Voters have ousted Chesa Boudin (D) as San Francisco’s district attorney.
Article by Brad Jones from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Unlike California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent recall election, Boudin didn’t face any opponents. On June 7, San Francisco voters were simply asked to answer yes or no to the question, “Shall Chesa Boudin be recalled (removed) from the Office of District Attorney?”
With more than 61.3 percent of the voters selecting “yes,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed must now appoint an interim district attorney until Nov. 8, when a permanent replacement will be elected. The no votes totaled 40,921 (38.7 percent).
Boudin, a former public defender backed by leftwing billionaire George Soros, came under fire for failed progressive criminal-justice reform policies that have led to a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths, homelessness, and thefts, including smash-and-grab robberies, car burglaries, shoplifting, and other property crimes.
Homicide rates and gun crimes have increased since Boudin became took office. He has strived to end cash bail, reduce incarceration rates, and scrutinize police misconduct.
Boudin fired seven prosecutors his second day on the job. In mid-December, The Epoch Times reported that more than 50 prosecutors, support, and victim services staff had either been fired or had quit their jobs over Boudin’s progressive agenda.
A former prosecutor who produced a list of those who were fired or quit left their jobs said at the time, “the office is imploding,” and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Superior Court Judge Bruce Chan chastised Boudin at a Sept. 24, 2021, court proceeding. Chan cited the “constant turnover” and expressed his “disapproval of the manner in which the Office of the District Attorney is being managed,” according to court transcripts.
The Recall Effort
Several prominent Democrats have opposed Boudin, including Nima Rahimi, an attorney and executive board member of the California Democratic Party.
The San Francisco Board of Elections certified a petition on Nov. 9 to recall Boudin after a group called San Franciscans for Public Safety, led by Mary Jung, a former San Francisco Democratic Party chairwoman, and Andrea Shorter. The two launched the petition on April 28, 2021, and gathered about 83,000 signatures, well surpassing the 51,325 needed to force a recall election.
The group alleges in its official recall petition that Boudin failed keep his promises to deliver criminal justice reform and police accountability.
“Boudin is not keeping San Francisco safe. He refuses to adequately prosecute criminals and fails to take the drug dealing crisis seriously. He doesn’t hold serial offenders accountable, getting them released from custody, and his response to victims is that ‘hopefully’ home burglaries will go down,” according to the petition.
Boudin dismissed the recall effort as a right-wing campaign based on “false and disproven Republican talking points attempting to undo progress and take us backwards,” in his May, 2021, statement of defense.
He argued that “recalls are not political tools for people who lose elections” and that voters “thoughtfully and carefully elected” him because they support his work “to reform an unjust system that too often criminalized poverty, addiction, and mental illness; failed to hold violent police accountable; and targeted people of color.”
Boudin was elected in 2019 with 50.8 percent of the vote, defeating Suzy Loftus who received 49.2 percent.
He said the “the old approaches” didn’t make the city safer but ignored the root causes of crime and “perpetuated mass incarceration,” and claimed that in his first year he fought to expand support for crime victims, hold police accountable when they commit unnecessary violence, create an independent “innocence commission,” and establish an economic crimes unit to protect workers’ rights.
Boudin argued that “exploiting recalls for political purposes is an abuse of the process [that] disrespects the will of the voters, and costs taxpayers millions of dollars.”
Richie Greenberg, a Republican and former mayoral candidate, launched an earlier but unsuccessful recall petition against Boudin in January last year. The campaign collected 49,600 signatures, 1,725 shy of the number needed to make the ballot.
Progressive Policies
Declaring that he didn’t want to prosecute minor offenses, Boudin has indicated he wanted to shift the focus to more serious offenses and take on corporations. He has also suggested hiring public defenders as prosecutors.
He has refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has threatened to prosecute ICE officers whom he accused of breaking “sanctuary city laws.”
Fentanyl Deaths
In San Francisco, fentanyl has claimed the lives of 131 people so far this year, according to data from the city’s Chief Medical Examiner’s office, and nearly 1,100 have died from accidental fentanyl overdoses alone since January 2020 to April 2022 compared to 1,544 total overdose deaths. In 2021, fentanyl deaths in San Francisco surpassed COVID-19 fatalities.
