How the rich and famous profess sympathy for left-wing sociopaths
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The new chief law-enforcement official in San Francisco isn’t particularly concerned with enforcing the law. Chesa Boudin, the city’s recently elected district attorney, campaigned to end prosecution of “quality-of-life crimes” like “public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.”
San Franciscans are about to get a small taste of what Venezuelans have been suffering for two decades. And not only due to the increased public squalor that will be a direct result of Boudin’s opposition to policing. The Yale-educated Rhodes scholar once worked as a translator and advisor to that benighted land’s late president-for-life, Hugo Chavez. A decade ago, after Chavez abolished term limits, Boudin cheered. According to San Francisco’s future DA, the man who did more to destroy democracy in Venezuela than anyone established the “first participatory democracy I have ever seen.”
Singing the praises and whitewashing the crimes of leftist authoritarians runs in the Boudin family: Chesa is the son of two Weathermen terrorists who took part in a 1981 robbery that killed three people in Nyack, NY; he was raised by another pair of radical left-wing terrorists after his birth parents went to prison, and his grandfather was Fidel Castro’s lawyer.
Ever since Castro and his ragtag band of revolutionaries descended from the Sierra Maestra mountains six decades ago to overthrow Cuba’s military dictatorship, Latin America has attracted a particular type of affluent Western leftist like Boudin: the “Sandalista,” who, frustrated by the inability to establish socialism in their own country, treks south of the border where such utopian dreams are easier to fulfill. Mayor de Blasio, who ventured to Nicaragua to play his part in defending the Sandinista revolution, is another example of the species.
After coming to power democratically in 1999, the Socialist Chavez systematically went about undermining democratic checks and balances, media independence and private enterprise. He ruled until his death in 2013, at which point his lackey Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver, took control. Under Maduro’s disastrous rule, Venezuela descended further into tyranny, and the past several years have been marked by hyper-inflation, state repression and vote-rigging.
Like Castro before him and in spite of his manifest malevolence, Maduro still attracts fashionable friends in the West. After the United States government recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela earlier this year and ordered diplomats loyal to Maduro out of the country’s embassy here in Washington, a smattering of Sandalistas occupied the building, while anti-Maduro protestors formed a ring outside it.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the embassy to deliver food to the occupiers and declared that the anti-Maduro protestors “were trying to starve them out” — utterly oblivious to the irony of his remark. (Because of Maduro’s corruption and Socialist policies, 90 percent of Venezuelans lack adequate food and, according to an interview-based study, the average citizen lost over 20 pounds in 2017.) When the billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson organized a charity concert in a Colombian border city besieged with Venezuelan refugees, his fellow Brit Roger Waters protested that, “It has nothing to do with humanitarian aid at all. It has to do with Richard Branson . . . having bought the US saying, ‘We have decided to take over Venezuela, for whatever our reasons may be.’ ”
The former Pink Floyd member insists there is “no mayhem, no murder, no apparent dictatorship” in Venezuela, even though the country’s own official statistics list its homicide rate as among the highest in the world.
The sympathy expressed for these south of the border sociopaths is particularly perverse coming from the fabulously rich and famous. Upon Chavez’s death, Sean Penn lamented that “today the people of the United States lost a friend it [sic] never knew it had,” adding that “poor people around the world lost a champion.” Indeed, Chavez loved poor people so much, his policies created millions more of them. Today, nearly 90 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty, more than double the figure before Chavez came to power.
Danny Glover commemorated the death of Chavez (“a true man of the people”) at a massive 2014 rally in Caracas, hailing “his vision of a participatory democracy, one involving all citizens.” Glover’s fellow thespians Jamie Foxx and Lukas Haas smiled and posed for photographs with Maduro in 2016, a visit that earned them a harsh rebuke from world chess champion and Russian human-rights activist Garry Kasparov, who accused the pair of putting their “financial interests” before basic decency. Director Oliver Stone made two worshipful documentaries about Chavez. “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place . . . Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history.”
Yes, forever as an abject lesson in how not to run a country.
No roundup of Western toadying for Third World tyrants would be complete without mention of Michael Moore. As recently as March, the filmmaker called himself Chavez’s “fanboy,” lauding the clownish caudillo for calling former President George W. Bush “the devil” from the well of the United Nations General Assembly. “Loved how he drove the heads of our military-industrial complex crazy,” Moore gushed.
Long after his death, Chavez’s insults may still tickle Michael Moore. But the one-in-five undernourished Venezuelans are unlikely to be amused by the sycophancy of an overnourished American millionaire.
James Kirchick is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.”
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