COVID hysteria brought out the worst in bureaucrats already prone to overbearing abuse of authority. People were arrested for paddleboarding alone on the ocean, for taking walks, for taking their children to parks, even for trying to practice their religions. Businesses were bankrupted, and educrats got out their totalitarian freak too, punishing kids for refusing to wear masks and denying them education. That kind of abuse spread even to red states like Wyoming, where at Laramie High School, 16-year-old honors student Grace Smith felt the full force of educrats’ wrath.
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Graphic: Grace Smith and her father Andy. YouTube Screenshot, via Fox
For refusing to wear a mask, and for daring to attend school, Smith was suspended three times, and on at least one occasion, the entire school was locked down and Smith was arrested. She was cuffed, stuffed and taken to the police station. Why the polite refusal of an unarmed honor student quietly waiting in the school office for police to arrive would require a complete school lockdown has never been explained, but sheer panic, arrogance and stupidity seems sufficient explanation. All this after ensuring Smith was issued a previous $500 dollar citation.
Smith eventually withdrew from the school and sued in federal court, but the case was dismissed when her lawyer missed a filing deadline. With new lawyers, Smith filed a new suit in state court. The school district tried to get the Governor and state Attorney General to intervene, but they said “no thanks.” In the meantime, the school superintendent got caught claiming legal authority he did not have. The school district did not cover itself in glory, and much of Wyoming was not amused.
Three years later, Smith’s case has taken a happy turn:
U.S. District Court Senior Judge Nancy Freudenthal dismissed the case in September 2023, saying Smith lacked standing or a genuine controversy, because she’d failed to show an “actual” harm that wasn’t of her own making.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, like much of Wyoming, was not amused:
“We are not persuaded,” reads a Tuesday order by 10th Circuit Judges Harris Hartz, Gregory Phillips and Allison Eid, which sends Smith’s case back down to the U.S. District Court for Wyoming for further proceeding.
When a government regulation forbids or requires some action by the plaintiff, she almost invariably can show she’s been harmed, says the order.
“Grace has easily met the requirements for standing,” the order says. “She alleges that the defendants repeatedly punished her for opposing the mask mandate. They suspended her three times and requested that local law enforcement issue her two trespassing citations, arrest her and take her to jail.”
Amazingly, the school district claims that Smith’s harms were “self-inflicted.” In other words, by calmly and politely asserting her right to an education, she brought the unreasonable, panicky actions of school officials on herself. Apparently highly educated adults have no ability to exercise reasonable discretion, or even to behave like sane adults, and the presence of a non-violent girl waiting quietly to be arrested is grounds for multiple arrests and the 90-minute lockdown of a high school, disrupting the educations of every student in the building.
Claiming Smith wasn’t harmed is likewise ludicrous. She was serially suspended and arrested, suffered a great deal of public ridicule and was denied an education.
The police aren’t blameless either. They too have wide discretion. They aren’t required to make arrests—citations are actually arrests—at the demand of school authorities. Rather than citing and physically arresting Smith, they could easily have declined such unnecessary treatment. They could have simply waited until Grace’s father arrived to take her home, or driven her there themselves.
As we’ve since learned, masks are ineffective. “Social distancing” was equally useless. The Covid “vaccines” aren’t. They neither prevent contraction of COVID nor prevent transmission to others. In fact, they’re responsible for killing people and harming far more. Arguing no one knew that until much later so every outrage perpetrated against the innocent in the past is blameless is also a lie. Fauci and the rest at the NIH and CDC, and doctors across the country, knew all of this then, but motivated by money, empire building, and personal power, they brought disaster down on us all, including Grace Smith, a girl in Laramie, Wyoming.
It’s impossible to know the outcome of Smith’s litigation, but if she’s successful, perhaps that might be one more step toward making it sufficiently painful to keep thoughtless, panicky bureaucrats from depriving Americans of their businesses, educations and liberty.
Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
