Fireworks Feared at L.A. City Council Meeting after Councilman Scuffled with Far-Left Activist

Friday night fisticuffs between a far-left Los Angeles city councilman and an even farther-left activist are raising more concerns about safety at Tuesday’s council meeting, where members are expected to vote on a declaration that would provide newly-elected mayor Karen Bass emergency powers to address the city’s growing homelessness crisis.

Tuesday’s meeting is the first since progressive councilman Kevin de León exchanged blows with far-left activist Jason Reedy during a Friday-night Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, according to an account of the encounter in the Los Angeles Times.

During the event, de León wore a Santa hat and was handing out gifts to children when Reedy and other activists walked in. They disrupted the event, loudly called for de León to resign and called him a racist, apparently for his participation in a racially-charged conversation with two n0w-former councilmembers. Audio of the recording was leaked earlier this year.

A DJ at the Friday event told the Times that children started to cry. De León left the stage and tried to walk away, but the activists followed him and started “getting into his face,” the DJ said. Video of the encounter shows the activists calling for de León to resign.

When de León tried to leave through a back room and close the door, Reedy and others forced their way through. Reedy stood directly in front of de León with his hands up. Reedy appears to have  pressed his body into de León, who then shoved Reedy into a table and down a hall. The Times reported that Reedy responded by punching de León.

Both de León and Reedy have filed police reports accusing the other of battery.

In a prepared statement, de León said that Reedy and “a group of so-called ‘activists’” have been harassing him and his staff for over a year. He accused Reedy of assaulting him on Friday, writing that Reedy “launched a pelvic thrust followed by a headbutt to my forehead.”

De León said he has no intention of resigning. “My commitment is solid to my community, to my constituents,” he said, according to the Times. “I’m not going to let a group of extremely hostile individuals from outside the district bully me or my staff or my constituents.”

Prior to winning a seat on the City Council, de León was a leader in the state Senate, where he tried to paint himself as a progressive champion by advancing left-wing priorities around climate change and protecting illegal immigrants. In 2018, he ran a failed campaign to oust U.S. senator Dianne Feinstein from her seat. De León challenged Feinstein from her left.

Reedy is an organizer with a far-left activist group called the People’s City Council, which describes itself on Twitter as an “abolitionist, anti-capitalist & anti-imperialist collective.”

The Friday fight between de León and Reedy stemmed from an earlier encounter that day at a council meeting, de León’s first in about two months. Reedy, a stay-at-home father, attended the meeting with his 5-month-old baby in a carrier on his chest. During the meeting, Reedy yelled about de León, “Get him out! Get him out of chambers right now!” Police ejected Reedy and another man from the meeting, fearing they could get into a fight, the Times reported. According to the paper, de León and Reedy have had other physical encounters in the past, including when de León once tried to cover Reedy’s cell phone camera with his hand and ended up hitting him in the face. De León told the paper that the activists “provoke you, they try to get you to take a swing at them and then videotape you.”

Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez has accused the activists, who have confronted elected officials at their homes, of engaging in “terrorism.”

Authorities are expecting a large turnout of demonstrators at Tuesday’s city council meeting, scheduled to start at 10 a.m. in California. Other leftwing organizations, including Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, has urged its members to show up for the meeting. The council is slated to vote on a Bass’s emergency declaration around homelessness, which would give her more power to spend money on facilities and programs for the homeless without council approval.

De León was one of three councilmembers who were caught on leaked audio making racially charged comments about a colleague’s family and the city’s political demographics. The other two councilmembers who were part of the conversation, former council president Nury Martinez and councilman Gil Cedillo, are no longer on the board.

On the recording, Martinez referred to councilman Mike Bonin’s two-year-old adopted black son as a “changuito,” or “little monkey,” and said she believed “he needs a beatdown.” De León called Bonin, who is white, the council’s “fourth black member,” and charged Bonin of carrying his son around like a designer handbag.

In October, when audio of the conversation was leaked, President Joe Biden called on the three council members to resign. Martinez resigned the next day, and Cedillo’s re-election bid was defeated in November. In a recent interview on CNN, de León defended his decision not to step down. “Let me be very clear about this: In a democracy voters make the decision, not folks who are in the peanut gallery, or political pundits, or even my own colleagues,” he said, adding that participating in the racially-charged conversation and not shutting it down is “something I will forever be sorry for.”