Mark Steyn
Steyn Online
11/25/2014
…Dr Mann…claims to have suffered professional and emotional damage from what I wrote about him. So you’d think he’d want to be in the courthouse today – to underline by his presence the real victim in this, and the great wrong done to him. But no, he’s getting on with his life, and leaving it to the Big Climate-funded lawyers, because, for him as for Warman, the process is the punishment.
I was there, even though, formally speaking, I was not one of the parties today – merely an amicus curiae. My co-defendants National Review, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were appealing the Superior Court’s denial of a motion to dismiss the case under the anti-SLAPP law. I chose not to appeal, for reasons I’ll re-state below.
One of my own counsel made the point afterwards that the First Amendment was only mentioned six times in the course of the morning. Yet the First Amendment is what’s at stake. I’ve said on TV and radio recently that if Mann wins this case it would be the biggest setback for the First Amendment in 50 years, and one or two interviewers have raised a skeptical eyebrow. But the scale of what Mann is attempting to impose was made clear by his counsel, John Williams. It’s not just the charge of “fraud” or “scientific misconduct”: Williams said today that there is no right to call Mann’s hockey-stick graph “misleading”. In Mann’s world, free speech does not extend even to the mildest adjective…
…I was pleased to see so many friendly faces in court, including Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, whose film Not Evil Just Wrong was a withering response to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. I got the vague feeling that, once they’ve finished their Kermit Gosnell movie, they wouldn’t be averse to giving Mann the big-screen treatment…
Read the entire article at Steyn Online.
