I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it appears that coming up in the twenty twenty six elections, Fresno is going to have a new candidate for the California State Assembly seat currently held by Joaquin Arambula, so Jaquin Arambula has been a California State Assembly member for a long time. He is term limiting out. Yes, we have term limits in the California legislature. Probably many of you did.
Not know that.
The California State Legislature, by the way, is the greatest counter example for every conservative who says, you know, we need solve the problem in Washington, we need term limits.
Term these people need to get out off.
Well, we have term limits in the California State Legislature. You have a twelve year term limit. You can serve no more than twelve years combined between the State Assembly and the State Senate. So you could do like four years in the State Senate in eight years in the State Assembly, or or you know, twelve years in one or twelve years in the other, and then you're done.
Okay, you're term limited out.
And this legislature is terrible in California, just in different ways than Washington. Is it has just created new and different bad pathologies among members of the state legislature anyway. Joaquina Arambula is term limiting out and his district covers a lot of like South Fresno, and running to replace him. Is maybe one of my least favorite people as far as what she believes. I don't know anything about her personally. I never met her personally. I'm not saying she's a
bad person. I guess I don't know. Just don't like what she advocates and how she postures herself and sort of what she represents within local politics. Sandra Celodon, Sandra Selodon is running to replace Jauquina Rambula, and she got a big glowing column in the Fresno b yesterday from Merrik Worzowski, and it's really kind of.
Indicative.
I think of the irrelevance to which the Fresno Bee is sliding that they find literally the most left wing person to have their columnists do this big, glowing, gushing review over. So I want to go through this piece by Worzowski and talk a little bit about Selodon and what she represents. So the first thing to know is that Sandra Seladon is the CEO of Fresno Building Healthy Communities.
Fresno Building Healthy Communities is one of these nonprofits that circles around the basically any government entity that has money there in a city council, the president, county, board of supervisors, president, unified school districts, board of trustees, et cetera. They circle around like vultures circling a carcass. And they have all of these altruistic sounding liberal ideas, proposing certain kinds of taxes, doing certain kinds of things, whatever, certain kinds of government programs.
All sounds like these altruistic liberal ideas, but the point is to do them with a government contract going to them. They want to provide all these services with your taxpayer dollar flowing to them, so that it sounds like they're just, oh, we're just altruistically advocating for you know, some you know, bleeding.
Heart liberal cause.
But really what they want is your money in the form of a government contract. So Fresno Building Healthy Communities does that, Barriosunidos does that. All these different Fresno eoc very often does that. All these different local nonprofits do this. And Celadon and her Fresno building healthy communities has been
at the forefront of it. So she was this big pusher of measure p the parks measure, which she and her organization was a big pusher of measure p She is also like super environmental, like wanting to stop any kind you know, one of the big local entities, pushing all kinds of the negative adverse environmental actions, lawsuits, et cetera that help stop development and hurt business in the
city of Fresno. She also, notoriously this was the one notorious thing about her that Warzowski buries at the bottom of the article and just sort of glosses past. This was the sequence of events we had. The riots were happening in Minnesota after George Floyd was killed. Seladan tweets out a video of a police precinct burning to the ground, and she writes in the caption burn them all down.
Everyone understandably says, what the hell. She deletes her whole Twitter account, and yet somehow still manages to finagle her way onto the Fresno Police Reform Commission, the commission that was set up under Mayor brand and Mayor elect Jerry Dyer to examine the police how should we reform policing in Fresno because we're all feeling bad after George Floyd, and somehow the police are racist in Fresno, so we
need to set up a commission. And they set up poor Oliver Baines as the figurehead chair of the Police Reform Commission, and Sandra Celadon, of all people, this person who expressed the most obviously out of bounds idea for fresnens presidents who have never gone in at any level the citizenry, the city council, Nobody at any point had ever gone in for defund the police stuff other than Selodon, who's clearly a huge enthusiast for it.
