If you’re defending Michael Mann, you’re not defending science, or defending climate science, or theories on global warming or anything else. Defending Michael Mann means defending Michael Mann – and it turns out not many people are willing to go there.
Apparently there are some things you can only find in a podcast. On this week’s Heartland’s Climate Change Round Table #84, Marc Morano was a guest to report on attending a hearing in the Mann v Steyn case where Mann was actually forced to appear in person. At 18 minutes in, a little more than 20 minutes of this hour long panel discussion is devoted to the case:
I don’t seem to be able to find anything else on this hearing, but there’s quite a few revelations in this podcast. The trial is set to start within a couple of weeks. Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen and Naomi Oreskes are scheduled to testify. Mann’s lawyers are working to prevent Steven McIntyre from testifying and if all that’s not enough, Mark Steyn is acting as his own lawyer! It seems like a lot of people would be commenting on this, but I can’t find any posts, even at Climate Depot (Marc Morano’s site).
This case has dragged out for more than a decade. I don’t know how nobody, including me, didn’t note the ten year mark. I’ve been arguing about this case in blog comments at places like Climate Etc. and Rabett Run since the beginning. My views are echoed by Sterling Burnett at 23:00 in the above video. This is a first amendment case that should’ve been promptly dismissed. Steyn received amicus briefs from the ACLU and several major news organizations while Mann received none. So much time has passed and with the revelations unveiled in the Twitter files, one has to wonder if these still even apply. In the video, the panelists have trouble remembering details correctly. Steyn’s book, A Disgrace to the Profession, is referred to as The Hockey Stick Delusion and no one picks up on it. The outrageous delaying is clearly from Mann’s side. Steyn promptly submitted to discovery requests and has waited years for Mann to respond. In the meantime he’s even suffered from a couple heart attacks.
There are a few worrisome things. This will be a Washington DC jury that one might suspect will be sympathetic to Mann. Steyn will be acting as his own lawyer. It will be hard to chide him considering how long the court system has let this drag on, but I wonder how well he’ll be handling the objections which there are bound to be for nearly everything he says. At 34 minutes in, Morano talks about how Steyn says that a convicted criminal presided over the investigation of Mann and the Sandusky case and whitewashed both. Morano notes that this official may have been charged and even gone to jail. He is correct. This official is former Penn State president Graham Spanier who got charged with several felonies, went to trial, got acquitted on all the felonies, but was convicted on one misdemeanor. This conviction was then thrown out, because this statute did not exist at the time that the alleged crime occurred. But Pennsylvania had a grandstanding district attorney named Josh Shapiro who put Spanier in jail anyway. Shapiro is now Pennsylvania’s governor.
Did Graham Spanier deserve to go to jail for covering up the Sandusky case? NO! He did not cover up for Sandusky, because there is nothing to cover up. As unlikely as it sounds, the whole case is mass hysteria, stemming from a moral panic caused by a false account of graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, seeing Jerry Sandusky sodomizing a boy in a Penn State shower. There’s an actual email record of McQueary complaining to a prosecutor that his words were twisted. I have a previous Climate Scepticism post entitled: Is Mark Steyn Walking into a Trap? where I try to summarize this very intricate and complicated case. For a good updated summary I would recommend Frederick Crew’s review of the book, In the Lion’s Den by the above mentioned Graham Spanier. For people who want more details (perhaps fans of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) there’s an epic 70+ hour podcast series called With the Benefit of Hindsight.
If you’re still with me, Mann’s lawsuit is over two blog posts that are about comparing Penn States handling of the Sandusky case with their handling of their inquiry into Michael Mann and the controversy over his hockey stick. At the time, there was no reason for anyone to doubt what they were hearing in the media about the Sandusky case and most people have not heard about all the unreported stuff that’s come out later. Mark Steyn most likely believes the widespread view. Why should he believe the odd Twitter responder who goes by the handle Canman? At 34 minutes in, Morano talks about how Steyn interrupts the judge when he mentions child molestation and says “Excuse me judge. This was not child molestation. This was child rape. We got multiple counts. This guy’s convicted. We can’t whitewash this. ..” This might not be verbatim, but it makes it clear that Steyn intends to use the emotional appeal of the sensationalized charges against Sandusky. It’s irritating to see these false charges used in a case that many say is about truth, but it’s probably a winning tactic/strategy. Looks like it worked wonders for Josh Shapiro.
I actually think there is a small chance that Steyn could get blindsided. Mann looks to me like he’s more of a left wing political pundit than a climate scientist. He’s up to almost 175 thousand tweets and seems to tweet as much about politics as he does climate. he seems to have a regular column at Newsweek. As I mention in my previous post on Steyn, Mann does acknowledge Graham Spanier in his last two books. Could this be some kind of doomsday weapon being held in reserve? In a worse case scenario, what if Steyn subpoenaed Spanier and Mann’s Lawyers convinced the jury and possibly the press that Spanier and Penn State did nothing wrong in the Sandusky case so they likely did not whitewash the Mann inquiry, which they clearly did. If Mann and his lawyers could pull this off they would divert attention away from all the bad hockey stick science and make Mann a rock star in left wing politics. I know this is all pretty far-fetched, but you never know what a mann will do when he’s cornered and Mann is cornered.
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