Ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by voters on Tuesday, benefited from spending linked to a pro-Communist China organization — and was also opposed by a network of Chinese-American voters.
Campaign finance disclosures reveal that Boudin received $230,000 from a group called the Center for Empowered Politics. That group, in turn, is described by InfluenceWatch as “a lobbying and advocacy organization for the San Francisco-based Chinese Progressive Association (CPA).” As Breitbart News has previously reported, the CPA was founded to support the People’s Republic of China, the communist mainland regime. It has become involved in radical politics in the San Francisco Bay Area, even sponsoring Black Lives Matter projects.
However, the CPA remains on the fringe of the Chinese-American community in San Francisco, whose members have been at the forefront of a recent backlash by voters against the city’s left-wing policies.
For example, the community helped push for a successful recall of three San Francisco school board members earlier this year, partly in reaction to radical policies that saw merit-based admissions temporarily dropped for a local magnet school.
In the Boudin recall, according to reports, activists used Chinese-language social media apps to organize voters:
Much of the organizing and outreach was done on WeChat in Chinese language text messages and chat groups.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) June 8, 2022
The San Francisco Standard reported earlier this month that WeChat, “widely used in the Chinese-speaking world,” was used to create “negative impressions” of Boudin: “A simple search on WeChat using the keyword of ‘Chesa Boudin’ or his Chinese name 博徹思, lots of the results are linked to the narratives of ‘lawlessness” and ‘crimes.'”
At one stage in the recall fight, a poster by recall proponents likening Chesa Boudin to a Chinese dictator during the Cultural Revolution was called “racist” by Boudin’s supporters. (Boudin is the son of radical Weather Underground militants.)
The Chinese-American community, like other Asian-American groups, has generally felt vulnerable to hate crimes in recent years, as well as general crime of the sort that Boudin was determined not to prosecute.
Chinese-Americans constitute over 20% of San Francisco residents.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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