Celodan gets picked.
To be the vice chair of this Police Reform Commission and produces this report full of recommendations that she clearly wrote. I don't know if Oliver Bain's I mean, Oliver bains seemingly was completely steamrolled on this whole thing or sell it On writes this report, which which apparently nobody but me bothered to actually read at the time, which basically
said policing in America is inherently racist. Policing in America is rooted in gangs of Southern yahoos who would go around, get deputized, and go around with rifles to round up escape slaves. That was the whole point of policing in America, and that racist legacy lives on today and how it adversely impacts communities of color, and blah blah blah.
Every just chapter in verse, every.
Line of modern day American left wing police discourse, all of which is bunk, all of which is historically bunk. Actually, the roots of modern day American policing lie in the Bobby's London's Police Force that was developed in nineteenth century, where the idea came about for a professionalized swarm set of swarm officers taking on almost a sort of quasi military style of behavior, with uniforms, with ranks, with discipline,
with training, who would enforce the law. That model was exported from the United Kingdom to the United States of America and started on the East Coast and spread throughout the country. That's the model for modern day American policing. It owes far more to that than it does to anything having to do with rounding up slaves in the American South prior to the Civil War. It's a different tradition.
It has nothing to do with it. But if you're a completely left wing nutjob, race obsessed loan, then of course that's the lens through which you view the universe.
So I find Seladon.
To be.
Sort of the worst example.
Of this, and I think an out of touch example with where Fresno is and has been. Fresno never bought in to the defund.
The police nonsense.
Never. I don't care if you're South President, North President whatever.
No, Fresno never bought into the defund the police nonsense. She was able using her army of nonprofit paid interns to get measure P the parks tax passed, but which, of course she's you know, then tries to finagle you know, grants and stuff for herself. I am sure, I haven't seen all the receipts from it, but that seems to be their mo. If she didn't get any money from
measure PE, then I'll shut up. But basically, Fresno Building Healthy Communities is a nonprofit that was started up in bootstrapped by ultra left wingers from the Los Angeles area who helped to get these things going. And you know, Worzowski goes through her sort of like resume here on this piece because he went to a fundraiser for her. He talks about how she's transforming Fresno with state funds. So, in short, like this is the worst kind of person
to vault into the state legislature. This is someone who I don't think actually represents very well the communities she claims to represent. And this is one of the obnoxious things about these kinds of groups. Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability is another one of these groups that CELADON is very tight with, which this is the that's the group that basically sues everyone for allegedly for under sequa for allegedly not having enough of an environmental review. Celadon
is sort of tight with those groups. All these different lefty nonprofit quote community groups, they're all funded with money from Los Angeles. First of all, these entities are not just springing out of the ground on the backs of ten dollars donations from Ubuela No.
These are out of.
Town Los Angeles or San Francisco based entities starting up nonprofits in Fresno to impact public policy in Fresno. That's what this is. Well moneyed entities. So it's not something organic, and they constantly have this attitude of acting as if they represent South Fresno more so than the actual elected representatives of South Fresno do. Like it seems as though Analisa Perea might be running for this Assembly seat also now, Analisa pre has been on the president of City Council
for about two years. I'm not you know, I'm not like a great fan of Analisa Perea. Necessarily she's sort of part of the Henry Perea family business. But Analisa Perea I think has a much better claim to actually represent these people her viewpoints, which, by the way, she's a far more moderate Democrat than Sandra Seladon is, and I think that is actually representative of the people of South Fresno. I think people in South Presno are if
they are Democrats, they're more moderate Democrats. This is not San Francisco Democrats. This is not you know, Beverly Hills democrats. Here, people in Fresno didn't ever want the police to be defunded. People in Fresno overwhelmingly voted for the former police chief to be the mayor twice. This is not a this is not a left wing city. And by the way Sandra Seladon is a candidate for twenty twenty, she's not a candidate for twenty twenty six. The country has moved on from a lot of these insane.
