Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon, whom many believe is too lenient on crime in his district, faces a possible recall this election year. Last week, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial in protest titled, “Anti-Gascon drive extends era of destructive, distracting recall mania.” When addressing the consequences of progressive policies on Americans, the legacy media’s leftist distortion is evident in nearly every line.
The piece begins with the assertion that voters’ desire to remove Gascon has no rational basis. It is instead motivated by “anxiety over disease, lockdowns, political turmoil, violence and societal disruption.” Gascon is the victim of emotionally unstable voters who have “poured their fears” onto him, the editors argue, and this hysteria has been streamlined into a movement by “opportunists of various political stripes but most notably from the far right.”
That doesn’t exactly fit the description of recall leader Desiree Andrade, a registered Democrat motivated by the killing of her 20-year-old son, Julian.
Police arrested five men in 2018 who had stabbed Julian, beat him, and thrown him off a cliff. Before Gascon took office, “special circumstances” charges of kidnapping and torture would have boosted the attackers’ sentences to life without parole if they were convicted. Gascon removed them, reducing their maximum sentence to 25 years in prison. Disgusted and wounded, Andrade became the co-chair of the recall effort.
In January, the Times spoke to Andrade about the “horrific details” of her son’s death. The paper noted that “she supports criminal justice reforms for low-level crimes, but she thinks Gascon has been soft on those who commit brutal violence.” The editors then had the gall to indirectly suggest that she belongs to a movement of cynical “opportunists” with no meaningful cause.
The recent emphasis on criminal reform in leftist politics involves radical attorneys seeking to dismantle “oppressive” systems at the local level, which they accomplish by lowering prosecution and rates of incarceration for various crimes, even violent or heinous offenses. This effectively nullifies the law and releases criminals back onto the streets in the name of “equity” and other ideological nonsense.