The Washington, D.C., jury spoke! Twelve years and who knows how many millions of dollars later, we finally have a verdict in the defamation case brought by the climate alarmist Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg. What had Simberg and Steyn done? They had pointed out that Mann had manipulated the data behind his now-discredited Chicken Little graph showing rising temperatures in the shape of a hockey stick. Simberg also invoked Jerry Sandusky, the then-disgraced, now-forgotten football coach who was convicted of child molestation. All that made poor Michael feel badly. He lost friends, he said. He lost grants. So he sued. We didn’t see anywhere his acknowledgement of losing credibility, but that was his biggest loss. Yet it had nothing to do with what Steyn or Simberg wrote. His reputational demise was simply the result of the revelation of misused data behind his infamous graphic.
The big day was February 8. And what do you suppose the verdict was? If you have to ask, you weren’t paying attention. Didn’t you catch the detail that the case was heard in Washington, D.C., that the plaintiff was a certified, Al Gore–approved lunatic about “climate change”? Didn’t you note that the prominent defendant was Mark Steyn, one of the most intelligent, outspoken, and funny conservative pundits on the planet (and for more than a decade the theater critic of The New Criterion)? Of course the jury found for Mann, just as any jury convened in Washington, D.C. (or New York for that matter), would find for any plaintiff in any case about any issue where the defendant is a high-profile conservative. That’s the way our so-called system of justice works these days.
It is a point that Justice Samuel Alito made in his dissent when Steyn and Simberg petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case back in 2019. Alito made a rousing defense of free speech, especially when the speech in question bears upon contentious policy issues, and went on to observe that “When allegedly defamatory speech concerns a political or social issue that arouses intense feelings, selecting an impartial jury presents special difficulties.” You can say that again. “An impartial jury”—the very phrase has become risible. Moreover, Alito continued, “when . . . allegedly defamatory speech is disseminated nationally, a plaintiff may be able to bring suit in whichever jurisdiction seems likely to have the highest percentage of jurors who are sympathetic to the plaintiff’s point of view.” Bingo.
But, as we say, Alito was in the minority. scotus didn’t take the case, and so there were five more years of litigation and legal fees. Mann didn’t seem to care. As far as we know, no one has revealed who has been paying his legal fees. It is refreshing to note, therefore, that the decision, bad as it is from the point of view of principle, is unlikely to discommode Messrs. Steyn and Simberg much. In what might, just possibly, have been the expression of a sense of humor, the jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages from Steyn and Simberg each. It also awarded him $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg and a cool $1 million from Steyn.
That $1 million might get your attention. But as Steyn pointed out, the Supreme Court has said that “in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages . . . will satisfy due process.” A single-digit ratio, e.g., four to one, say, or even nine to one. So we’re looking at $4, or maybe $9. The nice thing about this jury, also possibly arguing for its sense of humor (or, just possibly, its stupidity), is that they went for a thousand to one in Simberg’s case and a million to one in Steyn’s. We wonder if that is a record. In any case, our experts report that Mann will not even be able to afford a single new hockey stick with any proceeds that might, someday, trickle into his account.
And who knows when that will be. February’s verdict was merely the prelude to a fresh set of appeals. Lawyers have school fees and mortgages to pay, too. The rallying cry is “billable hours.” Apart from the preposterous and expensive legal process itself, there are two issues here. Justice Alito touched on one when he mentioned the First Amendment. As one of Steyn’s colleagues noted in the aftermath of the verdict, “The precedent set today . . . means that disagreement and/or criticism of a matter of public policy—the founding principle of this country—is now in doubt. And should you choose to give voice to any dissent, you can be brought before a jury, held responsible, and fined.” Do we still have a First Amendment that protects free speech? The jury has yet to render a verdict on that question.
The second big issue was touched upon by John Williams, an attorney for Michael Mann, in his closing argument. The jury, he said, ought to award punitive damages so that in the future, no one will dare to attack “climate scientists.” It was an absurd argument, and irrelevant to boot, something the judge recognized when he sustained objections from the defendants. Williams also shoved in something about “election deniers,” just to gratify his Washington jury with the ghost of Donald Trump.
For some years now, climate hysterics and their political and academic enablers have been describing those who disagree with them about the science of climate change as “climate deniers.” This was the fetid well from which John Williams sought to draw in his closing remarks. The echo of “holocaust deniers” is deliberate and pernicious. A “holocaust denier” is someone who denies a publicly verifiable historical enormity. But a so-called climate denier is merely someone who disputes an ideological construct masquerading as a scientific truth. We hope that Messrs. Steyn and Simberg will at long last prevail in court. So far, the process they have endured has been like something out of Kafka.
