In September, California’s Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management and Senate Public Safety Committee will convene hearings on white supremacist organizations and their techniques. This inquest comes at the request of Kevin de León, state senate president pro-tem since October, 2014.
De León claims racist comments against him have mounted a surge since the November election and he blames Donald Trump for not speaking out against hate groups. The Charlottesville incident, the senate boss said Monday, was “an attack on America and our values,” and “the ideology that fueled the attack is a cancer on our nation.”
California’s senate boss, who terms out next year, is clearly a man on the rise in the Democratic Party and a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate if Dianne Feinstein, now 84, retires. That prospect might focus attention on De León’s commitment to free speech and the First Amendment.
On February 21, the California Senate paid tribute to Tom Hayden, the New Left icon and former state senator who passed away last October. Senate Democrats hailed Hayden as a progressive visionary, independent thinker and a devotee of peace and justice. That struck senator Janet Nguyen as rather strange.
She was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, and one of the “boat people” refugees who fled after the Stalinist regime, more repressive than its Soviet sponsors, took over in 1975. After cheering the Communist victory, the “anti-war” Hayden turned his wrath on those fleeing the Communist regime. His fellow Democrats did the same in 2017.
De León’s chief of staff Dan Reeves warned Nguyen that any statement she attempted to make about Hayden would be ruled out of order and “rebuked.” That threat did not deter the Vietnamese refugee.
“Today I recognize in memory the millions of Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died in seeking for freedom and democracy,” she said in the senate.
Senate Democrats then turned off Nguyen’s microphone and demanded that she sit down and keep quiet. Again the immigrant senator defied them and kept on speaking. The Democrats then claimed the Asian refugee was out of order and directed the sergeant-at-arms to toss her from the Senate floor.
Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, Kevin de León expressed shock that such a smackdown could take place in the California senate, but he had been running the table all along. Beside the frontal attack on free speech, Californians could be forgiven for seeing racism and sexism at work. On the other hand, maybe there was more to California’s senate boss, or maybe less.
“The name on his birth certificate isn’t Kevin de León,” explained a fawning February 21 Sacramento Bee puff piece. “On his birth certificate and voter rolls, however, the 50-year-old politician is Kevin Alexander Leon.”
As the senate boss told the Bee’s Christopher Cadelago over dinner, the birth certificate says he was born on Dec. 10, 1966, at California Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles. “It describes his father, Andres Leon, as a 40-year-old cook whose race was Chinese and whose birthplace was Guatemala. De León’s mother, Carmen Osorio, was also born in Guatemala, the document states. She was 26 when he was born.”
As a child, “de León spent time on both sides of the border, in Tijuana, Baja California, and Logan Heights in San Diego and identifies strongly with Mexican culture, though he doesn’t know where his grandparents are from. He didn’t know his father, Andres, but remembers meeting him as a boy.” De León thinks his father Andres, “was a quarter, or as much as half-Chinese, pointing to the pockets of Asian populations in Mexico, including Mexicali.”
Locals found the story entertaining but for journalist Stephen Greenhut, it read like damage control. In a hearing the previous month, De Leon testified that “half of my family” would be eligible for deportation under Trump’s executive order, because they used false Social Security cards and other bogus identification. As Greenhut noted, “using a false Social Security number is not a victimless crime.”
Clearly, there is more going on with this guy than “The untold story of how Kevin Leon became Kevin de León,” as the Sacramento Bee headlined the tale. Cadelago conveniently failed to show any documentation, so readers had to take the senate boss’s word for it. For the man who “spent time on both sides of the border,” other realities were a matter of record.
When repeatedly deported Mexican national Luis Bracamontes shot and killed two sheriff’s deputies, the California senate boss previously known as Kevin Alexander Leon, who “identifies strongly with Mexican culture,” made no move to help law enforcement deport violent criminal illegals. When Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez gunned down Kathryn Steinle on a San Francisco pier, California’s senate president, whose family used fake Social Security cards, did not make a case against sanctuary cities.
After Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 innocents and wounded more than 20 in San Bernardino in December, 2015, California’s senate boss Kevin de León announced no plans for hearings on any “cancerous” ideology threatening American values and public safety. His response was to push for more gun control and denounce detachable magazines, in the same style as Dianne Feinstein, the U.S. Senator he may attempt to replace in 2018.
Maybe the man who didn’t know his Guatemalan-born father, a cook who might have been half Chinese, has his eyes on an even higher office. Such a thing has happened before.
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