“Progressive activists who called for the mandates at Santa Barbara City College are hurting the people they claim to champion,” Santa Barbara resident Justin Shores writes in his News-Press commentary.
A majority of Californians that are still here feel the state is heading down the wrong path. This has already caused millions of nonpolitical generational families to look to other states to lay their roots.
Businesses have relocated by the thousands, and countless others have shut down forever.
California has a Democratic supermajority and a non-existent GOP, and we have a political echo chamber that is sustained by low-information voters and controlled media. Most people vote along party lines and stay out of politics so the people who are elected only worry about the perception of their political party. So many of us feel unrepresented and homeless as a voter.
The Democrat Party is not a monolith and has a large, diverse base, but the progressives run the party. If you are an endorsed Democrat, you have to vote along party lines or will not be allowed in office. We see this at the local, state and national level.
Politics are all about who can rally the voters and the progressive wing of the party has excellent community organizers and fundraisers. Unfortunately, as we have seen in California over the years, progressive policies have done the opposite of what is promised. Crime and drug addiction is skyrocketing while the bar for education is continually lowered. We have progressive politicians in Sacramento like Alex Lee who just took a bill that was presented to lower the fuel tax and instead gutted it and rewrote it to make it into a tax!
Even with California having the highest tax rates in the country, more increases are being locally considered in Goleta and coming in the form of bonds from our local school districts.
A recent study graded states by how well they handled the COVID-19 pandemic, California received an “F” and was in the bottom 5 overall.
“The study verifies other studies, which have found that locking down businesses, stores, churches, schools and restaurants had almost no impact on health outcomes across states.”
This report determined “States with strict lockdowns had virtually no better performance than states that remained open for business.”
There should be a parody song made “We don’t talk about Sweden,” a country that had no part in the self-inflicted global disaster. Other examples of countries like Israel, with the highest vaccination rates to little effect, were also ignored.
Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize winning anti-viral, has been used all over the world throughout the pandemic to treat COVID-19, but in California it was called “horse medicine.” How can people be so dishonest? Why would they? District 3 Supervisor Joan Hartmann and Dr. Van Do-Reynoso, the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department director, both imply that humans could not take it. Why? How many people were denied potentially life saving early treatment? Politics? Profit?
While the world moves on from COVID-19, people in power in California are still holding on to outdated and harmful policies.
The Goleta Water District still requires its exempt employees to pay for their biweekly lab testing. Imagine paying your work hundreds of dollars a week to work because of a medical condition.
Sacramento is working on legislation to remove the personal belief exemption and consent age for the COVID-19 vaccine, require the vaccine in order to work in California and punish doctors who speak against the policy or question their chosen scientific theory.
Progressive activists who called for the mandates at Santa Barbara City College are hurting the people they claim to champion. Not only are they still not allowing the unvaccinated to come on campus, they are making the vaccinated jump through hoops to attend a partially closed campus.
Listen to this plea from the Associated Students government president who begs for access to the library. The COVID-19 policies here are devastating students who need the library the most while union members are allowed to break policy in front of them. How can this hypocrisy and discrimination be justified while our students continue to suffer?
Recently, at an SBCC meeting, progressive trustees talked about how to sell another $300 million bond by using the words “for safety,” sure to be used for many other things after the lack of widespread pushback from the COVID policies that devastated California.
During this same meeting the SBCC board voted to spend $145,000 for DEIA with no bid and or even posted contract. This is a much larger amount than the similar no-bid payment to local progressive activist James Joyce by the Santa Barbara Unified School District.
SBCC has far less public involvement and scrutiny so the board of trustees has little fear of legal battles.
When asked about the millions that have been spent on this already over the years at SBCC, one current trustee stated, “There is no amount of money that is too much to spend on anti-racism.”
They have no metric to judge success and have found a way to pay progressive political activists huge amounts of tax money while they can.
Most California politicians and school administrators have ignored the damage they have caused to millions of disadvantaged children and students. They have taken the most well funded educational system in the country and produced the lowest literacy rates in the country and students who are three to five years behind in math.
SBUSD trustee Laura Capps, self-described “partner in crime” with COVID policy, went above and beyond the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health out of fear. Her decisions added on to the already incalculable learning loss found by the Santa Barbara County Grand Jury.
It’s past time for hard working, everyday Californians to start shaping their local governments from the ground up. Support new nonpartisan candidates and hold current officials accountable for the damage they have caused. Stop electing the people who got us into this mess.
They are creating the problem and selling us the cure on so many levels and will never admit they were wrong.
Justin Shores
The author is with Stand Up Santa Barbara.
