RADICALISM IS IN SF DA'S BONES

San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin's parents were members of the radical and violent Weathermen  

 

By Howie Katz and Mother Jones  

 

San Francisco's new DA Chesa Boudin ha radicalism in his bones.  That is why uber-liberal billionaire George Soreass (sic) was a major contributor to his election campaign.

Boudin's parents Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert were members of the radical Weathermen which bombed government buildings and banks and committed armed robberies from 1969 t0 1977.  The group commonly known as the Weather Underground was a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society.  

The group was allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and aimed for "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a classless communist world."  Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were leaders of the Weather Underground.

From Mother Jones: 

Boudin’s parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the militant left-wing Weather Underground, which began as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society and gained infamy in the late ’60s and the ’70s for a spate of political bombings—including at the Pentagon and the State Department headquarters—in protest of the Vietnam War. The group was four years dead when Boudin’s parents handed their 14-month-old to a babysitter and left to participate in one of America’s most notorious crimes, the 1981 Brinks heist, for which they acted as getaway drivers—Gilbert driving and Boudin sitting shotgun in a U-Haul truck that served as a switch vehicle. The perpetrators, led by members of the Black Liberation Army, got away with $1.6 million before a shootout ensued; three people were killed—two cops and a security guard.

Boudin’s parents were sentenced to long prison sentences for their roles in the crime. His father is still incarcerated; his mother was released in 2003 and is now the co-director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University, which works on mass incarceration issues. In their absence, Boudin was raised in Chicago by their close friends and fellow Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, now a pair of retired academics who still haunt the fever dreams of right-wingers.

Boudin as SF DA

Boudin has renounced violence to achieve political goals.  As SF DA he has gone after police officers accused of wrongdoing.  Boudin also promised to eliminate cash bail and not to prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.

It remains to be seen how his parents and upbringing by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn will guide his policies as San Francisco's DA.