I couldn’t even try being impartial when writing about the broadcaster Mark Steyn because he’s all I’ve ever really known. Most impressions I have of our present have been either directly or indirectly influenced by him. For over two decades I’ve listened to every show, read every book, and column, watched every speech and debate.
I’ve seen him at his strongest moments – humiliating Democrat Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts at a Senate Commerce Committee Hearing – and his weakest, slumped in a wheelchair, his heart all busted up. I last saw him in December 2022 in London about a week before the first of his many cardiac arrests.
I discovered his name in 2003, when I was making a list at my uncle’s house in Johannesburg of every bastard journalist in the world cheering George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. At first, I thought he was a local, but Steyn is actually part Belgian, part Irish, and part Canadian, with an accent on the smarter side of English. Putting aside his support for that stupid war with a stupid pre-determined outcome (even back in 2003), I quickly found that he possessed something rare.
It wasn’t prescience, although there is a profound case for that, or his striking prose and, at times, breathtaking wit – but the trail he was blazing in the name of First Principles free speech.
Correctly predicted
This emerged in the mainstream in 2008 when he was hauled to the Canadian Human Rights Commission for allegedly “insulting Islam”. The charges related to his book, the New York Times best-selling America Alone, in which he had correctly predicted a Muslim invasion of the West, a failed attempt to appease it and finally, submission before it.
The odds were not encouraging: the complainant, the Canadian Islamic Congress, was haranguing labour organisations with hundreds of thousands of members to support it, but Steyn’s adherence to First Principles was unmoved. The Commission rejected the complaint and ultimately, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act – the “hate speech” – law was repealed.
Few could ever dispute the size of the solid good Steyn had done the world, particularly the West, by fronting up to illiberal bullies and theocratic tyrants alone. Successfully challenging one’s critics, winning, then changing the law would be the work of a normal man’s life, but for Steyn, it would be a relatively minor event compared to what happened next.
On 12 July 2012, a researcher for the Competitive Enterprise Institute named Rand Simberg published an article accusing the climate scientist Michael E Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, of deception. Mann was the inventor of the notorious climate “hockey stick” graph charting the rise of global temperatures.
When the graph was highlighted in the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), families started arguing and friendships were severed forever. No other piece of scientific data had or has ever been more central to climate-related policy making. But it was obviously also hysterical rubbish, which, despite repeated attempts since to “frame it in context” was intentionally dramatised from the get-go – so Simberg chose to compare it to another event involving Penn State.
That was the case of Jerry Sandusky, a football coach and paedophile whom the big shots at Penn State had run cover for. Ultimately Sandusky was convicted on 52 counts of raping minors, and the university’s boss, Cape Town-born Graham Spanier, was convicted of endangering the welfare of children. In the article for the CEI Simberg remarked:
“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
Three days later, on 15 July 2012, in his blog for National Review, Steyn emphasised Simberg’s column – and wisely seized Mann’s previous controversy of being accused of manipulating data in emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in 2009:
“Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does, but he has a point. Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the three-ring circus. And, when the East Anglia emails came out, Penn State felt obliged to ‘investigate’ Professor Mann. Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same cove who investigated Mann. And, as with Sandusky and Paterno, the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing. If an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up? Whether or not he’s ‘the Jerry Sandusky of climate change’, he remains the Michael Mann of climate change, in part because his ‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.”
Happy warrior
So began the fight of a happy warrior’s life. Mann, already unlikeable in the eyes of many of his climate science contemporaries, sued him and for five, then eight, then 10 and finally, 12 years deployed process-is-the-punishment lawfare against Simberg, the CEI, National Review, and Steyn. His expensive counsel location- and jury-shopped, and found the viper’s nest of Washington DC the most agreeable venue for the airing of the defamation charges.
Coupled to the whopping incompetence of assigned judges through the years, Steyn would also have to rely on the kind of juries that the city squeezes out – where you have the choice of a backend engineer for some elaborate Democrat-aligned scam who reads Vice, an NGO executive who reads the Washington Post – but finds it doesn’t criticize Donald Trump enough – or an antifa subversive, who doesn’t read but worries that the court’s metal detectors may betray the two stolen grenades strapped to him. In January 2024 the trial eventually got underway, and each day Steyn – representing himself – was wheeled into the courtroom.