The overdose rate is one of the worst in the state despite the city spending more than $13 million to expand overdose prevention programs last year.
The drug epidemic is so rampant that Mayor Breed and others civic leaders have tried to skirt federal laws to create supervised facilities, otherwise known as shooting galleries, where intravenous drug addicts can shoot up under the watchful eyes of medical professionals. The city approved the purchase of a building to open such a facility but has not actually done so.
Boudin and Breed have both been blamed for allowing the city’s infamous needle-strewn “Tenderloin” district to infect surrounding neighborhoods with open drug use and dealing.
Overdose death rates have surged since fentanyl began appeared on the scene several years ago. Because of its potency and low cost, drug dealers have been mixing fentanyl with heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine.
The drug, known as “China Girl, China Town and China White” among other street names, is most often smuggled into the United States from China through Mexico and can be deadly in doses as low as two milligrams, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that can be up to 50 times more potent than heroin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A year-long national study ending in Jan. 31, 2021, showed that overdose deaths from opioids increased 38.1 percent, and deaths from synthetic opioids jumped 55.6 percent.
Socialist Ties
Boudin once worked as a translator for Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chávez and co-wrote the book “Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution: Hugo Chávez Talks to Marta Harnecker,” published in 2005. Boudin is credited on the book cover.
In 2011, he attained a law degree from Yale Law School and began working for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office the following year. Unlike other Soros-backed candidates, Boudin was a public defender and had never served as a prosecutor before he was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney—a position Los Angeles DA George Gascón held from 2011 to 2019.
Boudin attended Oxford’s St. Antony’s College in England on a Rhode’s Scholarship and earned two master’s degrees, one in public policy in Latin America and the other in forced migration.
Radical Parents
Boudin was a 14-month-old infant when his parents were arrested in 1981 and imprisoned for their involvement in a botched attempt to rob an armored delivery truck in Nanuet, NY, about 35 miles north of New York City. They were getaway drivers for and members of the radical Weather Underground which orchestrated the failed heist in which two police officers and a Brink’s security guard were killed.
His mother, Kathy Boudin, spent more than two decades in prison before she was released on parole in 2003. His father, David Gilbert, was sentenced 75 years to life in prison but was released on parole in October after Boudin successfully lobbied disgraced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to commute his sentence before he left office. Cuomo did so on his final day as governor in August. Gilbert, now 76, served more than 40 years in prison.
Boudin was adopted and raised by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were also members of Weather Underground, a radical Marxist group that sought to lead a violent communist revolution in America and bombed government buildings across the country.
During the 1970s, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) displayed wanted posters with photos of Ayers and other Weather Underground members in every U.S. post office. The FBI listed Dohrn, whom Ayers married in 1982, as one of its 10 most-wanted fugitives. Ayers was a fugitive for years but resurfaced after charges against him were dropped. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago for more than 20 years and retired in 2010. He has authored several books on education.
Marxist Roots
Boudin hails from a long line of Marxists.
Louis B. Boudin (1874-1952), Chesa’s great-grand-uncle was a Jewish-American writer, politician, and lawyer. Born Louis Boudianoff (Leib Budiansky) in Ukraine—then under the rule of Imperialist Russia—he was a Marxist theoretician best known for writing a two-volume history of the Supreme Court’s influence on American government published in 1932.
The Boudin family immigrated to America in 1891 and settled in New York City. Louis studied law and was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1898. He was a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance in the late 1800s. He left the Socialist Labor Party in 1899 and joined a dissident faction to help form the Socialist Party of America in 1901.
His grandfather, Leonard Boudin (1912-1989), was a known civil rights lawyer, who represented Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro and Paul Robeson, an American entertainer who was denied a passport over his refusal to disavow membership in the Communist Party.
Image by Steve Rhodes from San Francisco, US, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
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Chess Boudin—What a gem. CA leftists sure know how to pick them.
He’s out, but they will get someone worse to replace him. There is no shortage of despots to fill the void.