On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by George Soros, billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of the Open Society Foundations. Soros defended the resources he has poured into the campaigns of progressive prosecutors ($40 million over a decade, according to a June report). His efforts on behalf of criminal-justice reform are both popular and morally righteous, he claimed. American law enforcement is “rife with injustices,” Soros wrote, as evidenced by the fact that “black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people.” (It was not clear whether Soros literally meant “jail,” whether he was using the term as a synecdoche for both prisons and jails, or whether he knew the difference between the two.)
What happened next was startling: nothing. To be sure, the conservative commentariat outside the Wall Street Journal sprang into action, penning articles, editorials, and letters to the editor challenging Soros’s claims. But within the Wall Street Journal’s editorial offices, quiet reigned. No editorial writer or columnist tweeted that Soros’s op-ed put him in danger. There were no calls for the opinion page to retract or renounce the op-ed, or for the opinion editor to resign.
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