Publisher's Note: One of the most significant things you can do to promote Liberty is to support our mission. Please make your gift to the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you! —Mark Alexander, Publisher

June 10, 2022

The Chesa Boudin Inflection Point in the Fight for Civilizational Sanity

The chasm between grassroots leftists and sensible American voters has never been broader. San Francisco, of all places, now seems to agree.

Chesa Boudin is, by any reasonable measure, a nut job. Conservatives could not grow a more picture-perfect political villain in a petri dish, even if they tried; Boudin really is that caricaturable.

Boudin’s parents were Weather Underground domestic terrorists and, following the 1981 Brink’s Robbery in New York state, convicted as cop-killers. They were incarcerated (Boudin’s father was just released last November), and Boudin was thus raised in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood by Bill Ayers. Yes, that Bill Ayers — the onetime Weather Underground leader, domestic terrorist kingpin and erstwhile comrade of another famous Hyde Park denizen, Barack Obama. Boudin’s great-grand-uncle, Louis Boudin, was an influential Marxist legal theorist and an active member of the Socialist Labor Party of America. His grandfather, Leonard Boudin, was a radical leftist attorney who once represented Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuban government. Chesa Boudin himself worked before law school in Caracas as a translator and researcher for Venezuela’s (blessedly deceased) socialist president, Hugo Chavez.

In November 2019, Boudin was narrowly elected district attorney of San Francisco, America’s foremost bastion of progressivism. (Notably, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor praised Boudin’s “personal strength and commitment to reforming and improving the criminal justice system” via recorded video at his January 2020 swearing-in.) Boudin replaced as San Francisco DA George Gascon, the Havana-born, similarly light-on-crime, anti-prosecution “prosecutor” who moved southward and has served as Los Angeles County DA since December 2020. Boudin and Gascon, along with some others such as Cook County, Illinois’ Kim Foxx, are the tips of the spear for what Andrew C. McCarthy in a March 2020 Commentary essay referred to as “The Progressive Prosecutor Project” — a sprawling, George Soros-funded national movement to elect prosecutors who don’t … prosecute (or incarcerate).

This past Tuesday, San Franciscans recalled Chesa Boudin in clarion fashion, ousting him from office in a thunderous 20-point ballot box cri de coeur. That no less than San Francisco — America’s preeminent urban den of left-wing lunacy — saw fit to render such a decisive verdict against the Chavez mentee represents an inflection point in the fight to restore and reclaim civilizational sanity from the forces of civilizational arson.

A “Progressive Prosecutor Project” archetype, Boudin’s 2019 platform focused on eliminating cash bail, active resistance of federal immigration enforcement, blocking prosecution for various drug- and gun-related offenses during traffic stops, and fully ceasing the prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes such as public urination and defecation. The all-too-predictable result is that, under his watch, San Francisco has further descended into the civilizational hellhole it has become known as. Burglaries rose 45%, causing many stores to shut down. Homicides shot up 37%. The conviction rate for prosecuted offenses fell from 60% in 2019 to 39% in 2021. Homelessness continued to skyrocket. (Perhaps the fact San Francisco offers up to $588 in cash per month to the poor, over three times what even New York City gives, has something to do with it.)

In short, city dwellers, even in nutty San Francisco, became disenchanted with their needle-bestrewn, feces-bespeckled sidewalks, their homeless encampments run amok and their inability to walk once-safe neighborhoods without fear of being mugged. So they axed Boudin.

Boudin’s ouster is yet another data point evincing the woke Left’s cultural and political overreach throughout the United States. Last November, one year after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by double-digits in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin ascended to the governor’s mansion by running during the campaign’s closing stretch as a culture war-centric, anti-critical race theory leader. Elsewhere last November, the left-wing cities of Minneapolis and Seattle defeated a toxic “defund the police” ballot initiative and elected a pro-law-and-order Republican as district attorney, respectively. Those results should have been wake-up calls for “progressive prosecutor” zealots.

Indeed, last December, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, herself a Democrat and no progressive slouch, inadvertently foreshadowed Boudin’s recall when she said: “The reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policy and less tolerant of all the bulls— that has destroyed our city.”

Even more recently, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis deployed his much-discussed fiscal fusillade in April against The Walt Disney Company for its propagandistic opposition to Florida Republicans’ parental rights in education bill, public opinion was on DeSantis’ side by a large double-digit margin. Whether it is law and order in the streets or gender ideology in the classroom, the pendulum is now finally swinging back toward the side of civilizational sanity.

But the far-left activist wing of the Democratic Party remains as radical as ever. And from fomenting overt anti-prosecution urban anarchy to playing down an attempted assassination of a sitting Supreme Court justice as if it is no big deal, the chasm between grassroots leftists and the sensible median American voter has never been broader. San Francisco, of all places, now seems to agree. Unfortunately for Democrats, even if they wanted to distance themselves from their toxic grassroots (and they don’t), it is now too late. Democrats are going to lose badly this November, and they only have themselves to blame.

COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.