District Attorney Boudin: The chickens do come home to roost!
Earlier this week the people of San Francisco (perhaps the most “woke” municipality in America) recalled their extremely radical District Attorney Chesa Boudin who, since his election in 2020, had rapidly turned the extremely beautiful city into the equivalent of a third-world nightmare.
San Francisco’s Mayor, London Breed, herself a long-time leftist, summarized the fruit of Boudin’s tenure as actions and policies that have “destroyed our city,” defecation on sidewalks, bold and prevalent armed robberies, rampant, flagrant and public drug use, pandemic shoplifting, car hijackings, and a massive surge in violent crimes.
Mr. Boudin is a high-profile advocate of a social theory known as “decriminalization,” which is a belief that too many ethnic minority youths end up in prison. That observation is unfortunately true. However, Mr. Boudin and his fellow travelers’ cure is worse than the disease. Mr. Boudin’s solution is to leave many more accused criminals roaming the streets and victimizing many more citizens.
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When the District Attorney’s office starts ignoring and refusing to enforce laws they have taken an oath to uphold, lawlessness increases at an exponential rate.
Mr. Boudin’s recall was by a veritable landslide. San Francisco sent Mr. Boudin packing by a 60% to 40% vote. He blamed his defeat on “right-wing billionaires,” which is ironic since Mr. Boudin and his fellow extremely liberal D.A.s across the country were in large part funded by George Soros. It has been reported that 75 radical D.A.s around the country are Soros financed and they currently hold office in half the 50 largest cities, sowing chaos and mayhem across the urban centers of America.
What happened in San Francisco is happening nationwide. As Bret Stephens puts it, “In one area after another, the left is being mugged by reality, to borrow Irving Kristol’s famous phrase.” Or, as my East Texas grandmother used to say, “the chickens do come home to roost!”
His compadre, Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón, is very likely to be recalled as well for his catastrophic tenure in LA.
Will Chesa Boudin and his followers get the message? Some will, evidently including thousands of voters in San Francisco. However, Boudin and those he symbolize will not. They are true believers in their ideology, and they have become “deaf, dumb, and blind” to anything that contradicts their secular religion. As The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger keenly observed, “The professional left will let their policies collapse a city, a state, nation and even their own careers down to the foundation.”
It is poetic justice that Mr. Boudin is the first of these catastrophic “woke” D.A.s to be swept out of office. In many ways, he is the “poster boy” for the radical left. Mr. Boudin’s parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, were convicted of murder for their role as members of the Weather Underground in a Brink’s robbery that resulted in two New York police officers and a security guard being killed.
As a consequence, at 14 months of age, Mr. Boudin was raised by his adoptive parents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (yes, that Bill Ayers and that Bernardine Dohrn, infamous fellow members of the Weather Underground — a terrorist group modeled after Chairman Mao’s Red Guard — and committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the government of the United States). Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10 “Most Wanted List” for several years and considered herself a “revolutionary communist.”
It would have been extraordinary if Mr. Boudin had been able to overcome such a toxic background. Unfortunately, “the acorn has not fallen far from the tree.”
Given the evident bankruptcy and catastrophe-producing nature of the hard-left progressive agenda, you would think at least some of their leaders would re-evaluate their policies!
That will not happen. That means that since they won’t do it, thousands of us who have not been seduced have a responsibility to roll back this madness engulfing our nation.
The most interesting thing to emerge from the Boudin episode surfaces when you begin to analyze the voting patterns in the San Francisco recall election. When you get down to the precinct level, you find that the only places where Mr. Boudin won were the most affluent, overwhelmingly white precincts of the city. When the poorer, less advantaged areas are examined, you find Mr. Boudin falls way behind in the voting.
In other words, the areas of the city that can afford to insulate themselves from the mayhem, criminality, and violence Mr. Boudin’s policies created and encouraged, and could assuage their “white guilt” by doing so were the only ones who continued to back Mr. Boudin.
Those more vulnerable San Franciscans who were forced to live in the midst of the chaos created by Mr. Boudin’s policies, said with their votes, “Enough is Enough! We are not going to sign what Daniel Henninger called ‘the suicide pact that is doctrinaire progressivism.’”
On a wider scale, it is very instructive to note that gun sales have been going up precipitously in our nation. And which Americans are buying weapons at the most increased rate — African-Americans.
“Retailers in an online survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation … reported that they sold 58% more guns to black customers in the first half of 2020 than a year earlier, the highest increase for any ethnic group. Personal safety tops the list of why people decide to buy a firearm. In a 2021 Gallup survey, 88% of respondents said they own a gun ‘for protection against crime,’ which is up from 67% in 2005,” according to Jason Riley's op-ed in the WSJ, “Why Black Americans Are Buying More Guns."
As has been the case so many times before, the very people the progressive Democrats claim to care about the most are the ones who suffer the most under progressivist policies.
The cities that have the highest rates of gun violence and criminality are also the cities that have the strictest gun laws — gun laws that criminals, because they are criminals, routinely ignore.
The Bible tells us the human heart is flawed. “The heart of man is deceitful and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). That is why God created civil government, to punish those who do that which is evil and to reward those who do that which is right (Rom. 13:1-7).
Progressivism will never work and people will never flourish under its tenets because it is based on an erroneous understanding of human nature.
As one American to another, I say to you my fellow countrymen, “Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what He is saying to the churches” (Rev. 2:29).
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
