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So Why is Mark Steyn No Longer at National Review? I didn't even find him in the contributing editors section. I do go to www.steynonline.com but reading Steyn was a good 40% of why I subscribe to NR.

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How the Left, here and abroad, is trying to shut down debate — from Islam and Israel to global warming and gay marriage ... At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. .... In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s ‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy ... But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one...

The ongoing trial involving journalist Mark Steyn – accused of defaming climate change theorist Michael Mann – reflects an increasingly dangerous tendency among our intellectual classes to embrace homogeneity of viewpoint. Steyn, whose column has appeared for years on these pages, may be alternatingly entertaining or over-the-top obnoxious, but the slander lawsuit against him marks a milestone in what has become a dangerously authoritarian worldview being adopted in academia, the media and large sections of the government bureaucracy.

I have written for years about America's absurd paramilitarized bureaucracy: the federal Secretary of Education who employs not a single teacher but is the only education minister in the western world with his own SWAT team; Virginia's beverage regulators with their crack sparkling waterboarding team; USDA's Bunny Team Six; Wisconsin's Deer Team Six; the IRS agents ready to take out your W2 with an AR-15... Apparently the only government department without a military force at its disposal is the military. So when a lone shooter opens up at an army base, Fort Shock'n'Awe has to call 911 and "shelter in...

A couple of days ago, you'll recall, we featured current controversies over a metal cross retrieved from the rubble at Ground Zero, and a roadside cross marking a fatal accident in Lake Elsinore, California. American Atheists and the American Humanist Association are suing over both outrageous provocations. On the other hand, as far as I'm aware, American atheists and humanists have no plans to bring any separation-of-church-and-state suits against the City of Minneapolis, for its observance at City Hall last month of "Hijab Day". Female members of the city council wore the hijab, as did the Chief of Police, Janeé...

Ever since I ended my joint representation with National Review and fired my lawyers on Boxing Day, the endlessly reprised refrain has been that "Mark Steyn has a fool for a client". As I wrote here: That's an old English joke, of course. Circa 18th century, I believe, when English life was very lightly lawyered. Whether it applies a quarter-millennium on in a sclerotic dungheap of a system that, as my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, employs as many lawyers as the rest of the planet combined, who between them invoice ten per cent of GDP is...

Good news! As I predicted four years ago, alarmist climate scientist, Michael Mann’s gambit of using the courts to silence debate about his faked “hockey stick” graph is backfiring spectacularly. 17 mainstream media outlets now agree Mann should put up or shut up.

I heard the "leader of the free world" on the radio this morning speaking from the White House on Russia's annexation of the Crimea. President Obama's big thought was about the "choices that the Russian government has made". It was delivered in the condescending tone of a grade-school guidance counselor lecturing Little Vladdy on the "bad choices" he kept making, and what's more "choices that have been rejected by..." Stand well back! "...the international community". Other than that, the President announced he was imposing "sanctions" for more individuals in the Russian government thinking of visiting Disneyland or opening a savings...

On Saturday, I spoke to the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua, New Hampshire. I was one of the last of a bazillion speakers over two days, many of whom - Bobby Jindal, for example - had pointed out how serious things are by offering some variant of the warning that, if we're not careful, we'll wind up like Europe. So I tried to explain that, by most measures, America is already way beyond Europe, and significantly worse than other English-speaking nations in the New World (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). From the OECD's 2011 edition of Government At A Glance,...

It's pre-Oscar night at SteynOnline. We're celebrating with The Oscar for Best Oscar Speech, and a look back ten years to A Great Night for British-ish Film. But from the Sunday Telegraph corner of the Steyn archives here's my profile of the man without whom none of this would be possible:He's short. He's muscular. He has no private parts. No, not Tom Cruise. We're talking about one of that select handful of silver screen legends recognised instantly by their first name alone: Brad, Barbra, Arnie... and Oscar. He's Hollywood's most indestructible star, unless your chauffeur accidentally reverses over him in...

