The political machine funded and run by George and his son, Alexander Soros, which has bankrolled the election of over 100 prosecutors across the country over the past decade, deliberately chose to inflict several of their chosen candidates on the surrounding counties of Washington, D.C. One of them, ideological extremist Steve Descano, won his primary over a fairly typical Democrat with an agenda designed to push the Soros agenda — one that puts violent criminals back on the streets. Since his election in 2019 (by a mere 1,500 votes), he has deliberately refused to enforce Virginia laws that run afoul of his own predilections, in accordance with the soft-on-crime wishes of his well-heeled funders. In that time, violent crime has increased 92% in the Virginia county he represents — including multiple high-profile cases where repeat offenders were released only to commit murder, rape, and other felonies.  Jason Miyares is the former Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He sat at the same table as Descano in a recent high-profile hearing, which also featured the mother of a recent victim, stabbed to death at a bus stop after Descano declined to prosecute a repeat offender. The Soros-funded acolyte put on a performance so embarrassing that his own supporters were gasping in shock. People are dead because of the Soros machine. Jason Miyares is fed up with it. He told us his perspective on this, and the pro-assassination agenda of the radical Left, in this week’s Punch interview. *** Ben Domenech: You had to sit down in that hearing room on Capitol Hill, and the tension there had to be significant. Can you tell me what your feelings were on that day? Jason Miyares: I would tell you it’s not necessarily what happened on camera, it’s what I saw happen off camera. I’ve gotten to know Cheryl since the tragedy. I think she’s an incredibly strong woman. She lost her daughter, Stephanie, to an illegal immigrant. I’ve always believed in being cordial. I think civility is not a weakness. And when [Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve] Descano would not come back in the room where [House Judiciary Chairman Jim] Jordan allowed the witnesses to wait, he, I think, very intentionally decided to separate himself from the other witnesses. And when he arrived, he wouldn’t look at Cheryl, obviously wouldn’t look at me, but when he walked into the room, Cheryl and I were already seated, and he walked right past her. He didn’t even acknowledge her, and he showed her no humanity. I intentionally went over to shake his hand and say hello, but he wasn’t very happy even with that gesture. He sat down, and then, when the cameras were rolling, he decided to apologize to Cheryl Minter. So I think everything was just shown to be performative. Disingenuous. And one thing I’ve realized as a public figure, when you’re in public office, is you’re dealing with people who are grieving. I have attended so many different funerals for the fallen for those in the law enforcement community. It is a difficult part of the job. It’s the hardest part of the job in many ways. But to me, I just thought, wow, it required a congressional subpoena and cameras rolling for him to show humanity toward a grieving mother. I thought it was a telling moment. So yeah, there was a lot of tension in that room for sure, a lot of tension. But to me, the most telling moment was the complete lack of any display of empathy or humanity by Descano when he walked into that room, which I thought spoke volumes. BD: There were a couple of moments that you experienced that were in that hearing room that seemed like there was a reaction, at a couple of different moments, to statements that were being made and to Descano’s responses to questions. Can you tell us a little bit about that? JM: I think there was this amazing moment where Chairman Jordan was cross-examining Descano, pointing out that on his website for over six years, it said that he would factor in the immigration status of defendants in his charging decisions, which as you know, if you’re providing a benefit to one category class of people that’s not available to other classes of people, then you run into the problem of an equal protection violation. Descano kept saying, “Well, that wasn’t my policy,” or “Maybe that’s what I said on a website, but that wasn’t my policy.” And when Chairman Jordan said, “Wait, you had this up for six years, and you took it down a week before you were to testify after you’d been subpoenaed. How can you explain that? I mean, isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?” And he said, “No, it’s just campaign rhetoric, and I can’t believe anyone would be so obtuse to actually believe that. And I looked up the actual definition of obtuse when it comes to intelligence, which means dull or dim-witted.” So, essentially, Descano thought that anyone who believed him was dull or dim-witted. What I thought was most remarkable were two aspects. One, there was an audible gasp in the room. The Fairfax Democratic Committee had sent a bunch of supporters there. Several of them were shaking their heads or just in stunned disbelief. It is documented in case after case that he was underprosecuting illegal immigrants. Why? Because if you get a felony, it definitely triggers a whole host of other ramifications on your immigration status. So he