It was all a fucking farce
Professional wrestling came to the Capo Unified School Board meeting Wednesday night—scripts and all.
On Jan. 23, 1984, Hulk Hogan challenged Iron Sheik for the World Wrestling Federation championship. The match took place inside a sold-out Madison Square Garden, and I watched via my family’s 13-inch Zenith—a young boy mesmerized by the spectacle of it all.
Although I was desperately rooting for the upstart Hogan to triumph, I knew it was long shot. Sheik, you see, had never before been felled, and he was blessed with the deadliest move in wrestling history, The Camel Clutch.
Then, toward the end of a long and grueling match, this went down …
I couldn’t believe it! The Hulkster escaped The Camel Clutch! It happened! It really friggin’ happened! The following Monday I bounded into Mrs. Gardineer’s sixth grade class at Lakeview Elementary and raved to everyone about one of the great athletic achievements of my lifetime.
Then (sigh) David Clingerman1 pulled me aside.
“Jeff,” he said, “you know it’s fake, right?”
Um, what?
“It’s not real. It’s all scripted and make believe.”
I went home that afternoon and cried.
•••
I bring Hogan-Sheik up because I am writing this on the night of April 23, and once again I feel like crying.
For I have witnessed a grand farce.
A few hours ago, I attended the Capistrano Unified School Board meeting at the headquarters in San Juan Capistrano. This was the operation’s first gathering in six weeks, ever since Judy Bullockus, a trustee representing the district’s Area 7, dropped the n-word during a public session. That nugget of stupid resulted in quite the shit storm, with plenty of residents calling for her resignation and demanding accountability and, at the very least, seeking an acknowledgment that the language usage wasn’t merely wrong, but awful judgement.
So tonight’s meeting felt like a big deal.
I arrived at approximately 5:15 for a scheduled 7 o’clock kickoff, and as I pulled into the parking lot I spotted dozens upon dozens of individuals standing outside the building. Many held signs. Some walked with petitions. I’d say, oh, 80 percent of attendees were in the Bullockus-pretty-much-sucks camp, but there were also a good number of folks there to support her. Which (and I truly mean this) I have no problem with. This is America. You’re not going to side with everyone. Maybe her backers thought the n-word, while inappropriate, wasn’t worth this big of a fuss. Hell, maybe some of her backers just happen to know Bullockus. And like Bullockus. It’s all good.
So I did what the veteran journalist in me has long enjoyed—I tried speaking with those I likely disagree with. The pro-Bullockus crowd had arrived extra early, and were positioned by the front of the line. Which was (to their credit) a savvy move: Only a limited number of people from the public can speak, and it’s supposed to be first come, first serve. And … I chatted with some of the peeps. I explained this site, explained they (cough) wouldn’t likely love it, also explained that I try and keep an open mind and listen. I talked at length to a woman whose opinions I do not share, and it was cool. And I spoke with a guy who didn’t like my body language but thought my T-shirt was dope, and that was cool, too.
But then—this little pit bull started barking. Yap! Yap!
Her name was Amber Smith
She was short, fake blonde, intense eyes, nice sweater or shirt or whatever. She told the surrounding conservatives they should never, ever, ever engage with me. She insisted this post on Lisa Davis was horribly unfair and erroneous—and when I asked what, specifically, was unfair and erroneous, she bellowed, “Everything!” When I followed with, “Like what?” she sorta said the same thing. “Everything!” Amber had a look. Rabid hamster energy. So I backed off.
Be you, girl. Be you.
It turns out Amber runs the @reformcapousd Instagram feed, which is a local hotspot for all your needs when it comes to trans liberal athlete librarians teaching racist DEI books to LGBTQ+ groomer Lady Gaga fans. We had actually recently engaged in a somewhat heated back-and-forth on IG direct messaging (she runs it anonymously, so I didn’t know it was her until the meeting), which ended with me writing this …
… and Amber responding by blocking me.
Which, honestly, I don’t begrudge her for. We live in hostile times.
Anyhow, Amber was standing alongside a youngish dude in a blue suit, white T and black Iverson-in-1997 saggy-at-the-butt pants.
This guy …
What I liked about this guy was his half-cooked soul patch, which reminded me of all my past years also half-cooking soul patches.
