While it might be amusing that the latest victim of a phony police call of a violent crime in progress was extreme-left Billionaire George $oro$ (who probably wasn’t even in the country at the time), “Swatting” is no joke.
George Soros’ posh Southampton estate was swatted over the weekend as the leftist billionaire became the latest high-profile victim of the 911 pranks.
Southampton police said they received the 911 call shortly before 9 p.m. Saturday, with the caller telling cops he had just shot his wife at the ritzy South Shore manse and was threatening to shoot himself — sending officers rushing to the scene.
The report turned out to be bogus, Southampton Police Detective Herman Lamison said Monday.
“Spoke to security, searched the premises. It was [a] negative problem,” one cop responding to the scene reported, according to a recording of police radio traffic obtained by The Post.
Lamison did not identify Soros as the owner of the home, but sources confirmed to The Post that it was indeed the 93-year-old billionaire’s Long Island estate on Old Town Road.
It is not clear if Soros or members of his family were home at the time of the incident.
The Southampton prank was just the latest incident of swatting — phony calls to police reporting crimes at a specific address — targeting high-profile individuals.
On Friday, police in Virginia responded to the home of George Washington University legal scholar Jonathan Turley after a bogus 911 call to Fairfax County police that someone had been shot at the address.
“Yes, I was swatted this evening,” Turley said in a statement. “It is regrettably a manifestation of our age or rage.”
On Christmas Day, police were dispatched to the home of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) following a fake 911 call from a man who said he shot his girlfriend there.
Four other Georgia lawmakers — Republican state Sens. John Albers, Kay Kirkpatrick and Clint Dixon, and Democrat Kim Jackson — were swatted the same day, according to reports.
Another victim of the Christmas Day pranks was upstate New York GOP Rep. Brandon Williams.
On Thursday, Georgia GOP Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was also swatted, with a bogus bomb threat called into police — one day after US Rep. Rick Scott (R-Fla) was the target of another call that sent police rushing to his Naples home.
Among the other recent swatting victims were Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a Democrat, and US Rep. Kevin Miller, an Ohio Republican.
Soros has backed dozens of far-left prosecutor candidates across several cities as part of his efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago, former DA Kim Gardner in St. Louis and others.
However, Soros’ work to overhaul the criminal justice system extends beyond prosecutors.
In what seems like an “uh-oh” realization that swatting call targets have been almost exclusively conservatives, there has been a sudden uptick in high-profile Democrats being targetted by these calls.
To long-time Disqus conservatives, this scenario sounds suspiciously like the infamous upvote theft bot of a couple of years ago that destroyed commenters’ ability to post on new sites because their ‘Disqus Rep” fell below the threshold of automatically going to pending — or marked as spam. When people started pointing out that all those losing their upvotes were conservatives, suddenly, a few token leftists were hit (and their vote counts were quietly restored soon after). Some conservative posters have had their upvotes restored, but only when an individual begged a Disqus staffer who was somewhat sympathetic to the user’s plight.
But while Disqus’s little dirty trick didn’t harm anyone in the real world, Swatting definitely could. And — sooner or later — it will.
In the interests of transparency, I have had this happen to me, and having a gun pointed at you for no good (ie, legal) reason is NOT conducive to a calm, well-thought-out analysis of the situation. Using one’s wife to hide the gun while standing out of the line of sight escalates an already bad situation.
Sooner or later, someone is going to get seriously injured or killed.
If it’s a conservative “MAGAt,” the story will be shrugged off. But if it happens to be a leftist, all hell will break loose, IMHO.