brazenly lied to the chairman, and what he runs the risk of now is that the Department of Justice obviously has a civil rights investigation that is ongoing. Now he has another problem. If any of his current or former employees, Commonwealth’s attorneys, paralegals in that office, or if there’s email evidence in which absolutely they are saying Steve Descano either in his written word or in their own testimony was factoring in a person’s immigration status and ordering people to reduce charges because of that immigration status, then now he’s lying to Congress and that’s perjury and totally different legal ramifications that I think could be a potentially earthquake for him. And I think that was the thing that I immediately recognized: he may have just perjured himself on national television. So yes, there were a lot of those moments, but that one definitely stood out. BD: It seems that the decision that was made to pursue this by Congress is meant to highlight something that, unless you watch Fox News or if you read The Daily Wire, you probably don’t actually know that much about this. We’ve consistently seen in polling data concerns about rising crime, along with, of course, the Biden administration explosion of illegal immigration, but I don’t think people necessarily connect it to prosecutors, because you hear “prosecutor” and you assume they’re looking out for the protection of the people.  JM: The legacy media has, not surprisingly, missed the plot. The reason why The Daily Wire is credible is that it’s willing to tackle stories that the legacy media refuses to and acknowledge exist. And I have friends who are reporters, and I have told them before: why we talk about media bias is not just how you slant the stories; it’s the stories you choose to minimize or pretend don’t exist if they don’t fit your narrative. And that’s one of my biggest critiques of the modern American legacy media is they’re more interested in a narrative than truth, and they’re more interested in being first than in being right. And it is a huge, huge problem.  If this does not fit their narrative, it is because they overwhelmingly are sympathetic to the so-called social justice left-wing worldview when it comes to crime and statistics. And I have a buddy of mine who’s from Manhattan who says that a liberal in New York is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged by reality yet. There’s a certain level of truth to that. The harsh reality of our criminal justice system is that there is nothing new under the sun. They say nobody learns from history. The only thing you learn from history is that nobody learns from history. And the reality is, everything Steve Descano and the left-wing social justice warriors advocate for, a new so-called reformed and enlightened criminal justice system, has already been tried before. Let me emphasize, there is nothing they have advocated for that has not previously been tried with disastrous results. The 1970s were when the ideas we talk about today first emerged: early release of violent offenders, no cash bail, and a host of more “enlightened, softer policies” on repeat, violent offenders. And it led to a crime explosion in the 1970s to the point that you actually have cultural commentators writing about those random movies that emerge in the ’70s of the vigilante and [Charles] Bronson and whatnot. That was somewhat of a reaction — also Clint Eastwood with the ”Dirty Harry” movies — all part of the soft-on-crime policies that coddle and just protect criminal defendants. Well, it was all tried in the 1970s and early ’80s. And then there was reform and pushback in the 1990s, you saw things like parole abolition and truth-in-sentencing laws. And we saw the nationwide trend between 1992 and 2018 in this country, crime went down dramatically. And by the way, at the same time that gun violence and crime were going down between 1992 and 2018, gun ownership was increasing. So you had more guns in circulation, but crime was going down at the same time. And then after 2018, people forgot those hard lessons, and they started bringing back a lot of the same policies that were tried before, and that’s why we’ve seen this uptick in crime, to your point. So the legacy media has missed that entirely. They don’t like to focus on it. And I applaud Congress for putting a spotlight on what these failed policies have done and how many lives have been wrecked as a result of it. BD: Politically speaking, you’ve seen over the last decade George Soros and his attendant groups be the primary, as they are in Descano’s case, financial backers, sometimes the exclusive financial backers in terms of the size of their donations to more than a hundred prosecutors elected across the country, that’s over the past decade. Why do you think that their organizations would choose to try to push these prosecutors in the hub around Washington, D.C.? Because, from my perspective, that’s one way to suddenly send a message that might get heard by the national political class, as opposed to hearing it in blue cities, where presumably they have the political dominance to basically do whatever the heck they want. JM: It’s interesting for me to get my arms around what their motivation is. I know that if you look at what these left-wing prosecutors have been, the first thing they realize is, which is easier to get