Free Speech and Arson

Mark Steyn has been trying the defamation case that Michael Mann brought against him in the D.C. Superior Court for the last three weeks–literally trying it, since Mark is pro se. Yet somehow he found time not only for an update on the trial proceedings, but for commentary on my visit to Washington last week and the firebombing of my organization’s offices a few days earlier. He included in his post a tweet in which I talked about the arson, followed by video footage of the devastated building.

Not only that, he tracked down an interview that I did with Howie Carr, the great radio host in Boston, a couple of days earlier, and embedded it on his own site. Here it is:

I spent a little under two days in the D.C. courtroom and have listened to some of the other proceedings on the court’s freely available feed. It is dangerous to comment on a trial which you have seen only a small percentage of, yet people (like Dennis Prager on his show earlier today) ask for my impressions. So here are a few:

* In general, I don’t think the case is going as well as Mann expected it to. The judge, a gentlemanly sort, has openly expressed skepticism. He appeared to be taking seriously the motions for a directed verdict by Steyn and his co-defendant Rand Simberg.

* The combination of Mark representing himself and Simberg having good lawyers from a respectable law firm seems to be working well. Mark is irrepressible and sometimes funny, while Simberg’s lawyers are more conventional, but effective.

* Mann himself comes off as rather repellent. In his opening statement, Mark observed that Mann likes to dish it out, but can’t take it. I think that observation will resonate. Mann viciously smears those who disagree with him. Most notably, there is an email in evidence in which he passed along a false sexual rumor about Judith Curry, a distinguished climate scientist who happens to disagree with Mann. Mann acknowledged that the rumor was false, and that he probably shouldn’t have spread it, but showed no sign of regret. Dr. Curry herself has testified in the trial.

* Mann also seems to have a fragile ego and to feel slighted easily, which perhaps ties in with his defamation claim. Thus, for a long time he claimed to have won a Nobel Prize. In fact, the original version of his complaint alleged, three times, that he was a Nobel laureate. But that claim was false–the Nobel committee finally put out a statement to the effect that Mann had not, in fact, won a Nobel Prize–and Mann’s lawyers amended the complaint to remove that assertion. There is a long email thread in which Mann tried to cajole or bully Wikipedia editors into adding his alleged status as a Nobel laureate to his Wikipedia biography.

* The gist of Mann’s claim against Steyn is that Steyn described Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph as fraudulent. It is, in my opinion, but I don’t know whether the jury will be able to figure that out or not. Several expert witnesses called by the defendants–one of whom I saw, he put on a marvelous performance–should help in that regard.

* Truth is the defendants’ threshold defense, but the ultimate standard of liability is actual malice, which has nothing to do with malice as normally understood (although an appellate court confused that point slightly), but rather means that the defendant must actually have doubted that what he said was true. I don’t know how anyone can observe Mark Steyn for a month (or Rand Simberg) and conclude that he was insincere when he said he thought the hockey stick was a fraud.

* I don’t know whether Mark will win his case, but I fervently hope that he will. In recent years we have seen an effort, across a broad front, to suppress views–facts as well as opinions–that are inconvenient to powerful people. Climate change is one of the topics on which speech has been suppressed. Much as critics of the government’s covid policies turned out to be right, critics of climate alarmism as expressed by Mann’s hockey stick, which I believe is now generally discredited in the scientific world, have turned out to be right, too. But even if they were ultimately shown to be wrong, the right of free speech doesn’t require one to prove that he is correct before he is allowed to speak.

So Mann v. Steyn is an important case. It is critical that our differences be resolved by robust public debate, not by censorship. And not by arson.

UPDATE: Howie asked me about coverage of the arson in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which at that time had been minimal. But it is only fair to add that yesterday, the Strib’s editorial board published an editorial denouncing the arson and quoting my organization’s marketing director at length.