. . ."Earlier this week, voters in San Francisco recalled (with a 60 percent majority) that city’s loony-left DA, Chesa Boudin, under whose reign crime, especially violent crime, has gotten out of control. It’s interesting to see how the voting went by demographic. From New York magazine:
Still, his rejection reflected visible grassroots anger at both these conditions and his policies, particularly Boudin’s unwillingness to bring heavier charges against shoplifters and other kinds of petty thieves that had come to define, in the popular imagination, 2020s San Francisco. Wealthy, older voters were eager to dump Boudin, as were middle-class non-white voters, particularly Asian Americans. Victimized by a surge in hate crimes, Asian voters felt Boudin had not responded properly to their plight. In 2021, Boudin drew sharp criticism for failing to describe the murder of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai man, as a racially motivated crime. While denouncing the crime, Boudin said the defendant was “in some sort of a temper tantrum” and said there was no evidence to charge him with a hate crime. His office would later charge him with murder and elder abuse, but it wasn’t enough to assuage anger in the community. Like with the school-board recall, the organizing work of Asian Americans paid off. The Asian vote, in particular, is a warning for Democrats; they are not a demographic the left can take for granted or assume will easily fall into their coalition in the future. No Republican was on the ballot Tuesday, but right-leaning candidates who speak the language of law and order will be able to campaign for their support and win.
"Good. But I live in a city where the district attorney is no liberal at all, and where you don’t see the kind of open thievery that has become a staple of social media. Still, the city is more violent than it has been in a long time, with violent crime moving into areas that once were peaceful. And if you don’t see shoplifters brazenly filling sacks in stores, you still see consumer items that you used to be able to buy easily now behind locked cases. Somebody is doing the stealing.
"Meanwhile, how is life in Hungary, which our media and our foreign-policy elites have assured us is an authoritarian hellhole? Let’s see:. . ."