control over: state government and have them change the criminal justice code, or is it better to get a district attorney or in Virginia, we call them Commonwealth’s attorney, installed in large localities where they just refuse to enforce entire sections of the criminal code, which is essentially what they’ve done. Think about it. As a policy in his office, Steve Descano will typically not prosecute any larceny-related crime of $1,500 or less. He’s basically legalized petty theft. And when you look into the retail space, when they’re operating with such small margins, that can be devastating for retailers; it’s much easier to get a prosecutor just to declare, “I’m not going to prosecute any type of larceny crime of $1,500 or less” than getting a bill passed. So I do think that’s their mindset. I also think it is a great irony that this group of left-wingers constantly use the term privilege. The real privileged are enormously wealthy elites who can push laws and support candidates who impose rules on the general population that they never have to suffer the consequences of. If you look at the recall effort in San Francisco and the Soros-funded prosecutor who got recalled, the only precincts in San Francisco that voted to keep him in office were the uber-wealthy white elite areas of the city. In other words, they were the ones who could afford the best home security system and a gated defense, and they were far removed from the disastrous consequences of having a prosecutor who acted like a social worker instead of a prosecutor. That’s called privilege. That you could sit in your ivory tower and support policies, knowing that the common American has to suffer from them, and you never have to suffer the consequences of your actions. So I think that’s somewhat of the great irony of this. I would argue that you’ve seen a little bit of some of the areas of some of the most artful defenders of Steve Descano are not living in some of the areas and neighborhoods of Fairfax in which repeat violent offenders are getting released and back on the street, back in the community, and preying on the innocent again. The privileged feel safe walking at night, but they’re not in an area that’s going to be suffering as much as some of the other areas of Fairfax, working-class areas of Fairfax, where repeat offenders get released. BD: Alexander Soros can quite literally get into his penthouse elevator, go down, get in the black car with a chauffeur, and go straight from there to the private airport and never have to see the New York streets. JM: Stephanie Minter was a working-class mom who was at a bus stop when Abdul Jalloh, who had previously been arrested not once, not five times, not 10 times, not 20 times, but 30 prior arrests, an illegal immigrant, was the one who stabbed her to death. There is no way somebody like Alex Soros would ever be sitting at a bus stop waiting for a ride because they can’t afford their own car. That is the definition of privilege. He doesn’t suffer the consequences. It’s the Stephanie Minters of the world that do. If you want to talk about something, it’s that level of unmitigated arrogance that they refuse to look at the data. And I would say this, one of the great problems we have in politics today, and we see it overwhelmingly on the Left, is politicians who ask you to judge me on my intentions, not the results. There’s no area of society that operates that way. Nobody in the business sector could operate that way. Nobody in the military could operate that way. Nobody on a sports team could operate that way, where they’ve got the coach saying, “Hey, why do you decide to call an audible and go for it on 4th and 17?” And replying, “Well, coach, you can’t blame me. I meant to get the first down.” That’s literally what they do. They tell the voters, “I intend to build a more equitable, just society and an equitable, just criminal justice system.” Okay, I know that’s what your intentions are, what are the actual results, and are you hurting the people you claim you want to help? And they are never held accountable. And that’s another frustration I have with legacy media. California’s Exhibit A. Sacramento is the definition of politicians who always ask you to judge their intentions [rather than] their results. And at some point, people rebel. Look at the L.A. mayor’s race, where people just sit back, and they’re just aghast at it. And that’s literally what the Left is in America today right now. They’re never held accountable for the consequences they support that actually make communities poor, make it harder for people to start a business, and make it harder for people to grow and lift themselves out of poverty. They only get judged by what their intentions are. And I find that a really sad state of modern American journalism, that they never hold them accountable. BD: A big driver of the political shift nationally, in my view, and plays out locally too, is that the Left is actually, when you combine their policies, essentially undertaking a war on the working class, that they have gone to war against their priorities, against their safety, against their education via the lockstep embrace of teachers’ unions. Again, to the point about elites, the children of COVID elites were getting tutors and things like that. JM: I had a front row seat in Virginia. I was in the Assembly. I remember