“I want to be very clear about what happened tonight,” intoned Chesa Boudin shortly after being ousted as San Francisco’s district attorney in Tuesday’s recall election. “Right-wing billionaires outspent us three to one.”
The far-left extremist would have you believe he is on the side of the little guy and was victimized on Election Day by dark, right-wing money. The truth, however, is that he lost because of the more substantive fact that voters were fed up with a district attorney whose attitudes line up with those of his Marxist revolutionary parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who were convicted of felony murder for their role in the crimes of the Weather Underground.
Boudin is on the side of criminals and is steeped in contempt for ordinary citizens and American society in general. San Franciscans wanted him gone because he was trashing the peace and security of their society as fast as he knew how.
There are several ironies about his comments. The first to note is the phrasing. When Boudin says, “I want to be very clear,” he echoes former President Barack Obama’s tic of prefacing his most implausible assertions with “let me be clear,” implying they are incontrovertible.
In addition to his casuistical rhetoric, there is a deep irony in Boudin’s substance on the subject of right-wing billionaires. He took power in 2020 with financial backing from George Soros, the left-wing billionaire who is even now infiltrating soft-on-crime extremists into office all over America to wreck major cities with grotesque spikes in crime.
It is both comically tardy and utterly hypocritical to complain, at the moment of defeat, about the influence of money in politics that got you there in the first place. If you live by the cash, you can’t complain if you die by it, too. The malign effect of governance by these Soros lieutenants is not a bug but a feature — not an unfortunate byproduct but their goal. Boudin was recalled not for his incompetence but for his horrifying efficiency in achieving his ends.
It was also, of course, not money alone that beat him. He was popularly rejected because he helped turn San Francisco into a byword for filth, dysfunction, violence, larceny, and other crime. The lefty inhabitants who picked him two years ago, like other Californians, seem to like the warm glow of virtue that is delivered by progressive policies in prospect. But they don’t like them when they take their inevitable effect. When they detonate, as they always do, those same people are horrified by the mess they make. Suddenly, they don’t want to defund the police, don’t think shoplifting of up to $1,000 should be seen as a harmless urban sport, and don’t think career criminals are life’s victims.
It’s not just voters casting their ballots who are abandoning Boudin and his ilk. It is also other Democrats fearful of losing bids for reelection. They are tossing out or tactically suspending left-wing orthodoxies faster than Californians are fleeing to better-run states, such as Texas, where the writ of malign progressive experiments does not run.