That sounded like Trump for a second, a lot.
Of these people.
The country has moved on from a lot of these sort of pathologies that the left was just so captivated but with back in twenty twenty, she's the wrong person for this timeframe, seemingly, and especially in Fresno a county. You know, Presno County went you know, Fresno County went red. Now I'm sure that Assembly district didn't. It takes like the most liberal parts of Fresno and then probably I think some other parts of the South Valley into the
South Valley. So I mean, it's still probably a pretty safely Democrat district. But I think go on, Lisa Perea probably fits that district a lot better than Sandra Slodon does. And yet that this is the difficulty. You have these nonprofit groups who act like, oh, I represent the interests of this community. We're just standing up for the people in this community, and it's very unclear that they are
actually representative of their communities. They'll file lawsuits with you know, three members of that community who said, uh sure, I'll have my name be a plaintiff in the lawsuit. I don't have to do anything right, No, you don't do it, okay. So basically I just feel like, gosh, Sandra Slodon represents the absolute worst stuff, the most poisonous stuff within Fresno politics. Is this again, this flock of vultures from these different nonprofitentities who again they circle around City Hall.
Just waiting to dip their beaks. That's all they want.
And she's going to ride that gig all the way to the California State Assembly. Now, when we return, I want to talk about the BS lawsuit that Selodan filed against Community Hospital. That's next on the John Girardy Show. Sandra Seladon is running for the California State Assembly seat currently held by Joaquin Arambula, who is term limiting out, and the Fresno b is fainting all over itself. At the News, Marrik Worzowski wrote a gushing column about Sandra
Celadon and how wonderful she is. Sandra Slodon on the head of Fresno building healthy communities. Sandra burn them all down.
Seladan.
Yes, this was the woman who tweeted out after the George Floyd riots when there were Minneapolis police precincts literally burning to the ground. She posted a video of one burning down with the caption burned them all Down. And her defense of that in Warzowski's column was so lame. She was saying, Oh, I just I tweeted it out in a moment of passion, and you noticed that I wasn't the one doing anything destructive.
I just went back to work.
It's like, okay, So the bar that we're holding you, you know, the standard were holding you up against, is did you actively participate in a riot or did you just cheer one on from the sideline? Oh okay, we ignore that you were cheering on violent riots because you didn't actually do them. If anything, it just shows that she lacks conviction. I guess anyway, if she thinks, you know, burning down police, he thinks is such a wonderful idea. Now I say this for its own segment. Worzowski in
his column. And by the way, you may have noticed, I haven't talked as much about the Fresno Bee lately. I think it's less and less relevant I don't know why I happened to open it up today to look at it, and it's sort of cemented in my mind
that maybe I don't need to. The President Bee still has this bizarre worldview that of their acceptable range of opinions, their worldview seems to be so narrow that they sort of cannot comprehend analysis from someone on the right anyway, so such that they think that Celodan isn't a ridiculous
kind of person anyway. One of the things Worzowski highlighted in his column was the wonderful stuff Clodon has done with suing different business as in government agencies, including one lawsuit currently pending in federal court that charges Community Health System of misusing medical funds for its Clovis hospital expansion.
So the idea is.
Community Hospital gets reimbursement from Medical for caring for patients who have medical They provide a service for a medical patient, they submit a bill to Medical, they get money from Medical. The argument is that Community has diverted too much money away from community downtown towards Community and Clovis, and the idea being that this is racist, that this has resulted
in community downtown suffering and community and Clovist thriving. That community and Clovis is much bigger, nicer, and more spacious, better services.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Community downtown is crappy and run down, not as nice, and that community was illegally siphoning medical money from one place to another. So let me just talk about what an idiotic lawsuit this is just at the ten thousand foot level, all right, Is community diverting more money to Clovis than to downtown?
I don't know. Is that illegal?
I don't think it is.
