Levi Herrera-Lopez's Minions are at it AGAIN at Salem Keizer School Board Meeting!
Latinos Unidos Siempre hates you and will let you know, but then call you racist for not liking it!
On August 9th, 2022, the Salem-Keizer School Board had their second in-person meeting after starting them back up in July. And boy what a meeting it was!
But let’s back up and expand on the cast of characters supporting the agitators otherwise known as LUS, or Latinos Unidos Siempre.
Along with the groups listed in my previous article on Levi Herrera-Lopez’s LUS and the Mano a Mano Family Center supposed “non-profit group”, there are a couple more to add to the cadre. On June 5, a new Facebook group was created, called “Get The Word Out” - “Salem-Keizer's public resource for staying informed on upcoming events & creating FB events for when” And that’s not a misquote, their "Intro” information just… stops.
They post a lot of progressive events, LUS’s included, but also for progressive candidates like Ramiro “RJ” Navarro (a former LUS youth), various local LGBTQ pride groups, and Salem Democratic Socialists of America.
Another group called “Salem Community Oregonizers” reposts some of the “Get The Word Out” group’s posts. On August 5th, “Get The Word Out” posted, and “Salem Community Oregonizers” reposted the following “Red Alert!”
“Get The Word Out” had stolen graphics from a parent group (Salem Keizer We Stand Together), where they were urging parents to sign up to testify and show up to the meeting. “Get The Word Out” added the caption:
The conservatives, as always, are organizing to spew their views at the next school board meeting.
We need leftist adults to sign up to do public comment to oppose guns in schools, to oppose Security Resource Officers (SRO's) in schools, and to support LGBTQIA+ students and staff.
If you're not comfortable with speaking, showing up with signs and pride flags makes a difference as well.
Can you feel the tolerance? Believe exactly the way they do, or you’re an ist or a phobe, or whatever else they want to call you to marginalize you.
Just a bit more background: “Salem Community Oregonizers” is a subset of a larger group called “Oregonizers”, a group aligned with Indivisible, a far-left extremist group. If you need to read up on how bad that group is, you can find a thorough write-up on The Yamhill Advocate, as mentioned in the previous article.
Anyway, these two groups, and who knows how many others, put out their “Red Alert!” for “leftist adults” to show up.
LUS themselves put out a number of calls in the days leading up to the meeting.
Again, they’re targeting Director Marty Heyen and characterizing her comments as homophobic when they weren’t. They have to problematize everything so they can gain power over it and seek to control it. Otherwise known as Marxism 101. (For more info, read James Lindsay’s book Race Marxism [not an affiliate link - I get nothing if you buy it], and listen to his podcast New Discourses. He speaks a ton, especially on the intersection of education and marxism, otherwise known as our current education system)
LUS also tried to drum up support by posting Instagram Stories directly from the board meeting.
But, despite these depictions of virtue, what really happened?
Before cameras started rolling on the meeting itself, LUS was lined up outside the entrance to the meeting room early, equipped with parasols (to shield themselves from others who showed up) and played loud music, trying to crowd out the waiting area and make it uncomfortable.
They began photographing other adults that showed up that were not a part of LUS, ramping up the intimidation, as per the usual.
They brought signs with sayings like:
“Punitive Discipline, SROs, and Juvie Aren’t Responses to BIPOC Trauma”
“Abolish the School to Prison and Deportation Pipeline”
“Speaking Out Against Hate Speech isn’t ‘Divisive Speech’”
“No More Allowing AmeriKKKa To Take Our Youth”
In the meeting, they couldn’t abide by general decorum or the rules put in place by the School Board to have the audience be quiet while people are giving their public testimony, or respectful (i.e. without namecalling) while giving their own. In one instance, a parent was giving her testimony, and activists in the audience were heckling her.
The new chair of the board, Ashley Carson-Cottingham, having been elected in the previous month’s meeting, had a hard time controlling the room (especially towards the end of the meeting, where she found it difficult to hide her emotions). Maria Hinojos-Pressey, one of the two vice chairs, called for order, which should have been an action taken by the chair herself.
