Because I’ve been distracted by the horror in Israel, I’ve missed a bunch of things that I’ve been meaning to track. So!
First
I’ve written several times about the Alliance of Los Angeles County parents and its First Amendment lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, which is led by one of the most ridiculous public officials in the country. The lawyer handling that lawsuit, Julie Hamill, keeps pushing, and was in court last week for four days of testimony from public health officials on their decision to close comments to their social media posts — preventing the public from publicly offering questions and criticism.
I missed the trial — lazy Chris Bray! bad Chris Bray! — but the California Globe didn’t. Read Thomas Buckley’s well-reported story here, and note the headline. Closing public comments to prevent misinformation, Ferrer destroyed her own framing in court:
“I think misinformation to me and misinformation to you would – it’s completely possible that they would be two separate things,” Ferrer said on the opening day of testimony in the Alliance of Los Angeles County Parents freedom of speech lawsuit against her department.
See also this extremely useful discussion from lawyer Laura Powell, using the trial transcript, on the topic of Ferrer’s hapless wandering through the concept of “misinformation.” A courtroom exchange:
Q. And you're aware that people were saying masks are not effective for adults or children, right?
A. That some people were saying that, yes.
Q. And would you consider that misinformation?
A. Incorrect information.
[….]
Q. And you consider anti-mask perspectives to be misinformation, correct?
A. No. I don't consider an anti-mask perspective to be misinformation.
Funny how the witness stand is sharpening Barbara Ferrer’s mind. You can support Hamill’s lawsuit here, if you appreciate someone delivering accountability to autocratic public health officials.
Second
I noted a few weeks ago that a lawyer for the Los Angeles Unified School District had faced an obviously hostile panel of judges from the 9th Circuit while defending that district’s morally and scientifically insane Covid-19 “vaccine” mandate for its employees.
Soon after, the school board voted to drop the mandate, with board president Jackie Goldberg nonetheless shrieking like the dimwitted lunatic she is that the mandate had been entirely proper and wonderfully effective.
Watch here to see the lawyer Jennifer Kennedy rhetorically shotgun-blasting the school board over the mandate, shortly before they voted to kill it. I used rewind on this public comment. I lingered over it.
Now, here’s the shit sandwich:
The LAUSD ended hundreds of careers with a shameful policy that attacked the principle of informed consent and the medical autonomy of its employees, then refused reasonable demands to change the policy, then dragged litigants through a long and expensive cycle of legal conflict — and then, facing not just obvious defeat but the prospect of making case law over the topic of their horrible behavior, they dropped the policy and told the court to consider the whole argument moot. Whoops, can’t make case law, now.
This is why it’s so hard to sue governments into behaving reasonably. If they’re winning, they play out the game. If they’re losing, they flip the board and scatter the pieces.
As a personal aside, I once watched an LAUSD board meeting as they killed my daughter’s magnificent charter school and drove us out of the city, and I remember sharing the observation that the members of the board were considerably less smart than the average golden retriever. On second thought, revisiting the question, I was too generous.
Third
Having caused astonishing harm to California, Senator Scott Wiener is running for re-election.
It’s like finding out that Ebola wants a second chance. More about this later, after the anti-nausea meds kick in.
Finally
I wrote last week about the Pennsylvania lawyer and dad Chad Williams and his ongoing battle with his local school district over Covid-19 policy, and a new essay at The Federalist digs into that battle more deeply. It’s written by a guy named…Chad Williams. Well worth your time.
September 26th, 2023 -1pm Regular Board Meeting
LAUSD [Los Angeles United School District] Board Meetings
Livestreamed September 26, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQf_y77unZw&t=1726s
TRANSCRIPT
[ITEM 4 BOARD OF EDUCATION REPORT NO. 051- 23/24
OFFICE OF THE SUPERINTENDENT - PUBLIC COMMENT]
28:48
JENNIFER KENNEDY: Thank you, good afternoon, board. I'm Jennifer Kennedy, I'm an attorney, and we've met before. When last I spoke to you it was May of 2022, a year and a half ago, and I'll get to that in a minute. Today I'm here to urge the long overdue sun setting of your covid vaccination mandate, but it doesn't go far enough. You need to reinstate all employees with full back pay.
Listen, this didn't hit me, but it injured my friends. You stole livelihoods and careers from dedicated employees. You took food off the table and medical care away from children. You siphoned birthday gifts, and you sucked Christmas presents up the chimney.
In the name of health, you demanded that employees submit to an irreversible invasive EUA [Emergency use Authorization] injection, a medical procedure with documented risks like blood clots, myocarditis, stroke, and death.
In the name of safety, you demanded submission to the shot that never did, never could, and still does not prevent infection with or transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
And the people you fired, they couldn't even get unemployment, and without medical care they couldn't even get therapy to deal with the clinical depression you plunged them into.
And by the way, so why now? Was it because of the embarrassing arguments in the Ninth Circuit* that we just heard, thank God, they played that video, and the justices who said they were shocked that you were still pushing this mandate?
And by the way, it's so interesting in the little report that you wrote that, which Council mentioned in those Ninth Circuit arguments, where the most scurrilous an reprehensible lie I've ever heard, and that lie is this: The district mandated but did not enforce a student vaccination requirement.
How dare you? How dare you gaslight us into thinking, believing that you didn't crush students in the fall of 2021? That you didn't spend five million dollars on your Safe Steps Campaign of bullying, bribing, harassment, and shaming to force parents to subject their children to this experimental vaccine?
How dare you say none of that happened! That you didn't kick kids off their sports, out of their clubs, out of chess, out of cheer, out of fall, out of fall sports? Everything that you did in October of 2021, you absolutely enforced that mandate.
And funny also in the report, the fact that you say this now applies to all authorized charter schools. Funny because in May of 2022, that's what I was telling you, you needed to control your rogue charter, your LA authorized charter sitting on LAUSD property. Of course I'm referring to Granada Hills Charter, which did crush students, which did put students off campus, bar them from campus, and deny them every possible part of campus activity, including the seniors, denying them senior awards night and even their graduation.
I was here in May of -22 at your fancy end of the year board retreat. I begged you to do something to stop it and save their graduation, and to a man, not a one of you did anything.
Today is the day to finally do something, and that is end your stupid and cruel vaccine mandate.
[time alarm sounds]
MALE VOICE: Amen!
31:55
[END]
# # #
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
* For further discussion of this case, see
"Picking Up Some Dropped Threads"
by Chris Bray, October 26, 2023
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/picking-up-some-dropped-threads
See also https://www.laparents.org/our-lawsuit
Soon after, the school board voted to drop the mandate, with board president Jackie Goldberg nonetheless shrieking like the dimwitted lunatic she is that the mandate had been entirely proper and wonderfully effective.
------------
And just like literally everywhere else that removed mask mandates, nothing will happen.