answerla anaheim marchUPDATED/CORRECTION: Donna Acevedo was not at the Charter Review Committee last night, as I reported earlier. There was a miscommunication with my source, and I have corrected the post accordingly, and apologize for the error.

I heard from a very reliable source who overheard a conversation among some of the Usual Gadflies at last night’s Charter review Committee meeting. Cynthia Ward relayed to her compadres the misgivings Donna Acevedo was having about the protest and her involvement in it.

My source heard Ward tell Larry Larsen and Brian Chuchua that Ms. Acevedo was “freaking out” over the protest. She worried about its potential to get out of hand given the groups who are organizing it and whose adherents will be populating it, and was concerned she’d be held responsible.

The organizing effort for the anti-police protest was kicked off on May 31 with an incendiary letter signed by Acevedo and Genevieve Huizar. The missive called the Anaheim police racist and accused them of murdering their sons (two known criminal gang members) and others, as well. Acevedo and Huizar, joining with a coalition of extreme radicals, anarchists and socialists, called for a protest on the one-year anniversary of the riots to commemorate those “historic community mobilizations.”

The itinerant radical/Occupy/anarchist community has answered the call and are gathering to descend on Anaheim on Sunday. These are people who genuinely hate the police and view them through Marxian lenses as the uniformed arm of the One Percent, whose purpose is to repress and control minorities through brutalization. It sounds weird to anyone who isn’t a college student or a tenured professor, but there are actually still people who believe that kind of nonsense.

So, a few hundred of them are coming to Anaheim, and they aren’t kumbaya-type personalities. Acevedo (and Huizar) helped to summon the genie, and now she is concerned that it has a mind of its own.

While its good to know she is apprehensive that the protest will degenerate into something more violent, their ideology and behavior of the groups she has aligned herself are no mystery. AnswerLA, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Worker Student Alliance, etc. – a few minutes on online research very clearly illuminates the nature of these groups – which have a view of direct action and protest that is at odds with traditional American ideas of ordered liberty.

Since last summer, several of the same “Latino leaders” who the local media like to quote as representatives of Anaheim Latinos have accused the Anaheim council majority as courting another riot whenever that majority doesn’t act according to the wishes of those “leaders.” I hope Sunday’s gathering of radicals remains peaceful, but those whose rhetoric implicitly legitimizes mayhem as a means of political protest should be not be surprised if the marchers take them at their word.