True leaders seek to inspire, not incite

EDITORIAL - Thousand Oaks Acorn

October 21, 2022

Acorn Editorial Board

Forgive us for being cockeyed optimists, but we’d hoped the county could somehow avoid the ever-increasing political acrimony, mudslinging and finger-pointing the country’s experienced at the national level for the last several years.

Local politics, after all, involve our neighbors, the people we meet while volunteering in our kids’ classrooms, run into at the grocery store or say hello to at the Little League field. Certainly we don’t have to agree, but we can at least get along, right?

Apparently not. Or, at least, apparently not all of us. Despite believing our safe, generally quiet corner of the world to be impervious to it, things seem to be moving in that direction.

Just in the last week, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office has made arrests in two cases of citizens’ non-civil involvement in civics.

First, a woman backing the progressive candidates for school board was cited on suspicion of removing from private property political signs belonging to candidates she doesn’t support (while leaving signs of those she does). Her actions were caught on video.

The second arrest related to Conejo Valley Unified was far more serious.

Reasonable people on both sides of the political aisle were shocked and sickened by threats left in a voicemail message Oct. 13 for CVUSD Superintendent Mark McLaughlin.

The disturbing call was allegedly left by a 44-year-old Santa Barbara man with no ties to the district, which suggests his ire at McLaughlin was the result of something he saw on the news or read online.

It just so happens that a few days before the threatening call the superintendent was featured in a Daily Wire story that suggested he “defended” a seventh-grade boy accused of masturbating in class.

He did no such thing.

When a parent brought up the matter during public comment, McLaughlin made the mistake of responding to the accusation and, in trying to make the point that these kinds of reports are not irregular, was caught on camera saying, “I don’t think this is anything outside the norm.”

A local group with ties to former Councilmember Rob McCoy’s Godspeak Calvary Chapel then edited the video (adding transcription for effect) and posted it to social media, where it was picked up by some large accounts with huge followings—and the rest is history.

This kind of behavior is why so many on both sides of the aisle have grown tired of McCoy’s antics. So determined is the pastor to win back the school board for conservatives he is willing to resort to spreading misinformation.

This ends-justify-the-means approach is exactly what is wrong with politics these days. While such tactics are always shameful, in this case it’s fair to wonder if they didn’t prompt a crime.