What I didn’t like about this guy was he was … This Guy. Which is to say, I was actually having a fairly nice and polite and reasoned conversation with someone about parental notification laws. We disagreed, but I understood where she was coming from and told her so. But then … Soul Patch Breh broke out his phone and started recording me. To agitate. To inflame. To be what so many Soul Patch Brehs are in 2025: Irksome little gnats who earn their stripes by being irksome little gnats. In Soul Patch Breh’s defense, there’s a talent to it.
It turns out Soul Patch Breh is named Frank Rodriguez, and he used to be the executive director of an organization called Gays Against Groomers. If you’re thinking, “No way in hell an organization deliberately named itself ‘Gays Against Groomers’”—you would be incorrect. Frank was once one of their big guns, which means, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he was involved in a club that, “amplifies dehumanizing anti-trans rhetoric, perpetuates anti-LGBTQ+ stereotypes by falsely claiming that LGBTQ+ supporters of trans rights are dangerous to society – including equating gender-affirming health care with pedophilia and calling trans people a ‘bloodthirsty terrorist cult.’” He has since brought his talents to Instagram, where he posts wacky and weird shit. If the Alf puppet is ever rumored to have impregnated Blackpink’s Jisoo while wearing an AOC pin, I suspect Frank will break the news.
I digress.
Amber was there.
Soul Patch Breh (who doesn’t even live anywhere near the district) was there.
An old guy who smelled of tattered leaves and chai tea was there.
And at, oh, 6:45, the doors opened and we shuffled into the chamber. It was an enormous crowd. I didn’t count, but all the seats were filled …
… and when the board members entered, there was an electricity one does not normally (aka: never) find at school board meetings. It actually hit me that this was the first time I was seeing these women in person, and as the session kicked off with the pledge, then a couple of nods to academic achievements and sports success, I found myself actually sorta kinda (gasp) liking them. Lisa Davis seemed nice. Jennifer Adnams also seemed … nice. It was an important reminder that, deep down, we’re all just people trying to hug and smile and …
No.
No, no, no.
A half hour passed, and then it was time for citizens to approach the microphone and speak. As I noted earlier, it’s a first-come, first-serve system, and all those conservatives reached the building first. So, one by one, they used their allotted minute to say stuff like, eh, this …
It was super weird. Because every … single … dude and dudette were basically uttering the same bullshit while following the same script. Namely: Blame everything under the sun on Krista Castellanos, the liberal board member who had the audacity to call out Bullockus’ n-word inanity. Then demand Castellanos’ resignation for the crime of … um … eh … argh … something.
It was gaslighting: 101—Bullockus saying the n-word wasn’t her fault. It was actually Krista Castellanos’ fault for repeating that she used the n-word and bringing shame to society!
But it didn’t end there. In fact, this is where shit gets uber-bonkers.
Like, uber-uber-uber bonkers.
There’s a (entirely reasonable) School Board rule that guarantees active students in attendance an opportunity to speak. So, one by one, a gaggle of, oh, 18 or 19 teenagers were asked to line against the wall and wait their turns. From the start, something about it seemed fishy. First, because how many high school students give two shits about a school board meeting? Second, there had to be something better to do on a Wednesday night in SoCal. But third, what are the odds every kid there would have the exact same talking point? Seriously, the … exact … same … talking … point—calling for Krista Castellanos’ resignation.
I would say we were two or three kid speakers in when someone one row up turned to me and whispered, forcefully, “Hey, they were all handed their speeches.”
What?
“They were all handed their speeches.”
Are you sure?
“Wanna see a picture?”
And, yup. The scripts (of which I was shown several) were provided to the children.
Literally all of the scripts were provided.2
Hell, if someone had written MY NAME IS [NAME] AND I BELIEVE RUTHERFORD B. HAYES SHOULD BE REMEMBERED FOR OPENING THE FIRST DWIGHT GOODEN-THEMED DAIRY QUEEN … that’s what the students would have most certainly uttered. You could actually hear it in many of the young voices. The robotic-ness. The trepidation. The stumbling over words. Whether they loved MAGA, liked MAGA or gave not two shits about MAGA, I felt legitimately bad (and sad) for the youngsters, who were sacrificial lambs being led toward (moral) slaughter. Later, I was told that the two people seen passing out the speeches were … Amber Smith and Soul Patch Breh. Which is 100 percent on brand.
It all sucked.
Really.
Truly.
Sucked.
•••
But here’s the worst part, and something that strikes me as far, far, far, far, far more egregious than than the Bullockus n-word fiasco.
Like Hogan-Shiek, the school board meeting was pre-planned.
Just one big fucking joke.
An off-Broadway production.
