by Andrea Widburg
The reality of hard-left governance proves to be much less appealing than the theory and promises.
In 2019, Chesa Boudin openly campaigned on a hard-left, soft-on-crime platform—and got elected as San Francisco’s chief prosecutor. On Tuesday, San Francisco voters gave him the boot, having discovered that the reality of hard-left governance is much less appealing than the theory and promises.
Boudin comes by his leftism honestly, being descended from a long line of leftist academics and activists. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the Weather Underground, a Marxist terrorist group during the 1960s, and were the getaway drivers of the cars used in the 1981 Brink’s robbery in New York that left three men dead (a Brinks guard and two police officers). When Boudin was a toddler, his parents were arrested and convicted, with his mother getting 20 years to life and his father getting 75 years to life.
His parents handed Chesa over to Obama’s mentors, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, both of whom had also been members of the Weather Underground, and they become his surrogate parents. Boudin attended Yale for both his undergraduate and law degrees. So again, he was marinated in leftism.
Once he passed the bar, Boudin worked as a public defender. He then realized that he could reform the criminal justice system better from the inside than the outside and in 2019, with $620,000 from various George Soros entities, he ran for the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.
While Mr. Boudin did not receive money directly from one of Mr. Soros’ multiple state PACs, a network of left-wing donors connected to the Hungarian-born billionaire helped Mr. Boudin raise more than $620,000.
Boudin was open about his reforming zeal. He promised to eliminate cash bail, establish a special unit to re-evaluate wrongful convictions, oppose any requests for assistance from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and work on decarceration (that is, getting criminals out of prison, not into it). In other words, the typical pie-in-in-the sky promises that, if the government is nice to criminals, they will stop committing crimes. A slim majority of 50.8% of the City’s voters got him into office.
Image: Chesa Boudin. YouTube screen grab.
The moment he entered office, Boudin began to make good on his promises. He started by firing seven senior prosecutors, instantly handicapping his office’s ability to prosecute anybody and angering both the fired attorneys and the ones who remained behind. From there, he embarked on what can only be called a campaign of lawlessness as San Francisco’s top lawman.
In his first month, Boudin’s office immediately refused to prosecute Jamaica Hampton, a man who attacked a police officer with a liquor bottle, alienating the police.
In his second month, Boudin announced that his office would no longer prosecute contraband claims (i.e., drugs and weapons) if his office determined that a police traffic stop finding that contraband was “pretextual.” He also said that he would no longer seek enhanced jail sentences for people with criminal histories because doing so was racist. Oh, and he eliminated cash bail.
In his third month in office, Boudin used the pretext of COVID to reduce San Francisco’s jail population by 25%. By his fourth month, he increased to 40% the total number of people released from jail.
Beginning in his sixth month in office, which coincided with George Floyd’s drug death and the resulting riots, Boudin was all over the anti-policing movement. He made it almost impossible for people who resisted arrest to be prosecuted and put into place a whole raft of policies that emboldened criminals and disheartened police. He also consistently released repeat offenders.
Thanks to all these new policies, crime in San Francisco soared. In addition, homeless encampments and open-air drug use began to smother city streets. Boudin also turned out to be a poor manager, so much so that, 22 months into the job, a San Francisco Superior Court judge criticized his management for being chaotic and marred by high employee turnover.
Even the leftist San Franciscans who put Chesa Boudin into office couldn’t tolerate the crime ravaging the city. Two recall campaigns were born, with one making it onto the ballot. The campaign, surprisingly, came from the left. (Well, it couldn’t come from the right because there aren’t enough conservatives left in San Francisco to put together a soccer team.)
And yesterday, Tuesday, June 7, Chesa finally had to face the music for the damage he’s done to the quality of life in San Francisco: 61% of San Francisco voters said “yes” to the recall measure.
Sadly, it’s doubtful any San Franciscans, having literally been mugged by leftist reality, will change their political views. Rather than seeing the problem as leftism, they’ll almost certainly chalk it up solely to Chesa’s mismanagement—and place someone very similar in an office that, before Chesa came along, was held by both Kamala Harris and L.A.’s George Gascon.
Andrea Widburg
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/in_san_francisco_voters_give_chesa_boudin_a_soros_da_the_boot.html
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