Common Sense, Episode 67: An Ambassador for Foster Care

A conversation with USA Ambassador Ms. 2021 Jamerika Haynes-Lewis and a look at local activists' latest attempts to harass our school board and waste tax payer money

Episode synopsis

In this episode I interview USA Ambassador Ms. 2021 Jamerika Haynes-Lewis about growing up in the foster care system and how that shaped her as a person.

We’ll also take a look at a slew of frivolous public records requests written by a man named Luis Ewing from Moclips, Wa. and submitted by locals to the Wenatchee School District that spokesperson Diana Haglund says may take up to a year and countless hours to satisfy.

Intro – Part I

Hello and welcome to episode sixty-seven of Common Sense, I’m Dominick Bonny and in this episode, we’re going to speak with Jamerika Haynes-Lewis about growing up in foster care and how that made her determined to have a different life than the one she experienced as a child. She’s a native of Tacoma and a fellow Coug with more than ten years of experience as a journalist and advocate for children in foster care. She put herself through college, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Washington State University. As the owner of Clever Jam Communications, Jamerika offers strategic communications guidance, motivational speaking, and facilitation. Currently, she is USA Ambassador Ms. 2021 through the USA Ambassador Pageant. Her platform is ‘A Chance to Succeed: Empowering Youth in Foster Care.’ She is a commercial actress and model.

But first, I have to break a little news about the Wenatchee School District. It’s not that Superintendent Paul Gordon is resigning and will leave that post effective June 30 due to family reasons. If you are a Wenatchee Valley resident you will probably have already heard about that, and I wish Superintendent Gordon my thoughts and prayers during what must be a difficult time for him and his family. The school district news that hasn’t been covered by anyone else yet though is what former school board candidate Matt Van Bogart and eighteen of his friends have been up to recently – which is bullying our school board using lengthy 21-page public records requests; demanding the district provide proof of quote “Self-assembling tentacled nanobots” and “nanoparticles” in vaccines, among other nefarious-sounding ingredients like the dreaded SARS-Co-V2 spike proteins, which are frequently mentioned on fringe Q-Anon websites, podcasts and by conspiracy theory king Alex Jones. The requestors want the school district to prove that the quote “alleged Covid-19 is actually a naturally-occurring virus” or a quote “a man-made disease,” but they didn’t write the requests some sent by certified mail to Superintendent Gordon and School Board Members’ homes and plopped down in front of the board at the February twentieth school board meeting. Yes, you heard that right. Some of the folks in this group of nineteen decided it would be a good idea to send public records requests via certified mail to the home addresses of our superintendent and school board members. Why? That’s a good question. Was it to let these people know that we know where you live? Was it a low-key threat? As a member of the media who has filed many, many public records requests I have never, ever sent one to the personal address of an elected official or public servant. What’s the point of that? They don’t keep public records at their homes.

So I decided to ask Matt and his friends personally, and since most of them provided their emails and ALL of them provided their personal addresses on the paperwork it was pretty easy to send them emails as well as personal letters requesting an interview about this interesting decision and the “self-assembling tentacled nanobots” they are so worried about. I figured it wouldn’t be a problem for them to receive a request for information at their homes since they were fine sending certified letters to the homes of our elected officials. In my correspondence, I requested an interview with all but one requestor. That was about two weeks ago now and only one of them got back to me. And she declined to be interviewed, which is a bummer because I really want to know more about this Luis Ewing guy who actually wrote the requests these 19 folks puts their names on and submitted to the school district. It turns out Ewing isn’t local, he’s actually from Moclips, Washington, which is near Gray’s Harbor on the coast. And while he calls himself a lawyer, he is not a member of the Washington state bar and in his voicemail message when you give him a call he says he would never belong to quote “that corrupt organization.”

I emailed Ewing and called him, but he didn’t get back to me. He did however respond to the Spokesman-Review’s request for an interview, writing in an email quote:

“There is really no need to discuss anything until after I have forced the State of Washington to Reverse, Cancel and Withdraw all Vaccine Mandates, and all Mask Mandates in all 295 School Districts for the State of Washington. … Until I succeed which I will there is NOTHING to talk about.”

