The name Kathy Boudin might not be familiar to people, but people are familiar with the consequences of the bad decisions of her life, on a large scale.

Kathy Boudin died yesterday of cancer at age 78. Her death made the news because she was a convicted felon and a member of the infamous “Weather Underground.” The obituary article in the New York Post described her crimes this way:

In October 1981, Boudin and members of the group teamed up with the Black Liberation Army for the robbery to help fund their anti-government campaigns. They targeted a Brink’s armored truck, which they held up in Rockland County, making off with $1.6 million.”

During the robbery, gunmen killed Brink’s security guard Peter Paige before transferring the money to a U-Haul truck a mile away, where a 38-year-old Boudin sat in the cabin.”

The truck was stopped by police at a roadblock, where Boudin — unarmed — immediately surrendered. Gunmen in the back of the truck popped outside and began firing on the officers, killing two policemen — Sgt. Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown.”

She pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the death of Paige in 1984.”

She spent 22 years in prison before she was paroled for good behavior in 2003.”

After quoting her beliefs about how she loved her identity as being “underground” and a willing social revolutionary, this is how the New York Times described her crimes.

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.”

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.”

After rounds of legal wrangling, Ms. Boudin pleaded guilty in April 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the death of Mr. Paige. Though Ms. Boudin was unarmed and not even at the scene where the guard was killed, the judge agreed with prosecutors that she bore responsibility, and sentenced her to a prison term of 20 years to life.”

At her sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know that anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend to you my deepest sympathy,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.”

Does the New York Times just come off a BIT more “sympathetic” to the fact that Kathy Boudin was actively involved in a robbery that cost the lives of three men? Just a smidge? After all, everything old is new again, and Boudin’s recorded statement at her sentencing would not now sound out of place in the “woke” system that we live in. And she may have been a “model prisoner,” but that doesn’t take away that she was so wrapped up in her revolutionary cosplay that she actively got people killed.

But the New York Times had no problem airbrushing Boudin’s life in a Tweet – even though they deleted take one, and went with take two.

NYT deleted the tweet on the left about Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin and quickly replaced it with the one on the right pic.twitter.com/LFNjJDM7xr

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) May 2, 2022

Wow, let’s just clean up the actual enormity of her crime, and go with the “austere religious scholar” angle, shall we?

And if you have been paying attention to current events in San Francisco, then you probably know why the name Kathy Boudin sounds familiar. Just read this paragraph from the NYT, in the middle of the crime narrative.

More than a half-dozen suspects were captured, and most were given prison terms long enough to amount to life sentences. Among them was David Gilbert, whom Ms. Boudin married after their arrests and with whom she had a son, Chesa, who was 14 months old at the time of the Brink’s job. Divorced while in prison, they reunited in 2021 after Mr. Gilbert’s 75-year sentence was commuted and he was freed. Chesa Boudin, reared by a Weather Underground couple, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, was elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2019. Both her husband and son survive her.

Yes, Kathy Boudin is the mother of Chesa Boudin. While I sincerely hope for San Francisco’s sake that Chesa Boudin is successfully recalled because he’s garbage as a district attorney, one can’t help but feel mildly sorry for his childhood. His mother was too in love with her “underground identity” to care about, oh, actually sticking around to raise him. Both his parents were a part of the robbery and were sentenced to prison before he was even out of his toddler years. And then he was raised by more Weather Underground friends, who properly radicalized him. Chesa Boudin has fully embraced the radicalism that he was raised with in spades and he deserves to be fired from his job, but man, was he dealt a lousy deck before he could even talk.

And such is the legacy of Kathy Boudin. She loved her “underground” lifestyle so much that she was happy to go along with robbery and murder, and her actions not only robbed three men of their lives, but inflicted a great deal of harm upon the city of San Francisco under her son, whom she left to be raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn while she was in prison. Hardly “mother of the year” material, despite her “model prisoner” status. And certainly not deserving of an obituary airbrushing.

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Featured image: Kathy Boudin, from her FBI wanted poster in May 1970, cropped, public domain