I know though, for a fact, that saying that their medical money is being misused to spruce up community in Clovis at the expensive community downtown is one of the stupider things I've ever heard. Let's explain how medical works, guys. Medical's broke. Medical is deeply fundamentally flawed. Why because reimbursements to doctors who take care of medical patients from so this is reimbursement from the state. Medical is health insurance
paid for with joint federal and state dollars. It's health insurance that's available to everyone under a certain income threshold. The reimbursement that a doctor gets for performing a service on a medical patient is tiny, tiny relative to what the doctor could get for performing the same service on a patient who has private health insurance, and tiny also relative to the costs associated with providing that care. There are many disciplines where doctors just flat out lose money
taking care of medical patients. Okay, obgyn care for example, without extra state subsidies, they lose money on ob care.
Doctors do and they.
Lose BI get totally sucked providing gynecology care. So the money that community hospital, let's say, is getting from medical this is not representing some grand windfall. This is not like a big grant or something that they get that helps them. No, medical funding that community hospital gets is barely covering the costs associated with providing a service to
a patient, to providing services to their medical patients. So the idea to frame their lawsuit in terms of oh, here's community hospital making tons of money off of medical and they're just taking all that money they're getting from medical down a community and they're just shoveling at all to those fat cat white people in Clovis. It is not a realistic understanding of the world. Money that they get from medical represents, like, you know, reducing their loss
from a total loss to just a partial loss. All right, it's not some windfall. It's not like Okay, if look if Community down. If Community Hospital had applied for a you know, forty million dollar grant from the state for caring for lowering compatients at Community Downtown, and had received a forty million dollar grant from the state, Hey use
this for Community Downtown to care for lowering compatients. And then they took that forty million dollars and threw it into a you know, chandeliers and caviat at Clovis Community.
Okay, that I could understand. That. That's a lawsuit. That I could understand.
You got a forty million dollar, effectively a windfall a grant from the state, and you used all that money for Community Clovis.
That I would understand. But that's not the lawsuit.
It's saying, oh, you're you're a medical funding you've diverted to Clovis.
It's idiotic.
The medical funding that Community Hospital gets is again it's not even covering the costs of the services they get. Medical funding is given as a reimbursement for the cost of a service that Community Hospital or one of its docks whatever provided. So, but that's Sandra Seladon's nonprofit filing this fancy schmancy lawsuit. Oh she's bringing awareness. She's not bringing awareness to Jack. It's a PR stunt, is what
it was. It's a way to get her nonprofit in the news with a silly lawsuit that I don't think is going to go anywhere. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense theoretically. Look, is there stuff to criticize the Community Hospital for.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm not saying they're a sainted organization that that's perfect and doing everything perfectly.
But that lawsuit doesn't even make any sense.
So acting like Sandra selad On some grand community act advocate because she's suing Community Hospital.
Is silly.
Let me return a broader cultural question. Is Clovis really all that white?
Next? On the John Girardi Show, all right, I want to talk about sort of.
A this is an evergreen sort of topic, a broader cultural question, the demography of the San Joaquin Valley. So over the weekend I was in Washington, DC, and I get reminded of this pretty much every time I leave the San Joaquin Valley and I remember this the first time I visited Notre Dame and it's another area where by the way. So the whole first half of the show, I was riffing off of a column written by Merrick
Wworzowski in The Fresno Bee. I want to pledge Agent Squires, always, our beloved producer here on the John Girardi Show, always takes me to task whenever I do a Fresno B story, Why.
Are you talking about them? They're irrelevant there. Their readership is just down, down, down, down down.
Why are you doing that?
And based on the column I read today, which was just Mayrek Warzowski just losing his mind over how wonderful Sandra Seladon is, the CEO of Fresno Building Healthy Communities, is running for the State Assembly, I think I'm more convinced that Agent Squire's is right, and maybe I will slash my Fresno B consumption accordingly.
I think Fresno B is a.
