The news that prestigious universities will pay two failed radical Democrat politicians to indoctrinate students with progressive propaganda is more evidence of the success of the looney left’s sinister takeover of American higher education.
Based on their disgraceful records, we can count on the two radicals — ousted former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and defeated former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot — to conduct BS programs (and those letters don’t stand for bachelor of science) rooted in leftist ideology rather than facts.
The liberal University of California, Berkeley, announced May 31 it has hired Boudin as the founding director of its new Criminal Law & Justice Center. Boudin lost his job in a June 2022 recall election when 61% of voters cast ballots to boot him out of office after less than two years on the job.
Harvard University announced June 1 that it has hired Lightfoot — a failed one-term leader who lost her reelection bid this year when she received less than 17% of the vote in a multicandidate field, becoming the first Chicago mayor to lose re-election in 40 years. She will teach a course called Health Policy and Leadership for one semester at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lightfoot is a lawyer, not a health professional, but hey, let’s not get picky about her lack of qualifications!
Rather than educating, we should expect Boudin and Lightfoot will do their best to pollute the minds of students with a warped and hostile view of the United States, condemning our nation as a systemically racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, environmentally destructive oppressor of the poor and tool of evil corporate capitalists. This anti-American narrative is now the norm at U.S. colleges and universities.
Boudin comes from a family of radicals. His late mother Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground terrorist group, narrowly escaped death in 1970 when a bomb her comrades were building exploded prematurely, killing three of them. The group was infamous for bombing the U.S. Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other sites.
Kathy Boudin was sentenced to prison for her part in the $1.6 million robbery of a Brink’s truck in 1981 that resulted in the shooting deaths of a security guard and two police officers. She was freed on parole in 2003 and joined radical academia as co-director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University. What better job could you possibly find for a woman who pleaded guilty to charges of second-degree murder and first-degree robbery?
Chesa Boudin’s father is David Gilbert, who was sentenced to 75 years in prison for his part in the Brink’s robbery but freed in 2021 when his sentence was commuted by soft-on-crime New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, shortly before Cuomo resigned in disgrace to avoid impeachment after being accused of sexual misconduct.
Given his criminal pedigree, becoming a prosecutor seemed a strange career choice for Chesa Boudin, but not if your goal is to destroy from within. In 2020, Boudin was elected as district attorney in San Francisco — one of the farthest-left cities in our country. A former public defender, he quickly showed he was more interested in protecting criminals from justice than protecting the public from criminals.
As district attorney, Boudin did his best to keep criminals out of a jail by liberalizing bail, instituting alternate sentencing programs, declining to even prosecute some accused criminals, prosecuting some felony crimes as misdemeanors, and releasing prisoners from jail during the coronavirus pandemic as an ostensible public health measure.
As a result, murders, burglaries and car thefts in San Francisco soared. Large groups of thieves swarmed high-end stores, loading up with tens of thousands of dollars-worth of merchandise and fleeing to waiting cars in minutes.
Homeless people and drug addicts filled sidewalks. Instead of leaving their hearts in San Francisco, they left behind huge amounts of human excrement and urine in the once-beautiful city by the bay.
This was all too much even for liberal San Franciscans, which led them to vote Boudin out of office.
While Boudin was coddling criminals on the Left Coast, Lightfoot was failing to protect the people of Chicago. The city’s homicide rate rose 39% under her watch. Shootings and car thefts also rose sharply.
The union representing Chicago police issued a symbolic vote of no confidence against Lightfoot, the Chicago Teachers Union butted heads with her in an 11-day strike, and she had a bad relationship with the City Council and Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Her harsh COVID lockdown policies also drew strong criticism.
Lightfoot, who is Black, was criticized by the news media for announcing in 2021 that she would only give interviews to journalists of color, complaining about “the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets” and proclaiming her commitment to “fight for diversity and inclusion.” She dropped the policy of excluding white reporters from interviews last year after the Daily Caller News Foundation and a White reporter filed a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing her of illegal racial discrimination.
Think of the hiring of the Boudin and Lightfoot as oh-so politically correct recycling — part of a trend of transforming washed-up Democrat officials into propagandists to recruit young followers to carry on the fanatical crusade to Make America Woke. While this benefits leftist politicos with paychecks and platforms to promote their radical views, it robs students of the accurate and quality education they deserve.