California is at once making more and more activities criminal while decriminalizing things rational societies have always considered crimes.

For example, plastic straws, Coca-Cola for children, and standard-capacity gun magazines are all illegal in the Golden State. Shoplifting? That’s fine, so long as you need whatever you’re stealing. Proposition 20, which would have restored some stricter sentencing for such crimes, was defeated by a 62-38 margin on November 3.

And then there are the George Soros-funded district attorneys who are turning Rule of Law on its head. One of them is George Gascon, Los Angeles County’s new head prosecutor. Gascon was an LA police officer before serving as San Francisco’s district attorney and then moving back south. He promises a left-wing agenda that includes refusal to prosecute certain crimes.

“As of Tuesday,” reports Fox News, “many misdemeanor cases will be declined or dismissed prior to arraignment unless ‘factors for considerations’ exist. The list of offenses includes trespassing, disturbing the peace, a minor in possession of alcohol, driving without a license, driving with a suspended license, making criminal threats, drug and paraphernalia possession, being under the influence of a controlled substance, public intoxication, loitering to commit prostitution and resisting arrest.”

Just don’t use a plastic straw or violate a stay-at-home order.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents most cops in a department that faces $150 million in budget cuts, isn’t amused. “As homicides, shooting victims and shots fired into occupied homes soar in Los Angeles, it’s disturbing that Gascon’s first act in office is to explore every avenue possible to release from jail those responsible for this bloodshed,” said the union’s board of directors. “These victims and law-abiding residents lost a voice today while criminals and gang members gained an ally in the prosecutor’s office.”

Soros seems to have made funding urban district attorneys somewhat of a hobby, and Gascon was a big beneficiary of his lavish activism. Other Soros-backed DAs include Kimberly Gardner of St. Louis (the villain in the McCloskey case) and Chicago’s Kim Foxx (of Jussie Smollett infamy). Filling our nation’s urban centers, already nearly uniformly under Democrat control, with these radical leftists is going to make problems even worse.