# Chesa Boudin **Chesa Boudin** was San Francisco's District Attorney from January 2020 until his recall on June 7, 2022 — the most-watched of the reform prosecutors elected in the 2018–20 wave with Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and George Gascón in Los Angeles — and since 2023 the founding executive director of Berkeley Law's Criminal Law & Justice Center. The son of Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, both imprisoned for the 1981 Brink's robbery when he was fourteen months old, a Rhodes Scholar and a former public defender, he ran on ending cash bail and prosecuting police, and was removed by a recall that won 55–45 on a campaign about street conditions, drug deaths and retail theft. ## Why he matters here Boudin is the proof-text of the "California is broken" narrative, and the vault keeps him because the narrative and the money behind it point in different directions. The [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] was amplified by the [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] — the venture and crypto voices for whom San Francisco's decline was a reason to leave and a brand — but it was *funded* by real-estate and finance donors (William Oberndorf, the Shorenstein family) with a decades-long interest in the city's politics. The right's version of the story, that a Marxist's son let San Francisco rot until the people rose, is a useful fable; the recall's own data show a city that had lost patience with visible disorder and a DA who had not built a coalition to defend the policy behind it. Compare [[Rule of Law]] for the framing and the [[Christopher Rufo]] pages for the national campaign that used him. ## See Also - [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] · [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] · [[Christopher Rufo]] · [[Rule of Law]] - [[Progressive Prosecutor]] — the movement and the full backlash pattern - [[Larry Krasner]] · [[George Gascón]] — the other two of the 2018–20 wave's marquee trio; Krasner's 2025 re-election landslide is the counter-case to this recall