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May 9th, 2025

Insight

The dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US justice system has reversed itself --- but I'm still maligned

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published March 10, 2025

The dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US justice system has reversed itself --- but I'm still maligned

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At the end of this week, I am - at least on paper - $995,000.00 better off than I was seven days ago. On Tuesday the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt US justice system reduced climate mullah Michael E Mann's seven-figure judgment against me to a lousy five grand. Readers with vague recollections of The New York Times et al reporting on the stunning million-dollar victory for "climate science" have been waiting for those publications to update their stories and amend the headlines to a stunning thousand-dollar victory for climate science. Over at Just the News, Kevin Killough has noticed the silence:

The reduction in award -- called "remittitur" -- comes less than two months after Irving ordered Mann to pay the National Review Inc. more than $500,000 in the publication's lawsuit against Mann over the same case...

The D.C. jury's $1 million award was widely reported in many legacy media outlets, most of whom protest defamation awards against journalists. Yet, there's been little coverage of the ruling against Mann in the either National Review's lawsuit or the reduction of the award...

"I have had no inquiries from them since the decision yesterday, so I think it is safe to assume they will not be correcting the record," Melissa Howes, president of Mark Steyn Enterprises Inc., told Just the News.

That's true. Half-a-century hence, anyone who looks up the case in the archives of the worthless Yank media will come away thinking that Mann took me for a million bucks:

Scientific American had described the original $1 million award as a "victory" and said the case was a "warning to those who attack scientists working in controversial fields." The Washington Post also described the verdict as a "victory" and said it comes "amid heightened attacks on scientists working not just on climate change but also on vaccines and other issues..."

A New York Times article two days before the award was announced opened up with a dramatic recounting of Mann reading the offending blog posts. "The court case has played out over a time period when outright denial of climate science has decreased, but scientists' integrity has become a bigger target," the Times reporter Delger Erdenesanaa wrote.

As with the Post and Scientific American articles, the Times article had no examples of these alleged "attacks" against climate scientists.

The Post and the Times are less viable businesses than I am. A few days ago Jeff Bezos indicated that things would be changing at the Post. This case wouldn't be a bad place to start, would it? But, notwithstanding the dissatisfaction of their sugar daddy, the Post's reporters are committed to business as usual, at least when it comes to spectacular climate "victories". Kevin Killough's Just the News report, on the other hand, does remind us of Michael E Mann's statements in the heady wake of the initial verdict:

John Oliver should hold Mann to that.

~A civil offence, such as the one above, is not a crime. Unless, that is, you're Tommy Robinson.

The United Kingdom - a sick land dying before your eyes, as Trump, Vance and Musk have all recently noticed - is a country where criminal illegal aliens cannot be deported back to their homelands if their kids dislike the taste of the chicken nuggets there.

Thus the Albanian gangster Klevis Disha gets to stay in Britain. Because, as the immigration tribunal ruled, Mr Disha's ten-year-old son "will not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad". Not just in the Tirana McDonald's but "abroad" in general. So it would be a gross abuse of their human rights to deport Disha père et fils to, say, Tuscany or Provence.

I wish I'd thought of that before I was forced into trial at the DC Superior Court. Speaking personally, I "will not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available" in the District of Columbia, because I'd rather have a Dover sole in a sauce meunière washed down with a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, if you don't mind. The 2019 if you've got one.

Are you into raping children? In Britain a man found to be a danger to the public cannot be deported back to his homeland because of the unsatisfactory quality of treatment for PTSD in Eritrea. Did he get the PTSD after raping the kid? Or after regretting that he didn't get to rape more kids?

Ah, well. Whether it be the quality of Eritrean mental-health services or Albanian chicken nuggets, it would be a gross breach of a "migrant"'s human rights to subject him to either. These stories recur so often in the UK press that the public gives a massive shrug and consigns them to the "World's gone mad, 'asn't it?" category.

No, sir. It's your country that's gone mad - as JD Vance, Elon Musk and others have observed.

One notices, for example, that the legions of "human rights" lawyers stampeding to get a piece of the chicken-nugget action fall eerily silent when it comes to the human rights of, say, a political prisoner - the first in England ever to be banged up in solitary confinement and denied visitors for months on end ...not for a criminal conviction but for a civil contempt charge ...and in a prison with the highest suicide rate in the United Kingdom.

Isn't that a breach of human rights law, m'learned friends?

Ah, the sound of silence, of chicken nuggets chirping. Now comes disturbing news from my Steyn cruisemate Dan Wootton:

Another cruisemate, the indomitable survivor of Rotherham's Pakistani Muslim rape gangs Sammy Woodhouse, did manage to get in:

I look forward to hearing Sammy's report. As readers of what the evil Sir Keir Bastard is doing:

Something has changed in the last few years. In one of many perceptive passages (if I say so myself) in The Prisoner of Windsor, the Home Secretary hears of the death of a mouthy Australian blogger she had 'made an example of' and remarks that she'd expected to feel bad about it. And then she discovered that she didn't, and it fortified her to do more of the same.

I slightly misremembered my own book there. The "mouthy Australian blogger" comes out of prison not by the handles but in a vegetative state. Sir Keir's ministry has made a bet that it can survive Tommy's death in prison: after all, even the butch boys at Reform are careful to distance themselves from Robinson and his supporters, whom they dismiss as "that lot". But, at the bare minimum, HMG is absolutely committed to him emerging from his incarceration as an utterly broken man, preferably in a vegetative state.

The modish twerp of a king will think it's a good thing, too - as soon as he takes time out from his hectic schedule of Ramadan jubilations to notice it.

Shameful.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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