Today’s Ku Klux Klan rally at Anaheim’s Pearson Park turned to chaos before it even started. With no visible police presence at the scene, a black SUV carrying around five Klukkers pulled up by the park shortly after noon. They tried getting Confederate flags and “White Lives Matter” signs down from the back, when protesters swarmed them. After trading insults at each other, the counter-protesters started pummeling the Invisible Empire. One Klansman confronted the crowd with an American flag.
“He was using the American flag as a spear,” says Tyler Valdez, who was at the park. “One [counter-protester] got hit on the side and started bleeding,” says Israel Carrasco, another witness. Another protester got slashed reportedly with a knife behind the SUV and bled profusely all over the sidewalk. The Klan stabbed three people in all, one with critical injuries. In the pandemonium, protesters smashed the front window of the Klan Klown Kar and slashed its rear tires.
The Klan Klown Kar sped off down Cypress Street and turned left on Lemon Street. The Klukker with the flag sporting a “Grand Dragon” shirt got left behind–could it have been Bill Quigg, the head of the Loyal White Knights of the KKK who whined we were mean to him? “He ended up falling on the ground getting kicked and punched by protesters,” Valdez added. “People started jumping in to try to break it up.” The Klansman’s flag laid crumpled in the middle of the street with blood stains all over it.
The Pearson Park melee now joins the Street Dogs kicking neo-Nazi ass at their Anaheim House of Blues show last year and, of course, the famed Slater Slums Smackdown six years ago when Mexis racked up neo-Nazis in Huntington Beach!
Only after all the mayhem at the park ended did Anaheim police patrol cars roll up to take control of the scene. They arrested five KKKers and hauled seven protesters off in cuffs. The Klan Klown Kar stopped on the north side of the park by Lemon and Sycamore Street with cops questioning Klukkers there. When the public information officer Sgt. Daron Wyatt spotted me, he asked if I had seen anything. I later tracked him down for any interview. He couldn’t give me details on the number of arrests and stabbings at the time, but I did ask where the visible police presence had been since I got to Pearson Park at 10 a.m..
“We’ve been here all day,” Wyatt said.” You know, Gabriel, we don’t talk about our staffing and deployment, but we were here.”
I didn’t see any uniformed police, even with children playing at the park on a sunny Saturday. And then the Klan came to town. 
More–much more–to come…
Gabriel San Román is from Anacrime. He’s a journalist, subversive historian and the tallest Mexican in OC. He also once stood falsely accused of writing articles on Turkish politics in exchange for free food from DönerG’s!