The University of California at Berkeley, the flagship UC campus, is “joining forces with Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to launch a new, nonpartisan institute dedicated to strengthening American democracy and advancing solutions to the country’s most pressing challenges.”
The Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy (NPI) “will be a hub for research, teaching and civic engagement rooted in a shared commitment to advancing the public good.” California taxpayers have to wonder if UC Berkeley bosses conducted in-depth research.
Nancy Pelosi is the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro, a Baltimore mayor and member of Congress. He passed away in 1987, the year Nancy first ran for Congress in California, representing part of San Francisco. In the Congressional Record in 2001, Rep. Pelosi praised Harry Bridges as “the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century” and “beloved by the workers of this nation.” For all but the willfully blind, he wasn’t.
As Joshua Muravchik noted in “Pelosi’s Favorite Stalinist” article, Bridges’ membership in the Communist Party had been revealed a full nine years before Pelosi’s encomium. Bridges was a Stalinist thug dedicated to the Soviet Union, a Communist dictatorship. The former Speaker also has some strange ideas about how democracy works in America.
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” proclaimed Pelosi in 2010. The people’s representatives needed to know what was in the “Affordable Care Act” before the vote. After all, nobody would vote for a candidate before knowing who she or he is, and what they stand for.
In 2018, Nancy Pelosi charged that President Trump was ignoring the “spark of divinity” in the MS-13 gang. By that time, MS-13 had established a reign of terror in California, with at least 14 murders in the central valley town of Mendota alone.
No word from Pelosi about the spark of divinity in the gang’s many victims. At UC Berkeley, Pelosi will partner with a person of similar views.
Chesa Boudin is the son of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, involved in a 1981 armored car robbery that claimed the lives of two police officers and a security guard. Chesa Boudin is named after Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), who fled the country after murdering a New Jersey state trooper.
As the district attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin was basically a pro-bono attorney for criminals, whom he portrayed as victims of an oppressive capitalist society. It was too much even for San Franciscans, who in 2022 booted Boudin and elected Brooke Jenkins, a prosecutor in the city’s homicide division.
In 2023, UC Berkeley Law named Chesa Boudin as executive director of the new Criminal Law & Justice Center, a “hub for research, education and advocacy.”
According to Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky, Chesa Boudin has “thought deeply about the system, and I cannot think of anyone better to create and direct this important center.” Californians have cause to wonder about Boudin’s commitment to justice and the description of Nancy Pelosi’s institute as “nonpartisan.”
UC Berkeley was once regarded as a great university. If Californians think it has become a soft landing spot for over-the-hill politicians and crime-friendly attorneys, it would be hard to blame them.
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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.
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