Two weeks into the pandemic, founder of the Dream Center in Los Angeles Matthew Barnett was driving through the empty streets when California’s lockdown policy was announced.
“They said only essential workers can come and be involved with whatever they need to do, and I thought to myself, and I did the calculation,” Barnett tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.” “We’ve given probably about $1.2 billion of aid to the community over the years, and so I just kind of deemed myself to be an essential worker.”
“So, just kind of blindly and just smiling, I just showed up and said, ‘We’re going to feed people.’ And people started showing up and putting stuff in people’s cars, and everyone’s like, ‘You can’t be doing this. They can’t be doing this,’” he continues.
“It kind of blew up, went viral all across the country, and people started showing up, and even some of the same politicians that told you not to do it, they were like, ‘I think I need to go down and get a photo op,’” he explains.
Through doing this, Barnett noticed that there was a “culture of fear,” and most people were terrified.
And some of them had a right to be afraid, particularly the children in the housing projects whose social workers were no longer allowed to check in on them due to COVID policies.
That’s when the Dream Center took over for them — and what they saw in the name of safety was anything but safe.
“We saw kids joining gangs at a higher rate. We saw kids hungry. We saw a lot of pedophiles in the community that were taking advantage of them being home every single day. We saw food programs that were shut down to help the kids in the school system,” he tells Stuckey.
“So many policies — COVID policies, law enforcement policies, drug policies — are done in the name of compassion. They say that they are the ones that are actually helping the marginalized and the truly vulnerable,” Stuckey comments.
Barnett recalls one of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s comments regarding those “compassionate” drug policies that helped him realize there was no relying on the government to truly help those in need.
“One of the most discouraging statements ever made by our governor is when he said, ‘It’s irresponsible or reckless to think that somebody can truly live sober,’” he tells Stuckey.
“When I heard that comment, I’m like, we’ve given up, we have no belief that people can change, we have no belief that people can escape darkness,” he continues. “It was almost like something that was said that came from the spirit of darkness.”
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