People keep asking me whom I favor for the 2016 Republican nomination. I politely demur — and not just because it's almost three years till Election Day, and at this stage in the 2008 cycle I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Barack Obama. As a resident of a New Hampshire township with more than 37 people, I don't have to seek out presidential candidates; they're there at the inn and the general store and the diner and the Grange. I've seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar...

People keep asking me whom I favor for the 2016 Republican nomination. I politely demur — and not just because it's almost three years till Election Day, and at this stage in the 2008 cycle I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Barack Obama. As a resident of a New Hampshire township with more than 37 people, I don't have to seek out presidential candidates; they're there at the inn and the general store and the diner and the Grange. I've seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar...

I've been told by various experts in America's "justice" system that I shouldn't risk incurring the wrath of judges by talking about them. We'll see how that pans out. But I'm heartened by the stirring example of Lou Pelletier, a Connecticut father who took his sick daughter to hospital in Boston only to have her kidnapped by the tinpot tyrants of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. That was a year ago. Since then he has been under a "gag order" imposed by Suffolk County judge Joseph Johnston. Initially, Mr Pelletier abided by the terms of the gag order,...

UPDATE: it seems the language was lifted from a “Skeptical Science” web page, see below. Steve McIntyre had a busy day yesterday. While yesterday there was an incorrect story called “Michael Mann Faces Bankruptcy as his Courtroom Climate Capers Collapse“ being pushed by John O’Sullivan at Principia Scientific International (aka PSI and The Slayers) claiming Dr. Tim Ball had defeated Mann’s lawsuit, Ball confirms through communications with McIntyre yesterday that while stalled, Mann’s lawsuit is still very much on. Also, for those who don’t know, we’ve heard that Dr. Mann’s legal bills are being paid by the Climate Science Legal...

Every side in the political debate has a natural tendency to appeal to freedom of speech when they feel threatened—but to ignore (or initiate) threats to the free speech of the other side. My favorite example is from the early 1990s, when the Yeltsin government dispossessed Russia's Communist Party of the vast holdings it had amassed in the decades when it controlled the state. The Communist Party screamed in protest, denouncing the supposed attack on its "property rights and freedom of speech." Which was pretty rich, considering that the Communists had just spent 70 years ruthlessly stamping out everyone else's...

You don't have to be sued by Michael E Mann to have a certain antipathy toward him. It's been fascinating to discover how many people there are who believe in "anthropogenic global warming" and believe in climate science but really, strongly dislike Mann, his methods, and his promotion of himself as sole proprietor of Global Warming, Inc. I quoted a few of them the other day, but you have to be both secure in your career and have a certain toughness to come out against him in public. Here's a small case study. Michael Liebrich lives in London. He's a...

Free Dominion, one of the arch-foes of the Canadian Gun Registry, has been shut down. The conservative website, Free Dominion, has shut down after a long legal battle with censorship champion lawyer Richard Warman.  Warman gained notoriety for his attacks on conservative sites by using the "hate speech" law in Canada (the Canadian Human Rights Commission) to censor speech he disagreed with.   He was essentially the only person using the law and the process.  The CHRC became his personal tool of repression.  He had considerable success, though the CHRC has since been reformed by parliament as a result....

When the "Climategate" e-mails were leaked five years ago, a lot of us speculated that it could all end up in the courts, given the evidence that climate scientists were pocketing large sums of government money on the basis of a scientific consensus they were manipulating behind the scenes. But it's typical of our upside-down political and cultural environment that when this issue does reach the courts, it will be in the form of a lawsuit against the climate skeptics. Steyn and the others are being sued for criticizing Mann's scientific arguments. In the case of the Competitive Enterprise Institute,...

n 2002 Richard Warman appointed himself Canada's Hatefinder General and went around the Internet hunting down so-called haters and turning them in for lucrative tax-free sums amounting to many thousands of dollars. Hatefinder Warman and his enablers at the Commission abused the extremely narrow constitutional approval given to Section 13 by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision and instead turned it into a personal inquisition for himself and his pals. Parliament took my advice and abolished Section 13. Now it's déjà vu all over again: Michael Mann turns out to be the Richard Warman of climate science, a man...