The Just Elected San Francisco District Attorney is the Socialist Adopted Son of Former Weather Underground Leader Bill Ayers and He Is Not Going to Prosecute Public Urination

Chesa Boudin

David Gilbert, a founding member of Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society and member of the Weather Underground, sits in a maximum-security prison in upper state New York in the Wende Correctional Facility.

He is serving a, 75 years to life, sentence for being a member of the Weather Underground group who, along with members of the Black Liberation Army, robbed a Brink's truck on October 20, 1981.

Two Nyack, NY  police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady and Brinks guard Peter Paige were murdered during the getaway part of the robbery.

Prison has apparently not mellowed Gilbert. He has a book out which he wrote in prison, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner.

At the time of the robbery, Gilbert had a 14 months old boy. The mother of the boy, Kathy Boudin, also took part in the robbery and served a 22 years sentence.

With both Gilbert and Boudin sentenced to long terms, Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn adopted the toddler, Chesa Boudin.

But Chesa's interesting lineage does not start with his radical parents nor with Ayers.

His great-great-uncle, Louis B. Boudin, was a Marxist theoretician and his grandfather Leonard Boudin was an attorney who represented clients such as Fidel Castro and Paul Robeson.

Chesa ended up a Rhodes Scholar and in 2011 received a law degree from Yale Law School.

Before law school, Boudin traveled to Venezuela and served as a translator in the administration of the then-president, the socialist Hugo Chávez.

After law school, he moved to San Francisco and joined the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, which is where he worked before just being elected to the San Francisco district attorney's position.

He apparently thinks there is an injustice in the fact that his father received a long sentence for participation (getaway driver) in the three murders.

“Growing up, I had to go through a metal detector and steel gates just to give my parents a hug,” Boudin said in his campaign video.

“For most of my life, it was impossible to imagine that the district attorney’s office could be focused on undoing some of the damage done by overpolicing and mass incarceration,” Boudin said. “I think it’s up to people who care about the system and have been impacted by it to make sure this movement continues to build.”

Boudin clearly hates the police and the entire judicial system as do his followers.

City Journal reports:

On the eve of last week’s municipal election in San Francisco, a speaker at an event for Chesa Boudin—the eventual winner in the race for district attorney—took the microphone. “Hey, so I just got one thing to say,” she began. “Which is fuck the POA (Police Officers Association)! San Francisco, this is what we get when we throw the fuck down. This is the city where we elect a public defender to be our district attorney. What we start here, the nation follows. So, look out.”

As “Fuck the POA! Fuck the POA! Fuck the POA!” filled the room, the leader at the podium offered her middle finger, and many in the crowd followed suit.

Boudin is making clear that the focus of the District Attorney's office will be different under his regime. Zero focus on victimless crimes can be cheered on by libertarians, but what is Boudin going to be up to?

Is he going to fail to prosecute crimes committed against private property? Is he going to focus enforcement on coercive politically correct regulations?

His campaign web page under tenant protections says:

Chesa Boudin is committed to using the power of the District Attorney’s office to hold the wealthy and powerful accountable, including landlords who break the law...

Though the law does not go far enough, tenants in San Francisco have meaningful protections against mistreatment by landlords. These protections, which flow primarily from the California Penal Code and San Francisco Administrative Code, are aimed at preventing the worst types of abuses that San Francisco tenants face at the hands of unscrupulous landlords.

As District Attorney, Chesa Boudin will commit to using the full menu of options available to prevent crooked landlords -- and their agents --  from harming their tenants.

Time will tell where his focus will be and how creative he will get with the law.

But there are some serious negative signs.

He says he is proud to be a Democratic Socialist.

He told the socialist magazine Jacobin:

When we were kids, socialism was a bad word associated with dictatorships. What we’ve seen over the last five or so years, in large part thanks to Bernie Sanders and all the grassroots organizing that’s gone into making him a national political leader, is that socialism has become something that even mainstream progressives identify with. It means things like universal health care, quality public education for everyone, great housing for everyone. 

Those are values that are really mainstream today. Thirty years ago, even people who supported those values and policies to achieve them wouldn’t have been comfortable identifying them with socialism. That’s not the case anymore.

-RW

UPDATE

From The Daily Caller:

Chesa Boudin, the urine-and-feces-plagued city’s incoming district attorney, pledged during the campaign not to prosecute public urination and other quality-of-life crimes if he was elected.

“We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted,” Boudin vowed in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questionnaire during the campaign.