He’s quite the character, and his Facebook account is a mishmash of vulgarity and disdain for us “standardized” folks who do silly things like get licenses to drive on public roadways, or pay taxes, or vote. And Ewing is really the embodiment of this merge between the sovereign citizen set, which has been around for decades, and the online Q-Anon cult co-founded by a guy named Ron Watkins. Q-Anon, in case you are not familiar, is a far-right political conspiracy theory that evolved into a political movement. Its adherents believed that a high-level official within the Trump White House was taking to a website called 4Chan to post sensitive and even classified information so that their adherents could help in Trump’s fight against Satanic pedophiles who want to stay young by drinking the blood of children. If it sounds bonkers, that’s because it is! But this is the world we live in now and Watkins is actually running for Congress in Arizona. He also started an organization called “Bonds for the Win” designed to unseat school board members and infiltrate districts in the state, according to Vice News.

“The communist creeps at our school boards are now taking our parental rights away by teaching our children that they can be vaccinated without parental consent,” Watkins shouted at a school board meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona in January, adding “Communist school boards are now indoctrinating our children with transexual propaganda and teaching them to be racist against white people, by teaching racist Biden’s racist critical race theory.”

At that meeting in January his followers then “served” large packets of public records requests to the school board. Vice News also reports that his followers set up Telegram channels in all 50 states to allow people to coordinate harassment campaigns across the country. From 4Chan, one of the grossest places on the internet, to Arizona politics, to our school board right here in little old Wenatchee, Washington. That is the progression of how right-wing political activists like Ron Watkins, Luis Ewing and Matt Van Bogart and friends are coordinating to attempt to bully our elected officials. Time will tell if the tactic will work, but since this incident has gone wholly uncovered by any other members of the media here in North Central Washington, it’s a good bet that they will be able to continue with these antics without any pushback from the community. And doesn’t that say a lot about our local media, or lack thereof? Doesn’t the community deserve to know when the people we elect are harassed and bullied by political activists seeking to waste taxpayer dollars with these fools’ errands? Because wasting our tax dollars is the only thing these requests are accomplishing.

According to Diana Haglund, communications director for the Wenatchee School District:

“While the public has the right to make these requests, attempting to fill them is costly and diverts precious time and resources away from the important business of educating students. Wenatchee’s Executive Assistant to the Superintendent who serves as the District’s public records officer estimates spending 80% of her time preparing documents and responding to requests. Normally, 20% of her time is spent would be spent on records requests. It's difficult to determine the length of time it will take to fulfill this particular request. However, an initial search resulted in thousands of pages of documents that need to be reviewed by staff and the district's legal team, redacted, and prepared. We estimated the timeline could be from a few months up to a year.”

So it could take the school district’s clerk up to a year to fulfill these requests for files and documents that the district probably doesn’t even have and we’ve got to pay lawyers to go through everything and redact personal and sensitive information. What a great use of the clerk’s time and our tax dollars. 

Moving on.

Let’s get to my interview with Jamerika Haynes-Lewis about her experiences growing up in the foster care system and how that helped shape her into the person she is today.

Interview clip 1

Stay tuned for more, after the break. 

Commercial break

Hello and welcome back to Common Sense, let’s get right back to my interview with fellow Coug, journalist, commercial actress and model, Jamerika Haynes-Lewis.

Interview segment 2

I’d like to thank Jamerika for joining me as my guest for this episode. May is foster care month and Washington state is in dire need of quality people to step up and be foster parents. If you have the ability and desire to become a foster parent, I urge you to consider it and become one if that is right for you. It could be the most important and impactful thing you’ve ever done and even if you bring stability, love and peace into one child’s life you will have made a positive impact not just on that child but also on our entire society. If you would like more information about how to become a foster parent, you can pause this program right now and scan this code with your smartphone and learn more. Or you can find the link on how to become a foster parent in the show notes for this episode. Those will be available via a link below the video file for this episode on ncwlife.com. Just go to ncwlife.com, go to the full episodes tab at the top of the homepage and then scroll down to Common Sense with Dominick Bonny.

That’s all for this episode, join me next time for a conversation with a local woman who recently lost her 17-year-old nephew to a drug overdose because there was fentanyl in some of the pills he ingested. It’s a tragedy we are seeing more and more these days as fentanyl becomes ever more pervasive in the black market.

I’m Dominick Bonny and that’s next time on Common Sense.

Sources

QAnon Influencer Ron Watkins Is Berating ‘Communist’ School Boards, Vice News: https://bit.ly/3MqYCSP

The men behind QAnon, ABC News: https://abcn.ws/3xP6tFw

Luis Ewing’s Facebook profile: https://bit.ly/3MnXE9L

Matt Van Bogart’s public records request (redacted): https://bit.ly/38WY3S3

Becoming a foster parent in Washington state: https://bit.ly/3MhFQNs