The Republican Sabotage Machine vs Chesa Boudin: Where’s the Progressive Outrage?

The Republicans. They tell us they’re real Americans. They believe in truth, justice and the American way. Except they don’t really. They don’t truly believe in any of those values. All they really care about are power and self-interest. And the only way they can enforce their dominion over democracy is to sabotage it. Which they are doing in nearly every state – and even in so-called progressive capitals like San Francisco.

Here we see a sinister cabal of moderate Democrats (Republicans in any other city) and billionaire bullies targeting progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, launching TWO recall campaigns against him before he even got his seat warm at the Hall of Justice. This hit operation is right out of the Trump playbook – rig the system to get far-right fanatics elected, and if progressives slip into office, tie them up with endless disinformation barrages and even recall campaigns.

Who’s funding the Boudin recall campaigns? A rogue’s gallery of fat cats including Chicago investor David O’Keefe as well as Silicon Valley venture capitalists David O. Sacks and Cyan Banister. (It’s driven locally by figures like real estate lobbyist Mary Jung and police-affiliated attorney Harry Stern.) Who are these people and why are they targeting Boudin, who has emerged as a nationally prominent advocate of justice reform? Let’s look at Sacks, for example. He was a conservative wingman of notorious Trump ally Peter Thiel when they were Stanford students, later coauthoring a book with him titled The Diversity Myth, a Koch brother-published attack on “political correctness” which stated that racism in America is largely imaginary and that date rape is nothing more than “belated regret.” Besides funding the recall effort against Boudin, Sacks has also given wads of money to Republican candidates – including former Senator David Perdue, in a desperate attempt to keep Georgia (and the U.S.) in the red column.

The billionaire Republican attack on Boudin is being aided at the local level by Mayor London Breed’s political machine. Mayor Breed, who strongly backed Boudin’s opponent Suzy Loftus in the DA race, wants to eliminate a visionary future rival on her left. And Breed would much rather focus public attention on Boudin’s alleged mismanagement of the prosecutor’s office than her all-too-real leadership failures. Breed has benefited from Covid fatigue and a weak local press, but in any robust metro arena, she would have been on the ropes by now for her personal and political affiliations with disgraced Public Woks czar Mohammed Nuru and her rank inability to combat San Francisco’s homeless and housing crisis, urban blight and tech industry domination.

Boudin, by contrast, has offered a powerful example of what a public official can do to advance real justice in one city. But during his 17 months in office, he’s been forced to fight off a stream of fake news from his opponents and their useful tools in the media, like TV reporter Dion Lim of ABC7-KGO and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight. Boudin is charged with overseeing a rise in SF crime – it’s actually down overall by some 30 precent. Under his watch, violent crimes like rape and assault have significantly decreased. Homicide has ticked up, as it has in cities across the nation during the pandemic, but much less than other cities in the region. Boudin is also charged with taking a soft-on-crime approach, but while emphasizing alternatives to incarceration for non-serious offenses, Boudin has also increased the rates of prosecution for offenders with prior arrests.

The question that keeps nagging me is not why Republican billionaires and the Breed machine are targeting Boudin, but why San Francisco progressives have not rallied around him more aggressively. If his opponents succeed in knocking off a nationally prominent progressive prosecutor like Chesa Boudin, it will not only be a blow against the rising social justice movement – it will further disempower the San Francisco Left and embolden the forces of greed that have taken over the city.

Stay tuned to this space, as I campaign one more time for Chesa Boudin. It might be my last hurrah as a citizen advocate (more on that later).

For the People: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin