One Of Glenn Youngkin's Concerned Conservative School Board Screamers Miiiiiight Maybe Learn $20M Lesson?
Couldn't happen to a more deserving man, if so.
Have you ever looked at this defamation suit or that one or this other one over here or that ‘specially glittery one from Idaho and thought to yourself, “Wow, these right wing dingleberries are so reckless with their wild-ass conspiracy theories, why can’t I get some of those 83 millions or whatevs?” Well, if you are a teacher in ”Radical Right-Wing Asshat” Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia you may already have won a million dollars!
This past week Assistant Principal Tobie McPhail (now formerly) of Glen Cove Elementary school in Roanoke, Virginia, filed a $20 million suit (warning, paywall) against raging asshole and “real estate broker and Glen Cove parent” Damon Gettier, who may have gone a wee bit overboard at a school board meeting in championing his favorite governor’s anti-trans crusade.
If you remember anything about Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia it’s probably that he’s made school board meetings chaotic hellholes. Youngkin’s rowdy, spite-the-teachers movement ended up a nationwhide story covered right here at Wonkette. Though he tried to pretend he was just organizing a love-in for parents, he encouraged that thoroughly nasty bit of “activism” on the campaign trail and followed it up in office with more divisive, hateful and frankly injurious actions, like that time he drafted model policies for schools on how to fuck trans kids up for life.
This middle finger to kids and educators was not well received, and by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum, his Junior Radical Right-Wing Asshat Brigade was not going to take that lying down. Enter Gettier. While Republican right-wingers have long made vague defamation a central part of who they are, defaming vague anybodies or large groups does not a lawsuit make in God America. Gettier, however, was a true believer who actually thinks the worst of the people around him, and never read the fine print about not naming actual names.
So when, at a May 18, 2023, school board meeting (and also on Facebook) he identified specific people he accused of “child abuse, grooming, conditioning, and indoctrination by sexual predators disguised as teachers and staff at Glen Cove Elementary,” he crossed a line of crazy not often crossed by your typical conspiracy theorist. Heretofore you had to be this wealthy to enter the province of your average Alex Jones or corporate right wing news outlet. The whole game was using your spite-earned millions to pay for the legal team necessary to keep a case in limbo for years, and keep their money out of the hands of the people defamed even years after losing bigly, as Jones managed to do for so long.
Spoiler: Gettier is not that wealthy, and this looks to get downright interesting, and soon.
Tobie McPhail, who honestly has a name right out of an Ivy + Bean novel, was one of those people Gettier identified by position and accused of child abuse and grooming. Now she wants to drag him to the end of this book and show him who the monster is. (Spoiler: the monster is not purple-nosed and furry this time.) In addition to a $10 million action for defamation proper, she has also filed an equally valued claim under Virginia’s “insulting words” statute, which creates liability for insults that risk breach of the peace. (Yes, they took the very stupid SCOTUS doctrine of “fighting words” and made it a tort. We are not normally a fan, but in this case we will not veto with heckles.)
Defamation cases are not that common, and among those that do happen, to be perfectly honest a sizeable percentage are filed by a subset of recurring plaintiffs who are just assfaces who take gleeful spite in making other people “pay” for being mean to them, by making them sit through depositions in cases that are never going to go anywhere. Partially this relative rarity of serious defamation cases is a consequence of the First Amendment, and partially it’s a culture where we’re expected to endure anything in the name of free speech, even when there is an actual law against it.
But the timing of this case is interesting. Coming after so many high-profile right wing losers have been held accountable for their lies, it raises the real possibility that the people who have been the subject of right-wing attacks are being legally emboldened to wrestle these fuckers over to the corner and slap the “find out” cap on their heads. When even a Black drag queen from the Idaho panhandle can win a case against these paragons of hatred with fidget spinners where their brains should be, it makes your ordinary elementary school teacher think that maybe she doesn’t have to put up with being labeled someone who is conspiring to sexually abuse children.
Buckle up, Buttercups, because we could be seeing the start of a long-overdue trend.
I could never understand the right’s obsession with the transgender community until I read somewhere that conservatives are hard-wired to want to maintain hierarchies. Then it made sense. To them, gender is just another hierarchy, and any ambiguity about that concept threatens their worldview
The first step in healing is suing their vicious MAGAt asses off...