Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Kevin de León are contending for the U.S. Senate in California. On Wednesday, they faced off in what Dan Walters of CALmatters billed as their “one-and-only quasi-debate,” streamed online by the Public Policy Institute of California. The few voters who saw it might have learned something, but the “conversation” left out crucial backstories.
Feinstein, 85, was the executive producer of “The Summer of ‘82,” starring Christine Blasey Ford, Ph.D., a psychology professor who didn’t know the meaning of “exculpatory evidence.” In fact, Ford had no evidence that Trump Supreme Court nominee (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party in 1982.
In this modern high-stakes courtroom drama, the accusation itself is supposed to carry the day. Kavanaugh stood his ground, refused to back down, and duly gained confirmation. So Feinstein’s production flopped, but quasi-debate moderator Mark Baldassare asked if the accusations should be investigated further.
“The answer is yes,” de León said, and Feinstein agreed with him. This is the same senator who told Seventh Circuit nominee Amy Coney Barrett, a Roman Catholic, that “dogma lives loudly within you.” For the San Francisco Democrat, the concept that life begins at conception is a “dogma.” In reality, there is no other place where life can begin.
In 1992, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Vicki Weaver through the head as she held her 10-month-old daughter. This took place as her husband Randy Weaver was being investigated by the government on weapons charges. In the Ruby Ridge hearings, Democratic senators Herb Kohl and Patrick Leahy sympathized with the Weaver family, but as the San Francisco Examiner reported, “Feinstein dealt sternly with Weaver, asking whether his children wore Nazi armbands and shouted Nazi slogans at neighbors.”
In 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno approved the use of military tanks in an attack on the Branch Davidians’ compound at Waco, Texas, claiming the lives of 75 people, including 25 children. In her statement following Reno’s death, Feinstein expressed full support for all Reno’s actions.
The San Francisco Democrat has always been a partisan militant but her current opponent contends she and other Democrats are not sufficiently hostile toward Trump and Republicans. “We need Democrats in Washington, D.C., that have the courage of their convictions, to not just be on the sidelines, but on the frontlines” said de León, a supporter of government monopoly health care, advertised as “single payer.”
If she had the courage to do so, Feinstein could have brought up few things about her challenger.
In 2017, the California state senate boss spearheaded a smackdown of Republican Janet Nguyen, a refugee from Communist Vietnam, for speaking out during a tribute to New Left icon Tom Hayden, one of de León’s heroes. The Democrats told Nguyen to shut up, turned off her microphone, then had her carted off the senate floor.
Nobody in Sacramento could recall an attack on free speech quite like that. De León feigned outrage and promised an investigation, but of course nothing came of it. The senate leader, author of California’s sanctuary state law, apparently has a problem with Asian women. But his issues go even deeper. For one thing, as the Sacramento Bee explains, “the name on his birth certificate isn’t Kevin de León.”
On that yet unrevealed document, and on voter rolls, the name is Kevin Alexander Leon, born December 10, 1966, at California Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles. In 2017, de León began claiming that his father was a Chinese cook named Andres, born in Guatemala, same as his mother, Carmen Osorio. Even so, he grew up on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and “identifies strongly with Mexican culture.”
When he became senate president pro tem in 2014, de León threw a massive “inauguration” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Voters easily could believe this guy wants to be the “Latinobama,” hence the highly derivative story about the lost father. The tale defies belief but the establishment media has not chased down the details and neither has anyone in the federal government, even though it would be a simple matter to do so.
For her part, Feinstein isn’t going to call him on it. Like Christine Blasey Ford’s story, Kevin Alexander Leon’s tale is simply supposed to be believed, not challenged. The leftist challenger is unlikely to unseat Feinstein, but her defeat would affirm the new reality of Democratic Party politics. After Dreams from My Father, which Obama biographer David Garrow called a novel, not a memoir or autobiography, just about anything goes.