Posted on 01/25/2024 11:13:31 AM PST by Ultra Sonic 007
After 12 years of wandering in the wilderness of the D.C. court system, Michael Mann’s defamation case against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg has finally gone to trial. Opening statements were delivered today. The trial is being live-streamed, and I got the court’s app to work just in time to hear Steyn’s opening.
The case, as you likely recall, arises out of an internet post written by Simberg, which Steyn quoted and added a few comments to. The two posts drew a parallel between Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced Penn State football coach, and Mann, also a Penn State employee and, like Sandusky, investigated by Penn State’s administration in what amounted to a cover-up. Steyn described Mann’s famous hockey stick temperature chart–accurately–as fraudulent.
Mark fired his lawyer some time ago and elected to try his case pro se. I was afraid this might prove a bad mistake. Also, Mark has often talked about this lawsuit as a landmark free speech case. But defamation has always been recognized as an exception to the First Amendment, or whatever other free speech principles may apply. Free speech concerns are incorporated into defamation law, in the U.S., via the actual malice standard. I thought that the only way to try this case was with an aggressive truth defense. Even if the jury ultimately wasn’t sure which side was right in the global warming debate, it would be obvious that Mark believed that what he said about Mann’s hockey stick was true. Ergo, no actual malice.
I shouldn’t have worried. Mark’s opening statement, delivered on his own behalf, was a bravura performance. It was bold, frequently crossing the line, I thought, from exposition into argument–proper in a closing argument, but not an opening statement. It was shrewd, too. Mark showed one or two of Mann’s tweets, in which he attacked scientists and others who disagree with him–including one scientist who will be a witness in the case–in crude and childish terms. Mark portrayed Mann as a guy who lurks on Twitter, saying worse things about his critics than they say about him. A guy, Mark said, who can dish it out but can’t take it. That was an inspired theme.
And Mark’s opening was, happily, all about truth. Every word of his post, as he said repeatedly, was true. He did not back away from the comparison between Sandusky and Mann. On the contrary, he aggressively and effectively defended it. Not that Mann is a child abuser, of course: rather, the link is the corruption of Penn State’s administration, as embodied in Graham Spanier, the president of the university who went to prison, along with two other PSU administrators and Sandusky. In both Sandusky’s case and Mann’s, Penn State’s corrupt administration purported to investigate, but didn’t.
Mark displayed an email from Mann to a friend in which he said that he wasn’t worried about the administration’s investigation of his work, because he had gotten a phone call from Graham Spanier–who was not supposed to be involved in the investigation, at all–and Spanier had been reassuring. Mark showed photos of Spanier and the other Penn State administrators in prison jump suits.
So, in my opinion as a reformed trial lawyer, the case is off to a good start. Whether Mark can maintain the high standard he set today remains to be seen. But the day will come when he, personally, will cross-examine Michael Mann. I may have to buy a plane ticket to Washington to see it.
This podcast is providing updates and dramatic re-enactments of the trial as the days go by: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/unreported-story-society4/episodes/Ep--1--A-Mann-Apart-e2eig36
Thank you very much for the link.
Just show the emails Mann sent in the 2000’s that showed duplicity in his climate models.
He’s a liar. He showed he was willing to alter statistics and then lie about them.
“Mark fired his lawyer some time ago and elected to try his case pro se. I was afraid this might prove a bad mistake.”
Steyn is certainly getting legal advice from friendly (and amused) lawyers, and his tongue is much sharper than most lawyers.
The podcast is excellent! Just finished listening to Episode 6.
Who the heck is Michael Mann??
12 years!
How’s that for justice?
As Mark Steyn himself says - America’s courts are a bloated, 3rd world, clogged toilet.
*
Great interview with Steyn:
Typed in my best Mark Steyn voice doing minutes long run-on sentences: Michael Mann's hockey stiff graph is puck pooey like the roundabouts saturating New Hampshire with "climatlogists" like Mann always circling aimlessly until the bureaucracy leads Mann to the "results" that Al Gore wants for his carbon credit scheme because Mann likes the government money rolling in and it's easier to please Al Gore in that manner than to do a masseuse style chakra release for the aforementioned Gore of Tipper divorce fame and Pennsylvania State University has the audacity to call this "science" we can "trust" but we now know they believe less in science than they believe in America's first amendment which I assumed was still in place in the lower colonies until I'm forced to stand here in court for speaking the truth to not have to pay a compulsory jihad tax to Imam Mann for questioning his religion of a warmageddon future where it'll be too hot to survive much less worry what your pronouns are but at least the schools will quit telling the kids to ignore their parents because the schools will tell the kids to force their parents to turn off the A/C or the kids will dial up the climate constables to make the parents quit adding carbon to the atmosphere with their HVAC's meanwhile Mann isn't telling the university's donors from China to stop making coal plants out the wazoo faster than Biden can ask Kamala to rub his leg hairs...
Sounds like an "educated" idiot.
“In a typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff’s goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism. In some cases, repeated frivolous litigation against a defendant may raise the cost of directors and officers liability insurance for that party, interfering with an organization’s ability to operate.” ~Wikipedia
Imagine, invoking SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation intimidation lawsuits) protections causing you to get tied up in court for an extra decade.
And that after the original judge was so incompetent she couldn’t keep straight who was the plaintiff, who was the defendant, and who made the argument she was ruling on or dismissing.
Mark Steyn has given several talks at the Heartland Institute on this subject and suit. This one is old (can’t find the most recent ) and Steyn starts at about 06:35:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?326526-1/climate-change
Thanks....
The originator of the (horse) hockey stick - climate pseudo-science.
The University of East Anglia email dump (in 2009) was a treasure trove of proven malfeasance perpetrated by these climate hoaxsters.
I previewed the actual code written by Michael “Piltdown” Mann, used to draw the hockey stick graph. He placed comments on one section of the math algorithm, it referred to a purposeful fudge factor because the real data had been lost.
That’s exactly right, the fraudster Mann placed fake data points in the program so that it would plot the graph in a steady upward motion.
Anyone else would have been thrown in prison for this outrageous deception.
The Climatic Research Unit scumbags were ALL caught red handed. They later claimed that the emails were taken out of context. No they weren’t. The emails PROVED there was indeed a cabal of climate “scientist” conspiring to push the global warming hoax. These filthy pricks should ALL be fired along with the media enablers who hid the truth.
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