Who Got Rid of Chesa Boudin?

Since at least 2018, George Soros and his network have spent over $100 million to elect district attorneys who are soft on crime. These DAs were behind “catch-and-release” policies that encouraged endless rioting in 2020, and brought on crime waves in many big cities. Last night, the most radical of these DAs, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, was recalled, with 60 percent of voters supporting his removal.

City residents are fed-up with crime, and it’s hard to blame them. The website NeighborhoodScout assigns cities a “crime index” in which 100 is the safest and the most dangerous is zero. San Francisco gets a four.

On a different measure, this is how the city stacks up against California and the rest of the nation.

Unpunished shoplifting is so common that since 2019, Walgreens closed 17 of its San Francisco stores, while Target began closing all of its stores early.

Absolute lawlessness in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/DRUiW6iuZX

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 15, 2021

Headlines show how bad things got:

“San Francisco’s Mayor Breed Finally Admits City Is ‘In a Crisis’ and Declares ‘State of Emergency’,” Alyssa Guzman, Daily Mail, December 17, 2021

“Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Spiked 567% in San Francisco in 2021,” Gina Martinez, Daily Mail, January 26, 2022

“A Girl Fled Her War-Torn Homeland, but Found More Trauma in San Francisco,” Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 2022

What coalition of voters brought down Chesa Boudin? There do not seem to be good data on the racial mix of the vote. However, Asian support of the recall appears to have been strong and decisive. Yahoo News reported that, “Boudin enjoyed his strongest support in inner-core neighborhoods like the Mission and Haight-Ashbury, but he was decisively rejected by wealthier whites in enclaves like Pacific Heights as well as by Asian Americans in redoubts like the Richmond.”

The recall campaign’s website includes a “Victim’s Stories” section that lists criminals who should have been locked up but whom Chesa Boudin let out to prey on the innocent. The named victims are:

• Rong Xi Liao
• Vicha Ratanapakdee
• Kelvin Chew
• Simon Lau
• Hanako Abe and Elizabeth Platt (the two are listed as one because the same man killed them at the same time)
• Chui Fong Eng
• Sheria Musyoka
• Valeria

Six of the nine are Asian. The one white victim “shares” her story with an Asian woman who gets a photo:

The recall campaign was chaired by an Asian woman, Mary Jung. The website says:

His [Chesa Boudin’s] failure has directly resulted in increased crime against Asian Americans. The number of anti-Asian crimes has increased more than six-fold, but he is refusing to prosecute violent attacks as hate crimes and has allowed perpetrators to get away with only misdemeanor charges. This leaves AAPI communities in San Francisco injured, traumatized, and in danger of further attacks.

Other prominent Asian recall supporters were Nima Rahimi (a self-described “Democratic Party Delegate, Community Organizer, and Immigrant Rights Advocate”) and venture capitalist Garry Tan. Pro-recall protestors sometimes carried signs in Asian languages and displayed photos of Asian crime victims.

WE DID IT https://t.co/gHn4bwRKkq

— Garry Tan 陈嘉兴 (@garrytan) June 8, 2022

The black mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, quietly backed the recall, probably because opposing it would hurt her reelection chances next year. Brooke Jenkins, a black prosecutor, was a prominent supporter of the recall . . . and she is considered the favorite to replace Mr. Boudin. But blacks who don’t live in San Francisco publicly supported Mr. Boudin: Jesse Jackson, Donald Glover, and John Legend.

Many analysts think Asians don’t vote Republican in high numbers because they see the GOP as the party of white Christian zealots. But when an election or initiative is about racial issues, such as crime or quotas, as opposed to cultural issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, Asians often swing Right. Helen Raleigh, writing for The Federalist, noted:

In Washington State, Asian Americans helped defeat a 2019 ballot initiative that sought to allow “characteristics such as race, sex, color, ethnicity, national origin, age” as factors when considering candidates for educational or employment opportunities. In California, Asian Americans helped defeat a similar ballot initiative in 2020.

This year San Francisco’s Asian voters were the driving force behind the two successful campaigns that first recalled three leftist school board members.

The last time the GOP won the national Asian vote was in 1992, with 55 percent, when crime was high and the Los Angeles race riots had ended only a few months earlier. That year, in California, Asians voted Republican at a higher rate even than whites:

Race	Bill Clinton	George H.W. Bush	Ross Perot	Non-Democrat Total
White	42	35	23	58
Black	83	9	8	17
Hispanic	65	23	12	35
Asian	39	39	23	62

That was still true four years later, though less so:

Race	Bill Clinton	Bob Dole	Ross Perot	Non-Democrat Total
White	45	43	8	51
Black	83	8	5	13
Hispanic	70	22	7	29
Asian	51	44	4	48

The Republican position on social issues and foreign intervention repels many voters, but recalling a District Attorney is a referendum on crime, and on that, Asians seem more willing to take their own side than whites.

It is interesting, too, that only San Francisco has recalled its “progressive”  Soros-backed DA, or equivalent. Many other places have one: St. Louis (Kim Gardner), Illinois (Kim Foxx), Philadelphia (Larry Krasner), Portland/Multnomah County (Mike Schmidt), and Los Angeles (George Gascón). None of those has an Asian population nearly as large as San Francisco’s: 36 percent. Also, San Francisco is only 5.6 percent black and 15.2 percent Hispanic. Every other place with a Soros-backed District Attorney has more blacks, more Hispanics, or more of both.

Asians may not be reliably conservative, but it looks like they can be a valuable ally in fighting the worst of woke madness.