I stayed up every night waiting for a podcast capturing the day’s events to drop. Called Climate Change on Trial, it was produced by the independent journalists Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer (you can go listen to it here).
Mann’s lawyers were repeat MVP ambulance-chasers who had already proved their cunning in mendacious delays clearly designed to cripple Steyn emotionally and financially. But they were also sloppy – probably because they knew that in DC, which had voted 92.1% for Joe Biden in 2020, juries would hardly support a “climate change denier” (especially if they managed to inappropriately slip that reprehensible smear into the jury’s thoughts − which they did of course).
Vain and vindictive
Even so, some of the revelations from Phelim and Ann were startling, confirming Mann as a vain and vindictive plaintiff. His testimony was not that of a serious professional: when asked by Steyn to describe some of the consequences for supposedly having his reputation impugned by Steyn’s blog, he claimed that he had once been out buying groceries at a Wegmans when someone had given him a hairy eyeball.
Why so casual? Looking at Mann’s social media activity, it became clear that it wasn’t just the jury shopping or someone else picking up his lawyer’s tab that had emboldened him into complacency. Whilst he had form with Stalingrad lawfare [see: Tim Ball], in the years preceding, Mann had also buttressed his primary luxury belief – climate change – with other luxury beliefs, such as alignment to BLM and confected antipathy toward Republicans. By positioning himself as a woke scientist, he was almost certainly guaranteed not just the jury, but public opinion too.
So, despite his unconvincing performance in the witness box and the objectionable scheming of his lawyers, it wasn’t too surprising when Steyn lost, and the jury, by now wickedly instructed by Mann’s counsel to draw a line in the sand when it came to “climate denialism”, ordered Steyn to pay Mann $1m in punitive damages.
The climate desks at America’s worst newspapers and media institutions cheered: let this be a lesson – this is what happens when you criticize experts who know everything.
Gloat
The moment was embraced by Mann, who temporarily unblocked Steyn on X to gloat. At the time I argued it was this − a petty and undignified dopamine thrill – that captured who Mann really was. But thanks to the rapid success of Climate Change on Trial, many who listened formed the same conclusion: Mann had repeatedly demonstrated that he was an enemy of expression and curiosity who chose to respond to criticism with litigation not facts.
He was a perpetual victim, who was being perpetually stitched-up and debased – if not by email leaks, then by mean writers. He had stepped close to a kind of stolen valour by claiming to be a “Nobel laureate”. He could not produce a single witness to corroborate his injurious claims – and he wasn’t covering his fees.
Knowing a thing or two about this game, I tried to profile who would have stumped up the cash for him. In one column you have the green billionaires – people like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg and Jeremy Grantham. In another, impressionable celebrities – Leonardo DiCaprio (who had supposedly befriended Mann in making yet another Hollywood extravaganza of luxury beliefs, Before the Flood, 2016) and Adam McKay, who directed Don’t Look Up in 2021 and whose central character in the film, Dr. Randall Mindy (performed by DiCaprio), was said to be based on Mann.
Then you have litigation financiers who may have evaluated the case (and circumstances) and concluded Mann was on to a winner. But there was a risk of exposure for billionaires (Jeremy Grantham’s image emerged poorly from Michael Moore’s 2019 Planet of the Humans) and celebrities lack patience. To this day I feel that a group of academics – people with the personality of Dan Corder’s father Hugh – are the more likely candidates. Like the litigation funders, they may have seen the advantageous circumstances, but only someone or a group with a profound grudge would have ventured to this point.
Stark
It’s now a year later, and the scenario as it was reported from those dreary climate desks couldn’t be more stark. In January, National Review – who did not accompany Steyn or Simberg to trial – was awarded north of half a million dollars from Mann for legal fees. Two weeks ago, Steyn’s ridiculous penalty of $1m was reduced to just $5,000. And last week, the Judge finally ruled on an issue that had unfolded during the trial – something that shocked Ann and Phelim into silence and was notable by its mysterious absence from his initial ruling: Mann’s lawyers had entered garbage into evidence − erroneously calculated supposed “losses”.
What’s more, they knew it was garbage. Mann knew it too.