It turns out that, two nights before the event, Lisa Davis and Judy Bullockus held a Zoom session with, among others, Soul Patch Breh (aka: Frank Rodriguez) and Amber Smith to determine how to best navigate the upcoming drama ...
In other words, the president of the Capo Unified School Board and the board member who literally dropped the n-word … plotted with a former leader of (cough) Gays Against Groomers to pre-plan who would speak, what would be said, what lines would be fed to children and what order it all would go (Now that I think about it, I have to assume they actually recruited Rodriguez to participate. Which is wrong on 1,000 fronts). The repeated attacks against Castellanos? Orchestrated. The limited number of liberal voices allowed to be heard? Orchestrated. The tone, the tenor, the texture of the meeting? Orchestrated. The frustrations felt by those who wanted to be heard, but never were allowed to talk? Orchestrated. And somehow, while dozens of people itched to state their case, Amber Smith was permitted to twice walk up to the microphone and spew her irrational, poorly constructed, Archie Bunker-esque nonsense.
How?
It was all orchestrated.
And you know what kills me? It never had to be this way. Truly, there’s an alternate ending to this fiasco, and it goes like this: The meeting begins. Judy Bullockus turns to Lisa Davis and says, “Mrs. President, with your permission, can I say something before we get going?”
Davis nods.
“I have been giving this a lot of thought,” Bullockus says. “And I’ve really come to see how absolutely wrong I was. I didn’t consider the weight of the word, I didn’t use my common sense, I didn’t think about how naive and inadvertently hateful I surely came off to so many here. I own this, and you have every right to be upset. It was stupid and ignorant, and I am fully committed to becoming a better person and board member. You guys have every right to take me apart, and I’m going to sit here and absorb it all. I hope I can regain your trust. I certainly will try. I’m so sorry.”
And I swear to God—had Judy Bullockus said anything remotely akin to that, this space would have been used to offer her credit, and insist (I genuinely believe this) we should move on and give her some grace. If nothing else, it would have helped her recover her footing.
But … no.
Last night’s jamboree ended after about two hours, when shit got hostile and people started booing (mostly on the left—because it was now obvious the decks had been stacked) and Davis cleared the room. When the meeting later continued, a bunch of us watched through a window from outside as the School Board’s four MAGA heads denied Castellanos’ well-stated request to engage in further discussion on the matter come next month.
It was a whimper’s wrap to a dark day; yet another sad reason for people to feel helpless, lost, confused, fed up, disenfranchised.
But here’s the thing.
The important thing.
The one factor that struck me like a lightning bolt was the base-level stupidity of those who stole the night. Davis looked nervous and sounded functionally illiterate. Adnams said all of 17 words. Bullockus came off sad and defensive. Lisa Zollinger was home sick, but she sent her son to the front lines to utter the requisite talking points. Amber Smith was seven cups o’ coffee down and trembling like a vibrator. Soul Patch Breh was, well, Soul Patch Breh.
They made for a motley crew of doofuses and dolts; losers and louts. And before we were all kicked out, the graceful and understated Castellanos finally leaned into the microphone and—channeling the communal frustration of so many of us—let loose with this …
It was beautiful, and forceful, and (for a rare moment Wednesday night) the truth.
And sitting there, beholding the circus freaks before me, I thought, “This woman is, unambiguously, the smartest person on the stage.”
Which is important.
Because when the noise dies down and the crazies find another shiny object to distract their Funfetti-stuffed heads and Soul Patch Breh moves on to the next small-town carnival, reason and intellect will prevail.
Sanity will prevail.
An ironic twist: You have the Gays Against Groomers dude on your side and your grooming kids to speak.
The MAGA majority used their power to silence constituents who don’t share their viewpoints. In the process, they also silenced people who were there to speak about other issues. The board should have waived the time limits and let everyone speak. But no, they doubled down on the racism. Shameful.
So grateful for you being there and reporting with such honesty (and humor, much needed because none of us are smiling today). And you are correct…the collective intelligence of 4 of those women would still fall short of a single Krista Castellanos. BTW, not ONE kid showed up from Judy Bullockus’ area schools, and not ONE kid could pronounce “Castellanos” or “Bullockus” correctly. Most seemed to have read their scripts for the first time that night. Also, we had to get the personnel inside the building to convince the sheriff at the door to make them stop cutting in front of the line we had waited in for over an hour. When asked to do the right thing, they shrugged or smirked. Entitled beyond measure.