Tyranny has a foothold in America

...but for as reckless, bullying and egomaniacal as he sometimes is, it's not Donald Trump.

My last post was about something you had probably never heard of, to wit, hospital forms asking parents whether their newborn kid was genderqueer, or gay or lesbian, etc. I’ve found that under-reported stories can illuminate how crazy the Left has become and how eager it is to inject its lunatic thinking into American life (which illumination is why, I suspect, the stories are under-reported).

I found another such story today in something called “The Carolina Journal.” The headline is, “Split NC Supreme Court permits teen’s forced COVID vaccination suit against Guilford schools.”

I spent a good bit of my career as a federal prosecutor, and in a job like that, a lot of bad stuff crosses your desk. But until I saw the Carolina Journal headline, it never occurred to me that, in this country, a child guilty of no crime, and not even accused of a crime, could be seized by the authorities and forcibly injected against his and his parents’ will. I knew that COVID had been used as a reason/excuse in some jurisdictions to enact extraordinary measures like lockdowns, business closures, required masking and the like. I suspected (although I don’t know) that unvaccinated children could be barred from school or even quarantined at home, which I will assume here, strictly arguendo, is legally and morally permissible. But grabbing a kid and holding him down for an injection with something he’s afraid of and doesn’t want in his body was something alien to my way of thinking about how this country operates. Having been a prosecutor at one time, I can tell you that, if prison authorities were to do that to a guilty-as-sin adult inmate, the ACLU would be in court the next day with a steaming hot lawsuit accusing the government of putting the Nazis to shame.

I guess I need to get with it.

The Journal story was technically not about the forced injection per se of the kid (14 years old at the time), but about whether the authorities who did it could be sued, or instead whether they had a form of sovereign immunity by virtue of a federal statute called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. Lower courts in North Carolina had ruled in favor of immunity, thus barring the suit. The state Supreme Court reversed, holding that the suit could go forward (meaning, I’m pretty sure, that the kid and his parents are in for a fat settlement, since the defendants’ case for such an assault on a child is essentially unwinnable before a jury of normal people). The vote on the state Supreme Court was 5-2, with all the Republican judges siding with the kid and all the Democratic judges voting for the state.

The Journal’s reporting struck me as straight-forward (this is not, after all, the Washington Post):

Tanner Smith was 14 when he was forcibly vaccinated at a Guilford high school in 2021. Smith and mother Emily Happel argued in court that a clinic worker from the medical society administered the COVID vaccine against the teen’s will and without parental consent.

Over Smith’s protests, the unnamed clinic worker is alleged to have said, “Give it to him anyway.”

Question: Would any sane parent ever again send his child to that school? Or maybe the fairer question is: Would any parent who could afford a realistic alternative ever again send his child to that school?

“[W]e are tasked with considering whether Congress intended the PREP Act to immunize state actors who forcibly vaccinate a child without his or his parent’s consent, thereby committing a battery and infringing their fundamental rights under the state constitution,” wrote Chief Justice Paul Newby for the state Supreme Court’s majority.

Yes, thank you Justice Newby. This is less a tort than a crime, that being battery. And since Smith was underage, it’s child battery. Liberals used to consider that an outrage when the context was spanking as discipline, but COVID was too alluring an excuse to use to impose on the public — in the guise of “We’re here to help you with your health, no less!” — the expeditionary forces of authoritarianism.

“First, we agree that the state constitution protects a parent’s right to control her child’s upbringing, including her right to make medical decisions on her child’s behalf,” Newby wrote about the court’s support for Smith and Happel’s arguments.

“[T]he constitutional right to full ‘custody and control’ over one’s minor children would ring hollow if it did not include the right to consent on the child’s behalf, as well as the right to seek a constitutional remedy when the State disregards the absence of that consent,” Newby added. “Our state constitution and caselaw have long implied the existence of the precise right plaintiffs claim here. We directly recognize it today.”

It’s unfortunate, but in our present circumstances predictable if not all but certain, that the Court would divide along partisan lines. It’s impossible to imagine today’s Democrats signing on to reasoning that values the rights of the child and his parents over the commands of the state. This is especially so when the state is carrying The Banner of Experts Who Know Better Than You Do Mister Hayseed.

(This may be place to note that, in my experience, medical “experts” are usually right; in this dispute in particular, far from being anti-vax, I got seven shots of it, plus two doses of monoclonal antibodies. (But I got COVID anyway). The difference is that I got to decide for myself).

Under [the State’s] view, Congress gave carte blanche to any willful misconduct related to the administration of a covered countermeasure [to COVID], including the State’s deliberate violation of fundamental constitutional rights, so long as it fell short of causing ‘death or serious physical injury.’ … The ramifications of this approach are deeply repugnant to our constitutional traditions and the history of this State and Nation,” he added.

I guess it wasn’t a coincidence that Trump carried North Carolina all three times he ran. To be sure, Trump has his own problems of overreach, and sometimes gross overreach, but they tend to spring from his patrimonial style of governance rather than from a classic dictatorial bent, as I argued here. (This is an important distinction Never Trumpers don’t see, not because they lack the perceptiveness but because their hell-bent fury prevents them from seeing it).

The Court’s dissenters relied on a wooden reading the the immunity statute but, to their credit (and unlike many liberal dissents I’ve seen, for example in death penalty cases), didn’t try to sweep behind the curtain the unappetizing facts:

“The facts alleged in the plaintiffs’ complaint are undoubtedly troubling; as even the defendants’ policies provided, the administration of a vaccine to a minor child without parental consent in these circumstances was wrong,” Riggs wrote. “The minor child and his parents had every right and reason to be outraged at their losses of their physical and parental rights. And, absent any congressional countermand, they should have the opportunity to pursue any lawful claims for those losses against those responsible.”

As I’ve been arguing, a cultural backlash against the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic and authoritarian impulses that currently reign in the Democratic Party was a wind at Trump’s back during the campaign. Trump could easily fumble it all away with what we will charitably call his indiscipline, but until the Democrats turn away from the radicalism they’ve embraced, if it isn’t Trump, it will just be someone else.