Ambush at Costco/School Board Moral Cowardice Follows – Buz Blog

[Editor’s Note: The following is an opinion piece and reflects the views of the author. As a general rule,  Prescott eNews does not comment on articles appearing in other publications or identify their authors.  But the Linda Conn story is one of exceptional importance.  In the interest of full disclosure, the Publisher of Prescott eNews,  local attorney David Stringer,  has a client relationship with Ms. Conn.]

“Courage is rightly esteemed, the first of human qualities because…it is the quality which guarantees all others.” – Winston Churchill

I’ve known Linda Conn for 40 plus years. Like most of us who grew up in Southern California, Linda has lifelong friends with names like Rodriquez, Gonzales, Estrada, Garcia, etc. It was, and still is impossible to live in that area without having such friends. Linda was a dispatcher at the Long Beach Police Department when I was a patrol officer. As any cop who has worked the street knows, good dispatchers are worth their weight in gold. They know the bad addresses and bad people and will relate that to the officers they send to those places.

Linda left the LBPD to take up teaching in the Long Beach Unified School District. She taught in areas where the vast majority of those students were black, Hispanic and Asian. If this woman is a racist, then so were Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez and Nelson Mandela. That is why I was so surprised and upset to see the piece by Nanci Hutson on the front page of the Daily Courier. This article about Linda Conn was a textbook case of “yellow journalism”.

Britannica states that “Yellow journalism is a style of journalism that uses sensationalized news and eye-catching headlines to increase circulation and attract readers…Yellow journalism emphasizes sensationalism over facts and doesn’t report much real news.” Not only that, but this is a case that looks very much like a setup.

“The coward only threatens when he is safe.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This attack on Linda Conn follows the template that the progressive/woke proponents always use. To neutralize and silence an effective opponent, they make the accusations of racism. Linda stood up against School Governing Board President Stan Goligoski and District Superintendent Clark Tenney when they pushed through a controversial Social Studies curriculum that was opposed by most parents who had read or seen excerpts of it. Linda is a conservative on a board that is majority liberal. Tenney and Goligoski don’t like to have their views and policies confronted in public at the school board meetings. Then, somehow, the incident at Costco just happened to give them the opportunity to infer that Linda Conn is a “racist”. Sure looks like a setup.

Next, these two “leaders” of our school district, Tenney and Goligoski, the day after the ambush, before any investigation, added their comments to the sensationalist article, inferring that Linda Conn is a racist. If this isn’t an explicit case of moral cowardice and poor leadership, then nothing is.

A good leader would have said that an investigation was being conducted and there would be no comment until the investigation was completed.

There are those who will ask, “What needs to be investigated? The incident was videoed.” But these two ethical midgets, along with school board member Andy Fraher, condemn Linda on the basis of an EDITED video. Linda’s comments are quite obviously taken out of context, the video does not show what preceded the first video clip or what happened before or after the second clip.

“I think bullying in general is for cowards.” – Eddie Alvarez

The Courier article implies that Linda was bullying these three Hispanic women. Anyone who studies human nature realizes that in any “three on one” confrontation, it is much more likely that three are bullying the single person. So the question remains, who started this encounter and who was the one really getting bullied?

There are other questions that need to be answered. Only one of the three women, Elizabeth Garcia, is identified in the article. Why weren’t the other two named? Could one or both of the other two work for the teacher’s union, that supported Goligoski in the last election and opposed Linda Conn? If this is the set up it appears to be, who put these women up to this? Who put the edited video clips on the school board’s Facebook page? That page suggests that Linda Conn be recalled. If anyone should be recalled, it should be Clark Tenney, Stan Goligoski and Andy Fraher for lack of leadership and malfeasance in discussing a personnel complaint, prior to an investigation and in a public forum. The Daily Courier should lose any of its current subscribers who wish to read honest and balanced reporting rather than yellow journalism.