soros walked on foot through a high crime, predominantly minority neighborhood of any major city in America? I’m gonna guess probably never. And if he did, he did so with, you know, armed security guards and it was a photo-op, right? This guy has no idea. But he’s a billionaire who likes to find ways to… I’m just gonna say, I think he wants to just destroy Western civilization. I don’t know what else you can say about this guy. I think he wants to tear it all down because he thinks that we’re a society driven by exploitation. Now, he’s a billionaire.
He doesn’t exploit, of course. It’s the other people. A racist society, an unjust society; so we pull it all down and we start something new. He wouldn’t be the first that’s taken this approach in history, but it always results in misery, destruction, and despair, that the people pushing for these ideas are somehow except from themselves. He wrote July 31st, just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal, “Why I Support Reform Prosecutors. Justice Or Safety, It’s A False Choice. They Reinforce Each Other.” Here’s what he writes. “Americans desperately need a more thoughtful discussion about our response to crime. People have had enough of the demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks that dominate the debate and obscure the issues.”
“Like most of us, I’m concerned about crime… our system is rife with injustices that make us all less safe.” And he goes on to say, “We need to acknowledge that black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people. That is an injustice that undermines our democracy.” Now, here’s George Soros, who is saying this in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, just so everyone’s very clear that he is saying, the disparity of incarceration in this country is proof of an unjust system.
And I would want to ask George Soros what I have posed so many times before on this show, why is it that there are so many more men in prison for murder than women? What is the answer? Is it because the system is anti-male, or is it because there are more men who commit murders? Why is it that he says the disproportionate number of African-American males in prison is proof of racism? Are all the people that are in prison or even a majority or even a sizable number, are they there unjustly as in they didn’t commit the crime? ‘Cause that’s a huge problem. But that’s not the case.
Ask any person working in the criminal justice system. And there is not this belief, for anyone living in reality, that our prisons are full innocent people. No one really thinks that, right? So, what is he saying, then? Well, he says there are too many minorities in prison, therefore we need to have fewer people in prison, therefore there are gonna be more people who commit a lot of crimes who are in society and who are lightly punished, if punished at all. That is the basis of his ideology. That is why he has donated millions of dollars to prosecutors in cities across the country.
This is why Politico wrote an article — remember, a left-wing, D.C. insider website — “George Soros’ Quiet Overhaul of the U.S. Justice System.” You know when that got going? It was 2016. Why do you think Soros was pushing so hard in 2016 to overhaul the justice system? Oh, because the Democrats were fomenting a racial panic over Donald Trump. “Donald Trump? Oh, my gosh, he’s so racist !He’s a white nationalist and a white supremacist,” and then all of a sudden you had these hysterical libs who were more willing than ever to push for radical changes in the criminal justice system.
He started, George Soros, seeding these prosecutors’ offices with people who just think, you know what? If more people have to be murdered, robbed, more people have to suffer violent crime across America but it means that we bring down the overall number of people in prisons, so be it. That is the choice they made. That is the choice George Soros has pushed with his dollars on the American people. It’s monstrous, honestly. It’s deeply immoral. He should be ashamed. He should be begging for forgiveness. But, oh, a lot of people on the Soros payroll — a lot of people in the media, a lot of organizations — funded by him, a lot of entities getting Soros dollars.
You’ll notice they’ll back him up. And you’ll also notice that he’s very much a fixture in elite society, right? He’s treated with deference. Why? He has brought nothing but misery, destruction, and pain to all communities, including the black community in this country. He has made it worse for the overwhelming majority, for the 99-out-of-a-hundred black Americans who just want to go to work, live their lives, be safe, be in freedom and prosperity. But because he doesn’t like the aggregate numbers in prison, Soros decides to make it less safe for people in high crime neighborhoods, to make it less possible for police to do their job, to put lunatic imbecile prosecutors in positions where they can destroy some people for political means, right?
Oh, you better hope you’re not… Look up the case. This was a remarkable one. Look up the case years ago of Mark Witaschek in… (interruption) Not you guys look up. I mean folks at home. Sorry, team, I don’t have time for this one right now. Mark Witaschek in Washington, D.C. They wanted to lock this guy up for years for having a spent shotgun cartridge after a hunting trip that he brought back to D.C. in his baggage that he didn’t even know about, wanted to lock him up. Make an example of him. He works in finance. He’s a threat to society. He had a spent shotgun cartridge. Maybe he would throw it at somebody.
But you look at what’s going on while they claim that they want more gun control. What are these progressive prosecutors doing in city after city? Letting people off for gun charges. Why? Because disproportionately the people that are being caught with illegal guns are young black men. So, they don’t want to actually enforce the laws more aggressively about firearms, but they to want pass federal regulations that trample on the Constitution to take your guns as a law-abiding person, your firearms out of your hands.
Look, I don’t know what to say. I think what George Soros is pushing is evil, folks. I’m sure he thinks he’s the good guy. But a lot of people think they’re good guys while they’re doing awful things. And the record speaks for itself. This guy is atrocious. And the people that he has supported are a nightmare for our cities. And the Democrat Party should be held to account for this. They still get a lot of those Soros dollars, and they’re fine with it. They still want him backing them up, you know. He’s a good billionaire. Notice how any billionaire that’s not far left is somehow a bad guy, but Soros, he’s a good guy. Sure he is.