Sean Hannity had a guest on his radio show on Tuesday who managed to get inside CHAZ in Seattle without the “occupiers” realizing the purpose behind his visit.  While the interview was both humorous and informative, parts of the interview were really sort of chilling when you put it together with some other information and developments across the country in the past few years.

Ami Horowitz spent a day inside CHAZ before he was recognized, after which he and his film crew left for their own safety.

Horowitz posed as a journalist seeking interviews with the leaders of CHAZ and told Hannity that he believes, based on those interviews, that the goal for the most radical elements of the groups behind these movements is chaos.  They are seeking a state of anarchy in the country.  This is not “aspirational” — they have concrete demands about policing and the criminal justice system that lead directly to that outcome.

Horowitz said the leaders’ wish list includes the elimination of police departments.  It includes the elimination of all prisons.  It eliminates the criminal justice system.  All of them are inseparable from the legacy of racism and slavery in the United States and, as a result, are beyond repair in their view.

Are these meant as the “ends” of their efforts?  Is this all about wrongfully incarcerated minorities?  Is this about over-incarceration in totality? Or over-representation of minorities among those incarcerated?

No.  No.  No.  And No.

It’s about creating the chaos that will result when there is a complete breakdown of law and order.  This is about turning suburban American into a real-life version of Manhattan Island as imagined by John Carpenter 40 years ago in “Escape from New York.”  It’s about breaking the American system of self-governance so a new system more to their liking can be created to take its place.

The signs have been there – but the “connecting the dots” has been missing.  It’s a version of the metaphor about a “blind man and an elephant” – a blind man never having seen an elephant can’t make out the whole from only being able to touch the individual parts.

It struck me as curious a few years ago that, seemingly out of nowhere, big cities began to elect district attorneys who were criminal defense attorneys throughout their careers.  Most had rabidly anti-police histories in their law practices, and they ran campaigns that were overtly anti-police in their rhetoric.

Yet voters in Boston, Philadephia, Dallas, St. Louis, San Francisco, and San Antonio, among other places, have elected anti-police district attorneys – the press graces them with the title “Progressive” or “Reform-minded.”  But what they all have in common is a determination to find and prosecute fewer crimes, incarcerate fewer law-breakers, and work at cross-purposes with law enforcement whenever necessary.  It has been widely reported that some/all of these election successes by the “Reform” District Attorneys have been made possible by huge amounts of financial support from organizations funded by George Soros.

The “no cash bail” movement has gained momentum because some of these anti-police prosecutors have pushed it through in their jurisdictions.

Most have adopted policies that decline to prosecute economic “crimes of need” – property crimes where the suspects are supposedly stealing necessities of life because they can’t afford them.

They have policies that prioritize drug use as an issue of public health, even when coupled with sociopathic behaviors violating numerous laws involving public order and safety – basically a willingness to excuse and overlook all manner of criminal conduct that breaks down the social order in a community. This is basically a 180-degree reversal from the “broken windows” theory of policing that led to huge reductions in all types of crime in the 1990s.  That theory held that dealing with practices that led to physical and social disorder through the criminal justice system was a more effective way to prevent more serious crimes that often follow, rather than relying on social and economic programs to address the underlying issues that cause physical and social disorder.

That theory rolled back the approach to policing which emphasized a focus only on serious and violent crimes, with little attention paid – by the police and criminal justice system – to minor criminal activity that accompanied disorder.

But we now see these “Reform” DAs – and many Democrat big-city mayors – advocating and putting into practice a return to the earlier policies of focusing only on “serious and violent crime”, and redirecting resources away from policing to deal with physical and social disorder.  They champion the “fact” they are saving taxpayers money by lowering incarceration rates and other costs associated with the criminal justice system.

But the effort to elect “Reform” District Attorneys has a more pernicious impact than is obvious at first glance.  The obvious consequence is their ability to work such radical departures in traditional criminal justice processes from inside the system.  Refusals to prosecute a whole laundry list of criminal violations, refusal to seek detention of suspects pending trial, and an aggressive posture towards all types of alleged police misconduct all work to undermine the very function of a prosecuting authority on behalf of the community which is the victim of the criminal behavior and looks to the police for protection.

But overlooked, in my view, is the manner in which seeking to elect county-wide office holders allows the “Reform” agenda to stretch beyond the boundaries of the big cities themselves.  Although some big cities are part of a combined City-County governmental structure, there are many major metropolitan areas across the United States where that is not true.  When Soros succeeds in electing “Reform” District Attorneys in these counties, he extends the reach of these radical criminal justice system “reforms” to far larger populations than is the case with just electing mayors and appointing police chiefs in big cities.  Consider just a few examples:

Dallas v. Dallas County:  1.35 million v. 2.6 million

Los Angeles v. Los Angeles County:   4 million v. 10 million

Seattle v. King County:  745,000 v. 2.25 million

Chicago v. Cook County:  2.7 million v. 5.15 million

Much of the population within these counties, but outside these large cities, are suburban communities.  The radical reconstruction of policing and the criminal justice system will radiate outward from the growing lawlessness of the city cores, and begin to be felt in the suburbs over time.

Many of these counties also elect Sheriffs to oversee county-wide law enforcement agencies.  If Soros and groups he supports begin to make efforts to win county-wide races for Sheriff, what we are seeing now in changes to district attorneys and big-city police departments will spread to Sheriffs’ offices and policing of much larger populations.

All these “reform” efforts are geared toward keeping criminal offenders out of jail and in the community.  The physical and social disorder then spreads, policing is ineffective, and the goal of the breakdown of an orderly society – which the foot soldiers of Antifa and BLM preach – keeps getting closer to reality.

What comes next?