What would it be like if Hugo Chávez and Bill Ayers ran the city prosecutor's office?

San Franciscans are about to find out, now that Ayers's stepson, Chesa Boudin, son of Weather Underground terrorists and translator to none other than Hugo himself, has made his first move as San Francisco district attorney.

He's kicked off his term with purges for insufficient revolutionary fervor, taking a page from Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin's famous show trial prosecutor who enforced ideological purity.

According to KQED:

Just two days into his tenure as San Francisco's District Attorney, Chesa Boudin fired at least seven prosecuting attorneys. Boudin said the actions were necessary to carry out the progressive policies he campaigned on.

"I had to make difficult staffing decisions [Friday] in order to put in place a management team that will help me accomplish the work I committed to do for San Francisco," Boudin said in a statement.

It's not unusual for a newly elected district attorney to restructure the management team, said Lara Bazelon, a law professor at the University of San Francisco. The attorneys are at-will employees, which means they can be fired without reason.

Difficult staffing decisions?  "Necessary" to carry out "progressive" policies?  What an impressive bomb of Newspeak we have there.

And quite a lie, too, because since when has it ever been difficult for a far leftist to ever go after someone whose ideology wasn't pure enough?  That's what Chesa went after, just as Vyshinsky once did, and for the same leftist reasons.  Enforcing ideological purity is the left's bread and butter.  The only thing "difficult" about his purge for him might be in explaining himself to what's left of law and order in that city, as if that mattered. 

Why did he do it?  Because the purged were prosecutors who prosecuted, crooks, at least, as if that were their jobs.

The justification cited by KQED is that one of the seven "should have been fired years ago," which might even be true, given what's turned up in the wake of Kamala Harris's former office.

But it doesn't explain the other six.  Outliers can be convenient. 

Bottom line: Chesa has no use for such prosecutors who prosecute, and the only thing he wants prosecuted is "the system," the idea of there being laws against crimes. 

It goes to show the depth of ideological conformity being demanded now in what's clearly going to be a highly politicized D.A.'s office.  Professionalism is the enemy of the people now.

What's it like for the ideologically impure?  Here's one of them speaking about what it's like to be purged for the good of the collective, now euphemized as "difficult staffing decisions":

Boudin ran on an anti-incarceration platform — including the creation of a Wrongful Conviction Unit and an Innocence Commission — a vision that may have conflicted with the priorities of the fired attorneys.

But the attorney who was fired said they were "absolutely willing" to follow Boudin's new policy directives.

"For someone who ran on a platform of second chances, I know I never got a first," the attorney said.

So he's getting rid of prosecutors whose past crimes included...prosecuting, even though they now say they are onboard with his crazy train.  And unlike the felons he coddles, no second chances for them.  They're a bunch of Bukharins groveling before Chesa, saying, "Oh, Chesa," "oh, Chesa" the way Stalin's minions pledged their fealty and fake crimes to Stalin.  Those protestations don't matter to Chesa any more than they did to Vyshinsky, who shipped the grovelers off to the Gulags.

Two things stand out about this: 

One, how did Chesa and his minions get the information that those particular prosecutors were not onboard with Chesa's plan to let crooks go free?  How did they know?  Who informed?  Was there a spy network?  Vyshinsky certainly used them; it sounds as though Chesa is taking that page from the Book of Vyshinsky, too.  Message to the prosecutors remaining: You are watched.

Two, notice how the fired prosecutors are unwilling to use their names for KQED out of fear of reprisals from Chesa himself, even though as fired people, presumably, he can't touch them.  Apparently, he can.  And he may well have them on notice that he'll go after them since the only thing he wants to prosecute is "the system."  That puts a target on these people's backs.

Some of the seven fired attorneys, unfortunate creatures who worked in the gang units and other unpopular places in Chesa-world, are suing for reinstatement, of course.  They didn't actually do anything counter to young Chesa's agenda, but as Vyshinsky explained in his purges earlier, that doesn't matter.  From Wikipedia:

Vyshinsky recommended that investigators and judges consider "the wider social perspective" of each individual case in the context of class struggle. As a result, an actual commission of a crime was not required for conviction: people could have been convicted for being perceived as bourgeois ("class responsibility") or simply if that was considered to be beneficial for the Communist Party, for example in the "educational" role of the judicial system (thus, the importance of show trials, even with completely false^{[citation needed][dubious – discuss]} accusations). 

See, you don't even have to do something wrong to get fired by San Fran Vyshinsky -- just thinking the wrong thing will be sufficient. Which will pretty well put a chill on office cooler conversation for starters, it will also lead to a lot of cover-your-keister and records destruction as minions attempt to stay one step ahead of the ideological enforcers.

Stalin's society was all about keeping secrets, too, especially ideological secrets. San Francisco will now be the same. That must be some atmosphere they've got going in the San Francisco DA's office right now. Imagine being too afraid to express your thoughts as is no doubt the situation now with Chesa at the helm, that you refuse to say anything.

Now that word is out that prosecuting crooks and targeting gangsters is a firing offense, San Francisco is all set for a great crime wave. Apparently it takes an iron-fisted Stalin or a Chavez to create that much chaos.

Image credit: RIA Novosti, CC BY-SA 3.0.