On January 28, while attempting to take a photo of a suspicious vehicle cruising in front of his San Francisco home, 76-year-old private investigator Jack Palladino was grabbed by one of the two men in the car and dragged forty feet before falling over backward and lethally striking his head.

Not since the Zebra killings of the 1970s has one murder caused San Francisco's leftist worthies so much consternation.  If you do not know of the Zebra killers, there is a reason why.  The killers were black.  All 21 of their victims, 14 fatal, were white or Asian.  The Zodiac killer worked the same area at roughly the same time, killed far fewer people, and got ten times the attention.

Palladino's killing made the news in spite of the fact that he was white and the two accused killers are black.  What made Palladino newsworthy is that he has friends in high Democratic places.  "Mr. Palladino was a San Francisco legend, someone who dedicated his career to pursing justice and truth," said San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin.  "[He] did so much to make the justice system work, whether it was civil justice or criminal justice," said former San Francisco mayor and Kamala Harris "mentor" Willie Brown. 

San Francisco civic leaders have a different take on truth and justice from what the rest of us have, starting with the women who accused men like Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault.  Palladino first made the national news in 1992, when the Clinton campaign hired him, so reported the Washington Post, "to investigate the accusers involved in two dozen allegations."

The words "to investigate" do not quite do Palladino's role justice.  "To silence" is more like it.  His job was to make sure these women kept their mouths shut, a job he did well enough to get Clinton elected.  Impressed by Palladino's body of work, Harvey Weinstein employed Palladino to "investigate" his accusers as well.

In many ways, the state's leftist culture mimics its geology, with one cultural subset barging into another like so many tectonic plates.  The Palladino murder showed just how fragile is the feminists' plate in a city where order has broken down.  Without any notable protest, they let Palladino die as a hero and a legend.

Palladino's death did not trigger the "big one."  He is not legend enough for that, but it has caused a rumble, especially with the Asian plate grinding forward as well.  As the San Francisco Examiner reported, Palladino was but "one of two elderly men attacked in San Francisco last Thursday who later died."

The other man was an 84-year-old named Vicha Ratanapakdee.  Although the Examiner never mentions the race of Ratanapakdee's attacker, it posted a surveillance video that tells in just a few seconds the brutal story of this gratuitous daytime assault on a Thai elder by a young black man.

Said Boudin, "My heart goes out to the entire AAPI community for the harm and fear this tragedy has inflicted."  AAPI is intersectional shorthand for "Asian and Pacific Islander."  Boudin's heart apparently did not leave his chest for Palladino's European-American community.

The openly socialist Boudin has an only-in–San Francisco kind of background.  When still a toddler, his Weather Underground parents got sent to the slammer for their part in a lethal robbery of a Brink's armored car.  Weather godparents Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn stepped in to raise the waif.  Boudin has said of his godparents that they "have spent their entire lives fighting for social justice."

As a candidate for district attorney, Boudin inveighed against cash bail among other deterrents that led to "mass incarceration" in a prison system he believed to be fundamentally racist.  "It's not a coincidence," Boudin argued, "that the prison population exploded around the same time as working communities, black and brown communities were organizing in the Civil Rights Movement and against the war in Vietnam."

Now, as prosecutor, Boudin is faced with sending three black men to prison for very long periods of time.  Concerned that film producers might consider their once lovely city as a natural setting only for new seasons of The Walking Dead, city leaders have been forced to respond to the murders.

In the wake of the attacks, London Breed — the first black female mayor, the city likes to boast — got Boudin and police chief Bill Scott together for a virtual press conference.  Said Breed to a disbelieving audience,  "Let's dispel the myth right now that there are no consequences for committing crimes in San Francisco."

This threat came as news to Palladino's accused killers.  At the time of the murder, Tyjone Flournoy, 23, was on probation for a gun conviction out of San Francisco, a felony burglary from San Mateo, and a Santa Clara trespassing case.  Lawrence Thomas, 24, has had three felony burglary convictions in the last six years.

"The district attorney will hold you accountable, and you will feel the full weight of the law," Mayor Breed warned area criminals.  Said Boudin, "He will?"

No, Boudin did not say that.  He just thought it.

Jack Cashill's new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,  is now widely available.  See www.cashill.com for more information.

Image: 12019 via Pixabay, Pixabay License.