WRAL-News ran a terrific story Friday headlined, “NC Supreme Court ruling opens path for parents to sue schools, health clinics over Covid-19 vaccines.” The partisan sub-headline added, “The ruling was 5-2 along party lines, with all the Republicans in the majority and all the Democrats dissenting.”
Tanner Smith, 14, played football at Western Guilford High. In 2021, the school rounded up the football team for a surprise vaccination. Tanner protested and said he didn’t want one. Clinic nurses tried calling his mother, who didn’t answer, but ignored Tanner’s advice to ask his stepfather, who was waiting in the parking lot. Then, Chief Judge Newby wrote, “Ignoring additional protests from Smith himself, the workers forcibly injected him with the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.”
The Smiths sued the covid clinic and the school district. The trial court and the appellate court threw out their case, citing the PREP Act’s broad immunity. But last week, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that, while Tanner’s tort claims, like battery, might be federally immunized, his claims under the state constitution were not immune. His case continues. (Western Guilford should settle; just saying.)
For full disclosure: I am currently suing the federal government over the PREP Act. We are currently waiting for a May hearing on the government’s motion to dismiss. I’ll keep you posted.
This North Carolina decision is promising but limited. Obviously, having been forcibly injected, and having state constitutional protections, Tanner is in a small class of victims. So I might not have reported the story, but for the initial background paragraph in the Supreme Court’s opinion. Read this and be encouraged:
In other words, five of seven North Carolina Supreme Court judges —the top jurists in the state— agreed that the pandemic featured “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” We’ve come a long way. That is a legal verdict, not some blog post. This decision is permanently recorded in the state’s records and listed in its laws.
The partisan divide is also quite telling. Not one Democrat on the Supreme Court endorsed that statement, and how could they? It would be a damning admission, since Democrats themselves engineered “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
They will go down with the political ship before they admit they had any role in it.
Let’s connect some dots. I think you’ll be surprised at what might really be behind the Democrats’ political woes. Consider all the recent bad-news headlines like this one, published in Politico on Friday:
This morning’s post began with the Bernie Sanders stopgap, which obscures the Democrats’ historic implosion. Last week, we saw Democrats’ overall approval rating crater to 29%— and with it their hopes of permanent majority or really, any kind of majority.
How did Democrats lose so much support so quickly? I would like to offer a radical proposal: what if a lot of people agree with the Republicans on the North Carolina Supreme Court? The media is desperately trying to paint progressive voter angst as anger at their own leaders for not fighting Trump hard enough. And it’s easy to find that kind of evidence in the progressive fever swamps of BlueSky where Trump Derangement Syndrome infection is endemic.
But what if the anger is due, at least in part, with the many betrayals of progressive ideals during the pandemic. Supposedly the party of the “working class,” the Democrats threw workers under the bus with “vaccinate or terminate” mandates. Supposedly the anti-Big Pharma party of “my body, my choice,” the Democrats forced people to take hastily approved injections they didn’t want, which is especially infuriating in the harsh hindsight that the stupid shots never worked and were basically all risk.
How, pray tell, do you hold a party together after those Shakespearean levels of betrayal?
Worse, as President Trump pushes the limits on civil liberties, as with his perfunctory deportations of violent gang members and adjacent illegals, how can Democrats possibly reclaim the mantle of populist champions? Their hypocrisy is too profound and too recent for anyone to really take them seriously.
The pop-up popularity of Bernie Sanders and hyphenated Representative Ocasio-Cortez demonstrate a new willingness among partisans clinging to the “Democrat” brand to bring a wrecking ball to established party orthodoxy. What dragged them to this remarkable point of furious enthusiasm for discarding leaders like Chuck Schumer (D-NY) like soiled tissue?
Both Bernie and AOC were good little doggies who towed the party line during covid, enthusiastically endorsing mandates of all and any description. And maybe that’s why their messages aren’t resonating outside progressive partisan echo chambers.
Never let them forget.
The media prefers, for obvious reasons, to chalk up Democrat discontent to not opposing the President. But maybe —whether voters consciously realize it or not— it has more to do with lockdowns, passports, masks, and experimental jabs. Instead of Democrat officials’ terminating unvaccinated workers, vaccinated Democrats are terminating them.
I believe the Democrats are reaping the bloody harvest of their pandemic excess. That is what I think is happening to them. I think the Democrats have post-vaccine syndrome. It’s a political autoimmune disorder causing Democrats to attack their own party. And I think it will ultimately be fatal.
No more forced vaccinations no more Big Brother in the School system