US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is on the warpath against leftists, and a newly released State Department report calls out 43 people and organizations the department believes are threats, including two notable figures from the San Francisco area.
A week after Rubio led a multinational summit on the dangers of “left-wing extremism”, the State Department on Monday released a 100-page report purportedly detailing how the communist regime in Cuba has subverted and undermined American democracy, allegedly through entities that range from business owners to journalists to sitting representatives of Congress. The list was compiled by journalist Ken Klippenstein, who describes the report as a “modern-day blacklist of the political left.”
The list of names is scattershot, with inclusions as disparate as Democracy Now journalist Amy Goodman, Ben and Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, leftist streamer Hasan Piker, the Democratic Socialists of America, and “Antifa.”
The report also highlights two people currently in the Bay Area: former District Attorney Chesa Boudin and longtime pro-Palestine activist Paul Larudee.
Boudin is currently the founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at UC Berkeley. He served as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2020 to 2022, when he was recalled. The report specifies that Boudin is the son of Weather Underground activist and founding member Kathy Boudin, who died in 2022.
Boudin did not respond to a request for comment by Gazetteer SF.
Larudee co-founded the Free Gaza Movement in 2006 and took part in the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla that led to his violent detainment by the Israeli Defense Force, among other actions. In a phone call with Gazetteer, Larudee emphasized that the current US administration is vilifying Cuba because the communist nation is “standing up for its sovereignty” and refusing to “submit to exploitation” by the US.
“I could say I’m in good company, looking at the 43 named individuals and organizations, because a lot of them have earned respect,” Larudee said. “But [those] very people are not respected by the current US administration, whose practices do not respect US law or the Constitution. I feel very comfortable with the criticism being directed at me.”
