Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin claimed the city has been experiencing a "hard turn to the right" in recent years in a new interview.
Boudin, the former far-left DA who was financed by leftist billionaire George Soros and recalled from office in 2022 amid critics accusing him of soft-on-crime policies, told Politico in a piece published Wednesday that San Francisco is not as progressive as people think.
On the contrary, he claimed that it’s becoming more right wing, and noted his recall is part of the evidence for the change.
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The former prosecutor, who now leads a criminal justice center at the University of California in Berkeley, told Politico, "San Francisco is not nearly as progressive as its reputation, and my recall was only one small piece of evidence in support of that claim. Look at the recall of the school board. Look at the fact that the city has never had a progressive mayor other than perhaps Art Agnos."
Boudin also argued that because there are a bunch of billionaires in San Francisco, and that mainstream Democratic Party officials hail from the city, that means it isn’t progressive.
"Look at the fact that the city is home to more billionaires per capita than probably any other jurisdiction in the world. Look at the fact that the city’s made a hard turn to the right in the last couple of years," he said.
"Look at the fact that the politicians that have come out of San Francisco on the national stage are anything but progressive: they’re mainstream centrist Democrats, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, etc.," he added.
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Elsewhere in the interview, Boudin also denied there is an organic American backlash to progressive prosecutors like himself, noting that concerted efforts to oust them come from power centers in the country.
"I don’t think there is really a backlash in the traditional sense because you don’t see voters rejecting the progressive policies or candidates that they’ve endorsed except in very, very, very few cases," he said, later adding, "The reality is the attacks on so-called progressive prosecutors are coming overwhelmingly from places where there’s more concentrated power rather than from voters."
Despite his claims, 61% of San Francisco voters in his recall election chose to remove him from office, with many of them pointing to his progressive criminal justice policies as leading to an increased murder rate, violent crime, shoplifting, burglaries, and an open-air drug trade.
Those who supported Boudin however, praised him for keeping his promises of eliminating cash bail, not prosecuting quality-of-life crimes and putting fewer people behind bars.
Boudin is also the son of two members of the left-wing extremist group Weather Underground – one of which was convicted of second-degree murder.
Fox News' Brandon Gillespie, Thomas Phippen, and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