the Floor debates. I remember how I was lectured and mocked when we were saying, “Open up our schools,” because the people just heard us as working-class Virginians. It is the elite and the wealthy who can afford private schools and private tutors. They can afford it. And so you’ve seen, we saw nearly 20 years of gains in black and Latino testing scores in Virginia get wiped out essentially in 18 months, not by anything Republicans did, but by the utter, unmitigated, arrogant policies around Ralph Northam and his allies in the General Assembly. We were asking over and over again, reopen our schools. This is devastating for our kids. I feel there has never been true public accountability for what has been one of the most disastrous public policy decisions the Left instituted on America and our kids, particularly what we saw in Virginia. Virginia was 48th in this country in reopening our schools. We were among the last to reopen our schools for in-person instruction. And now we know kids were the least likely to get sick, and we know the kids were the least likely of any to even transmit the virus to teachers. We literally destroyed a generation of young people’s learning advancement in the name of a Left-wing ideology, and those of us like myself who were begging us to reopen were the ones who were belittled and mocked, and there’s been no accountability for that at all. None. BD: There has to be a point where this combination of, you used to call them the radical Left, but now I actually consistently make the case, they make up almost half of the Democratic Party because I use basically the statistics on justification of violence, which is now, I don’t know if you’ve seen the poll data, but it’s up over 40% pretty consistently when you ask the question of Democrats, that that radical Left has to be at some point a problem for the people who want to pretend, as Abigail Spanberger did, that they are in some way moderate or centrist minded or something that can be tolerable to the independent swing voter in a key election because of how bad these policies are. Why do they tolerate this? It seems to me that if you are trying to win back, say, the Rust Belt, you’ve got to declare we’re not going to be at war with the working class anymore. JM: First of all, I think that one of the under-reported stories in America today is the rise in one of America’s two major political parties, that violence is acceptable. If you look at the polling, it disturbs me that 66% of self-identified Democrats have a positive view of socialism. That is disturbing. It’s even more disturbing that, depending on the polling, I saw one that showed 25% of people identifying as Democrats say it is acceptable to use violence to achieve political means. And I will tell you this, and we live in such a soundbite society, but I think there was a date that will go down as a red letter date in American history, which was December 4th, 2024, that was the date that Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down in the streets of New York and murdered in cold blood. And what was most shocking — it wasn’t shocking that there was a murder in New York, it’s a city of eight million plus people. What was shocking was the reaction to it. When you poll America’s college students, 48% said his murder was justified. Now think about that. These are the people the media claims are the future leaders of America. These are our future lawyers, future judges, future politicians, future leaders. Roughly half of America’s college students today think it is acceptable or justified to summarily execute an innocent American without a trial, without ever being charged with a crime, all because they don’t like how he was running a private business. And that is a pure Neo-Marxist worldview. BD: We’ve seen the popularity of Luigi Mangione among the Left, and we go through periods where it happens — of seeing politicians targeted by assassins — crazy or not. That is not something that is entirely new. Every president has to deal with it. Many politicians have to deal with it. And if you are a political activist, if you’re Charlie Kirk or something like that, you also have to deal with it. If you’re the most prominent, you need security. What we are not used to and what really takes us back to something that resembles a century ago, and the era of the Russian revolution, and the like, is the targeting of people who are simply executives at companies. Many of them are large companies that employ thousands and thousands of people who are now beginning to fear showing their faith. There have been multiple attempts on the life of [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman. And I personally believe they will eventually get one of these AI guys. The odds are too high that they will eventually get one of them, and they’ve tried. When that happens, it’s going to be something that I think cracks open something truly evil in our society because there are going to be people who cheer it on. JM: No question. I was back at my law school at William and Mary, talking to some students at the Federalist Society, and they said they had classmates who were openly cheering when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, which is just so vile and disgusting that they would cheer the death of an innocent American. My family story has shaped