And when the activist claimed they were fighting “hate speech”, Chair Carson-Cottingham had to run to the board attorney to begrudgingly back her up that it wasn’t hate speech, and was in fact First Amendment protected speech. Mind you, Ms. Carson-Cottingham has her Juris Doctorate from Vermont Law and Graduate School. I’m pretty sure it’s a basic requirement of Juris Doctorate students to understand the United States Constitution, let alone the First Amendment.
But, I digress.
During one parent’s testimony, security approached an audience member in the room and told them to take down their sign. So LUS can display all their signs, but signs that oppose the Marxist progressive agenda of this Board’s unprofessional majority are demanded to be removed? LUS was never asked or told to take down their signs, and you can see from the limited view of the background in the YouTube stream, that they waved them often.
A student testified in opposition to a policy up for a vote that would ban gun owners with concealed handgun licenses from carrying their firearms on any Salem Keizer school campus. This brave young man stumbled over just a few words as he was reading his prepared remarks, and people attending in person said that LUS was making fun of him while he was still talking. How inclusive!
At the previous board meeting, the outgoing school board chair, Osvaldo Avila, made some parting remarks that called for an end to the divisive language being used. That’s where the sign about “Divisive Language” came from. And despite the plea from Avila, LUS persisted, using racially charged language, and calling everything “white supremacy” or “racist”.
To her credit, Chair Carson-Cottingham asked at least one of the LUS activists to stop the name-calling. Do you think they listened? For about half a sentence; this speaker wasn’t corrected again, let alone removed for violating the rules of public engagement.
Vice-chair Hinojos-Pressey also asked another of the LUS activists to stop the name-calling. They didn’t like that.
During public testimony, the top paid agitator… I mean organizer of LUS, Sandra Hernandez-Lomeli, signed up to testify, but she gave up her spot for an alleged 7th grader. She works for Levi Herrera-Lopez, and you can find more in my previous article. So much for a “youth-led organization”.
But now the increased fervor of the activists makes sense. They were all trying to impress the boss. They probably get paid more the more trouble they cause. I keep asking myself, if these are just a bunch of kids, where are their parents? If this is important, where are their mothers or fathers? Nope, it’s just these kids and their handlers.
At one point in the meeting, an argument erupted after LUS was calling a parent a racist without any provocation and launched an ad-hominem attack based on this LUS activist’s knowledge of the parent and their family. The argument started inside the school, and then outside, this parent was accosted by a mob of LUS activists. They called this parent vulgar names, demanded that the parent get off this “stolen land”, and engaged in physical acts of intimidation to a point that the security guards attempted to de-escalate the situation. To alleviate the conflict, the parent left but feels afraid that LUS activists may have followed them home.
Another parent reported that they were followed by LUS activists to their car, and witnessed another parent being followed, as well. The LUS activists took photographs of the cars and the license plates of both these parents, which are all obvious acts of intimidation. And I highly doubt these were the only two.
These are just a few of the incidents. If you want to see it all, at least what was caught on camera, go check out the YouTube video of the entire meeting.
Congratulations Salem Keizer School Board! This is the culture your policies and acts of mealy-mouthed acceptance of these activists have created. What about those policies governing in-person meetings you all spent so much time crafting? Even though you leveraged LUS and other like-minded groups to get elected, you are still beholden to all the citizens you represent, and as such, are duty-bound to provide a safe environment for the public to participate in the board meetings.
This doesn’t mean going back to Zoom meetings. This means enforcing the new policies you yourselves crafted, approved, and implemented. This means having the hard conversations you don’t want to have with those groups. You know you have Levi’s phone number, and you know he runs LUS. If you don’t have his number, talk to Superintendent Christy Perry, and she’ll hook you up. I wrote about it EXTENSIVELY in my last article.
So, it’s time to put up or shut up. Quit capitulating to these Marxist activist groups, or are you one of them, or at the very least sympathizers for the cause? Is that why you don’t follow through and make them follow your rules and policies regarding decorum in board meetings? The parents and the community of Salem Keizer expect and DEMAND more from you.
Side note: Thank you to everyone that read and shared my last article. I appreciate the support I’ve received from many of you. Please, please, please… don’t sit back. Stand up and make your voices heard. Share this and encourage others!