The decision by outgoing and disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to pardon David Gilbert, former member of the far left Weather Underground and father of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin has been greeted with outrage.
Gilbert was serving a 75 year to life sentence for his part as a getaway driver in a 1981 cash van robbery in which two New York police officers and a Brinks guard were shot dead. Family of the murdered men as well as political opponents of the Democrats, and the general public, have expressed their opposition.
Gilbert in custody following his arrest
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Gilbert had been part of the Weather Underground which had grown out of the student movement in the 1960s, but the robbery was carried out by the May 19th Communist Organisation. This was a gang led by former members of the Black Liberation Army who used guilt-tripping white idiots such as Gilbert as back up to mount robberies in which the proceeds went to the robbers rather than any spurious political cause.
Also involved in the robbery was Chesa Boudin’s mother Kathy who was pardoned after 20 years. Chesa was adopted by Weather Underground founders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who later became part of Obama’s political support network in Chicago before he was elected to the Senate. Following her release, Dohrn and Michelle Obama worked in the same Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin in the late 1980s. Barack Obama was a member of the Woods Fund which was chaired by Ayers. Obama had been hired by the Fund as a community projects organizer on Chicago’s southside.
Kathy Boudin later became adjunct professor at Columbia University and one of the founders of its Centre for Social Justice. Boudin had attended the elite Bryn Mawr school for girls and her father had defended American Communists in the 1950s.
Weather Underground, as romanticised by its past participants and ridiculously portrayed in Robert Redford’s 2012 film, The Company You Keep which was described as a “tribute to 1960s idealism,” is now an integral part of the back story of the left in the Democrats. Some of those are not only apologists but are now part of the Democrat elite across many sectors, some of them lineal descendants and indeed former members of the only actual “domestic terrorist” group to have successfully penetrated and bombed the Pentagon and Capitol.
Gilbert is now 76 and has spent almost 41 years in prison. From a purely human perspective, and having read his book, it would be difficult not to feel sorry for the pathetic old loser. The book proves that he was and most likely remains consumed with the same illusions and white guilt, whatever way he may dress it up, as he was as a young Jewish student.
Following his conviction, he and Judy Clark another participant in the robbery, wrote a self-criticism of their failures as white revolutionaries towards the black separatists with whom they fatally aligned themselves – and who by all accounts had contempt for them. Gilbert had also been involved with the Sojourner Truth Organisation. One of its leading members was Noel Ignatiev who was an early proponent of the theory that race is a social construct and controversially called for the abolition of the white race. Ignatiev is considered one of the intellectual pioneers of Critical Race Theory.
The real question is why Cuomo decided to pardon Gilbert. His own career is over, so it is a strange way in which to compound a legacy already inextricably linked to his responsibility for virus related deaths in New York nursing homes and accusations regarding his personal misconduct.
Chesa Boudin, who many blame for the failure of San Francisco to properly prosecute street crime, has publicly campaigned for his father’s release. In that he has had the support of other prominent leftists in the Democratic Party. It will therefore be regarded by them as a victory, although hardly one that New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will be broadcasting too much ahead of the next elections.
The humanitarian aspect aside – and some would scoff at any such motivation on Cuomo’s part – the impression might be that this is one more giant two fingers from a nasty cosseted white bourgeois elite to the Deplorables. Gilbert was one of theirs and eventually they got him out.
Besides which, the likes of Bernadine Dohrn – who once celebrated the Charles Manson murders – and now back among her own class and its privileged comforts – always had contempt for the “square” working class, white or black. The sort of people whose murders Gilbert regarded as part of some absurd “revolution” and whose lives were therefore expendable. Unlike them, he had a shot at redemption.