so much of my view of America and also the evils of Marxism. But I remember asking my mother, “How did communism really take root in Cuba?” And when Fidel Castro took power, how in the world did communism take over a country with a GDP the size of Greece at the time, which by the end of the year Castro died, [had] the same GDP as Sudan? And my mother told me there’s something that had always stuck with me. She says, when they took over, they’d already done it in the universities. They took it over in the media outlets. Everyone in Cuban society was labeled one of two categories: either oppressor or oppressed. You’re either the oppressor or the oppressed. There was no nuance. And she said, “You can always justify unspeakable evil if you’re doing it on behalf of the oppressed against the so-called oppressor.” And it really chilled me. It reminds me of that quote from C.S. Lewis: that of all the tyrannies in the world, the worst tyrannies are those that have been done for “your own good.” And that’s what we have. That ghoulish, disgusting behavior of those New York City journalists who were cheering, saying they were there to cheer Mangione, that Thompson’s children were better off without him. I just thought, wow, what little Marxists you are, where groupthink takes away individual dignity, and that’s such a slippery slope in a society that could break itself apart. Listen, we’re having big debates in our country right now, I mean, AI is going to be transformative. I fully acknowledge that, but we are at a moment in society where 50% of Americans don’t even know the name of their neighbor. We are the most disconnected but connected society; connected online but disconnected personally, the worst we have ever seen. And it is shocking to see how it’s accelerating, but it’s also coarsening our discourse. And what we’ve seen on the Left is this view that this kind of neo-Marxist worldview is a sophisticated way of explaining the world, but the reality is one of the most simplistic ways because you’re deciding to categorize everybody by either the race or the ethnic background or their gender and then label everybody the same way they did it in Cuba, oppressor versus oppressed and again, then justifying unspeakable acts of violence they’re doing on behalf of the oppressed against the so-called oppressor, that worries me greatly about the future of the American Republic. BD: The fallout from the Supreme Court decision in Virginia that undid a metric butt load of money — I believe that’s the technical term — that was spent on that fight for redistricting. We see the different responses to it from the Democrats, packing the court, threatening to do all sorts of things to eliminate justices or take them out, or go after them in various ways. How concerned are you that they will be able to do something like that, or do you think that the toxicity of this is so significant that Spanberger will basically have to assert, let’s not touch this, it’s just going to bring up a failure on our part and make people mad? JM: She is the least popular governor in modern Virginia history.  BD: Have you ever seen anybody burn through that much goodwill in four months? JM: No, I haven’t. I mean, she ran on affordability, and then immediately governed the opposite. Now I’m not surprised by this because if you look at her voting record in Congress, she talked like a moderate, but she voted like a Leftist. So I’m not surprised by this in any way, but I do think what you are saying is an unholy retribution that’s going to occur against the Virginia Supreme Court. I’m very disappointed that you’re already seeing indications of Dan Helmer, who’s angry that he basically hand-drew a district for himself, and then that was taken away because the Virginia Supreme Court had the temerity of actually following what the Virginia Constitution said. And Dan Helmer literally just publicly said, “Yeah, we’re going to be removing the Supreme Court justices that we don’t like, how they voted.” Well, Justice [Arthur] Kelsey, who authored the Supreme Court opinion, was appointed to the Court of Appeals by Mark Warner, a Democrat, and then elevated to the Supreme Court of Virginia on a unanimous vote. Every Democrat in the state voted for him, including the Senate president pro tempore Democrat Louise Lucas, but now Dan Helmer is deciding to throw a temper tantrum because he’s mad that the justices followed the Constitution and you have not seen a previously appointed Supreme Court justice removed and not reappointed by the General Assembly since the 1800s, but I predict it’s most likely going to happen because we’re one of only two states in which the general assembly controls not the governor, the Supreme Court and they are even farther to the Left than Abigail Spanberger. We have seen this every time: the Democrats are preaching the rule of law, but when they don’t win or get what they want, what do they do? They talk about court packing and doing completely unprecedented things in the pursuit of power. And it’s really, let’s just say — surprise, but not surprise — that we’re seeing this type of retribution. BD: Last question: I don’t know how much you want to speak to the current situation, but does Louise Lucas have something to worry about?  JM: Yes.  *** Jason Miyares served as the 48th attorney general of Virginia from 2022 to 2026.