Frauds? Manipulators of the “data”? To paraphrase Steyn: “if lawyers for the plaintiff are prepared to manipulate financial losses – what else won’t they manipulate?” I’ll leave that for you to decide, but Michael E Mann is not going to be $1m richer. In all likelihood, given the developments associated with the Judge’s announcement – he may be forking out himself – if for the first time in this disgraceful saga.
In addition to the repulsive behaviour of Mann, the past decade thrust other challenges on Steyn.
In 2021, he was parachuted in to save the failing GB News – the UK’s so-called “home of free speech”. A lily-livered response to hostile combatants seeking to destroy the channel had seen its advertising revenues plummet, so for a while Steyn lifted the leaky vessel and helped it realise some of its claims.
But when it came to victims maimed or killed by a covid “vaccine”, the channel predictably stammered − “free speech…but not free enough to claim that our wondrous Oxford Astra-Zeneca, whose inventor was given a standing ovation at Wimbledon and a Barbie doll sculpted in her honour, has killed people”. (In May last year, that same “vaccine” was yanked from global markets).
But First Principles don’t or can’t stammer, and Steyn, presented with a revised contract from GB News handed to him that sought to place any regulatory penalty on his person, resigned. He then took Ofcom to court and was ordered to pay £50,000. A brave woman called Lindsay Penney stepped up and initiated a crowd-funder. The costs were raised with a day to spare.
Grooming gangs
Flaws in GB News’s character were further revealed when the channel started claiming ownership of Pakistani rape-gang coverage – relating to the systematic brutality wrecking England’s counties. The GB News reporter Charlie Peters often started his breathless presentations with “BREAKING: GB News has discovered new evidence of police complicity in Rotherham’s grooming gangs.”
But there were a few problems with the channel’s claims: they weren’t breaking, and there was nothing new. Over a decade ago one journalist had already located all the evidence needed to prove the monstrous depravity destroying the lives of young, mainly white working-class British girls while the authorities, terrified of being called racists, sat on their hands. He had met the victims – some of whom he remains friends with to this day – and witnessed men scouring the parking lots and bus stops of those blighted lands casing for victims. That journalist’s name was Mark Steyn.
In 1994, the only Michael Mann worth knowing – the film director – released Heat, starring Al Pacino and Robert de Niro. There’s a remarkable scene filmed at the Port of Long Beach. De Niro’s character Neil McCauley becomes aware that Detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is on to his heist gang, so to understand who he is up against, McCauley makes an astonishing move that Mann captured in cinematic splendour.
On false pretences, McCauley lures Hanna and his team into a wide, empty area of the port, surrounded by tankers and cranes, where they are exposed. McCauley is filmed atop a container, photographing the assembly.
Thirty years later, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington inadvertently did the same thing – but for the bad guys this time. At its 2024 awards ceremony in April, a photographer captured three men together: on the left was Michael E Mann, in the centre, Anthony Fauci, and on his right, Peter Hotez – three gilded, unaccountable egomaniacs who believe they are the “science”.
Worse, when Mann posted the photo, it was swiftly reposted by another character on the “science” racket – Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, who had viciously attacked and intimidated a researcher called Ariel Fernandez when the latter had produced a paper showing that SARS-CoV-2 virus was unlikely to have arisen naturally. In January, EcoHealth Alliance was barred from funding from the US government.
I’d like to believe that photo was a gift in the spirit of the director Michael Mann. Three crooks, obliviously basking in their crookedness, cheered on by another crook. For us all to see.
After the trial last year, people I had introduced to Steyn stopped listening to his shows and reading his work. One friend lamented that it was too sad to watch a good, brave man being beaten and bashed around by a clearly rigged, censorious system. There was a sense of hopelessness within the ranks of First Principles; Labour would trounce the opposition in May’s UK election and amplify their opposition to expression by neutering the Free Speech Act. Donald Trump was going to jail. The United Kingdom’s unofficial Ministry of Information and Truth (Ofcom) was flirting with consultations from former Lib Dem buffoons who were suggesting that questioning the official narrative of climate change was akin to sedition. But I could never stop following Steyn. Like I said, he’s all I’ve ever really known.
[Image: manningcentre – Flickr: _74P3236, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33420576]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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