Downward news source stock, if you will, and maybe other kinds of news outlets are upward trending stocks. So anyway, but one of the things that is very much kind of a fresnob.
Sort of worldview.
Building One of these sort of building blocks of the Presno be worldview is that Clovis is bad within local Fresno politics, Clovis is bad, Clovis is conservative, Clovis's.
Right wing, and.
Clovis is white.
Clovis is just chuck full of white people, as is North Presno, but Clovis h Clovis just full of white people, nothing but whities everywhere you look, and those racial tensions, that racial animus distorts our local politics, and it made
me think I was brought to think about this. One of the things Worzewski was saying and his gushing piece about zelod On, he was talking about this lawsuit that Selodon's nonprofit filed against Community Hospital, saying how terrible it is a community hospital was siphoning money from community downtown to help pay for community and Clovis and a lot of her I think a lot of this kind of racial animus against Clovis because it's so full of white people.
It's sort of built into it that, oh, you're giving all the money to the rich white hospital Clovis community, and you don't care about you know, the downtown Fresno,
you know, lower socioeconomic community predominantly Latino serving community downtown. Now, there's definitely demographics that are at play with Clovis community, and I would guess I would venture that Clovis community has a high err percentage of non medical patients, which I bet and I sort of read some stuff I think indicating this Clovis community having a higher percentage of private insurance paying patients helps subsidize and keep community downtown afloat.
It's not the other way around. I mean, just the economics of healthcare would tell you that this is as much as obvious. Like that was one of the as I discussed in the last segment. That's one of the ridiculous things about Celadon's lawsuit was this argument that, oh, they're misusing their medical funding that goes to community downtown to have it pay for community in Clovis, which is like, No,
that's not what medical funding is. Medical funding is not like some big grant that you get over and above. It's not a windfall. It's reimbursement for services you provide. And usually the medical reimbursement barely even covers your costs. Often you're losing money on medical patients. So no, the idea that oh close, Presno community is getting all this
medical money, getting rich off medical money. And because the powers that be a community are racist and hate Latinos, they're taking all that money and giving it all the Clovis community to make it nice for all the white people.
That's idiotic.
I'm sure the money is flowing rather from Clovis community back to downtown. If there's any movement of money at all, that's obviously the direction it's going to go. Now, this is where I push back though, this notion of Clovis as a white town.
The way that like Tower District.
Delibs, Fresno b Ish lives, the way they downtowny lives, the way they talk about Clovis, you would think that Clovis is ninety percent white.
Let me tell you this.
I was just in Washington, DC, that is a far less diverse city. Or I was in Northern Virginia, Alexandria. I went to National Harbor, Maryland, so not in downtown DC.
Downtown d C.
Yeah, you have a ton of African Americans there, But these fancy schmancy enclaves in Northern Virginia where everybody is a Democrat and it's you know, Tesla Tesla BMW Volkswagen Tesla Tesla. These parts of northern Virginia, you know, fancy parts of Maryland, they're way more white than Clovis is.
Are you kidding me? If you picked Clovis up, if you picked the city of Clovis up, and you dropped it in Indiana or most of the country, if you dropped it in many, many states in the northeast and in the Midwest, Clovis would be far and away the most diverse city in that state. First of all, Clovis is majority minorities. All right, White people constitute a plurality in Clovis, not a majority. So let's just get that
out of the way. And as a result, like this, this notion that Clovis is just so lily white, it's just that that these sort of racial tensions just because it's relatively more white people, I guess than Fresno. But therefore it's it's just out of hatred for Latinos guys. Do you know probably how many Latinos Clothes Community Hospital serves an enormous number, you know, how many long you know recent how many Mong people they serve. I mean,
there's a ton of long communities near there. Although even like community is sort of silly, Like I've looked at the demographics of clothes. It's not like we have enclaves in Clovis where this is where all the Latinos live, this is where all the Mong people live. No, it's totally diverse and spread throughout the city, both for Mongs and for Latinos. Mongs tend to live a little bit more kind of Clovis East d but they're all over the city. We don't have like Mo this is the
Mong neighborhood, this is the this is the barrio. Like, No, we don't have that in Clovis. Latinos and Mongs are spread all throughout the city pretty fairly evenly. We're just a conservative city, Okay, Our Latinos are probably more conservative than most Latinos everywhere else. And some of that anecdotal, sure, but it's also shown by the way we vote. You know, we're gonna switch to this district based city council arrangement.
I highly doubt we're going to start getting like, oh no, now, all of a sudden, Cloes has three Democrats on the Clovia City Council.
Now, are you kidding me?
Get real.
Clovis is just a conservative city. That's all it is. It's not like it's dominated by the Ku Klux Klan or some nonsense like that is not the It just shows the very parochial, limited perspective of these dumb tower district deliberals who clearly have never been anywhere outside of like San Francisco, anywhere outside of LA and San Francisco
ever in their lives. Clovis is actually an incredibly diverse city relative to ninety nine percent of America, and a city with I would say pretty excellent racial harmony as I've known it my whole life. So this I just want to push back on this. I realize this is not like a breaking news story, but it's an idea that has persisted in local politics, local culture. This notion of Clovis as like, oh, the lily white, rich fat cats in Clovis.
Clovis is also, by the way.
That's the other thing. Clovis is a bunch of rich people. Yes, there are rich people who live in Clovis. There's a lot of working class communities in Clovis. Like when my wife and I moved back, I mean I was not making a ton of money by any means, and I had to find a place where a middle class family could live. Clovis wound up being the answer, a pretty good answer. So I again, I push back on all this nonsense of.
Oh, Clovis is lily white. It isn't.
Trust me go to South Bend, Indiana, and then you tell me that Clovis is white, all right when we return, when we return. Stuff I noticed in my trip to Washington, d C. Over the weekend that's next on the John's Already show. I was in Washington, d C. Over the weekend and went to a conference out there. Actually got
to go to a National Review conference. Now that I've been writing all these pieces for them, I was able to get a ticket to this shindig and got to see Ron de Santis speak, and Brian Kemp, the Government of Georgia speak, and a bunch of brothers. But something I noticed about now specifically, I was staying in northern Virginia with my brother who's an attorney who works for
the Department of Justice. And it's an interesting thing about where sympathy should lie for you know, for example, the Elon Musk slashing of government workers and some of these narratives come out, Oh.
These government workers are losing their jobs and that's terrible, and.
I was sort of like, okay, well, you know, I feel bad for people who lose their job in any setting.
It's a horrible feeling. It's not fun, a disruption.
But you know, going to northern Virginia where I.
Mean a huge percentage of everybody who's living in Northern Virginia is living there in some way based off of government funding, whether they are working directly for the federal government or government contractors or nonprofits or funded by the government whatever. And all these houses are worth seven hundred thousand bucks.
And it's basically.
BMWBMW Tesla, Tesla, Tesla, Tesla. By the way, it's so funny how these liberals are acting like Tesla's the most evil thing. You're never going to see more Teslas than in Northern Virginia. Tesla, Tesla, Tesla, BMW. You know, I gotta say, I mean again, I feel bad for anyone losing their job. They got a mortgage that they've based their mortgage off of what they make. You know, they made plans, et cetera. I just when I think that all of this wealth and all of these very comfortable
people are making what they make off of my taxes. Ultimately, it makes it very hard to have much sympathy. And I think that this is going to ultimately be, you know, slashing of various kinds of government workers and government contracts and programs, things like that. That's why I think it's gonna be pretty much an eighty twenty issue for Trump because again, it's hard to have that much sympathy for very comfortable people who are very comfortable on the backs
of taxpayers. So anyway, that was my my DC observation for all of you, your DC correspondent, John Girardy.
That'll do it.
John Girraardy shows see you next time on Power Talk