Apologies for missing yesterday's Q&A. I was under the doctors in Montreal, with lovely pure laine nurses - and, fortunately, I did manage to get back across the Jacques Cartier bridge before the New Montrealers blocked it. I hope to be back behind the Q&A microphone next week.
I see, however, that a couple of questioners were wondering how Tuesday's Zoomed-in "status conference" re Mann vs Steyn went. As you know, that's just one of my current free-speech cases. The other, across the Atlantic, is The King (on the application of Mark Steyn) vs The Office of Communications - over Ofcom's "rulings" against The Mark Steyn Show's coverage of the Covid vaccines and their increasing numbers of victims.
Notwithstanding his top billing, the King, alas, is leaving it to yours truly to do the heavy lifting. By the way, that particular formulation always reminds me of the most ill-advised libel suit of all time:
Regina (on the prosecution of Oscar Wilde) vs The Marquess of Queensberry
So I hope it works out better for me than it did for poor Mr Wilde.
Anyway, I thought I'd say a word about where both cases stand:
~The Mann suit arises from my 270-word post at The Corner which compared Pennsylvania State University's cover-up of serial paedo Jerry Sandusky with its likewise appalling cover-up of global warm-monger Michael E Mann and his fraudulent climate-change "hockey stick" - the most famous scientific graph of the twenty-first century. I stand by every word of that Corner post and am prepared to defend the truth of it in court - not that I should have to: the idea of a jury determining the validity of science is preposterous.
However, I wrote it on July 15th 2012. Which is eleven-and-a-half years ago. Which seems a long time even for the crapwanker arseholery of American litigation.
Nevertheless, jury selection was finally set to begin on October 30th 2023, praise the Lord. And then, just as my flight touched down in Washington on Sunday October 29th, the judge (the "fourth trial judge", as I've been calling him - although, as it turns out, he's the fifth trial judge: I'd forgotten one, who evidently made minimal impression on me) ...anyway, the judge emailed to say that the Court had been taken ill and thus tomorrow morning's trial was off and we'd have a Zoom-call "status conference" on November 14th.
Michael Cavino, a New Jersey member of The Mark Steyn Club, wrote to say:
I'd like to think the judge apologized for his illness causing another delay.
I couldn't honestly say that he did, Michael. Judge Alfred S Irving entered late, sat down, granted a motion of mine, denied a motion of Mann's, and then turned his attention to rescheduling the trial: January? February? May..? July..?
John Williams, Mann's attorney, offered next October. Because of his client's "teaching schedule" and that of his oh-so-eminent witnesses, that was the only time that worked for them. Winter and spring and early autumn were all impossible because of the inviolable "teaching schedule". As for summer, I assume it would be unreasonable to expect Mr Mann & Co to forego the critical COP-28 two-month retreat in Tahiti...
My co-defendant Rand Simberg and I were present on the Zoom call. But, as usual, Mann was not. After expressing some dissatisfaction with the plaintiff's proposal to postpone the trial for another year, Judge Irving asked if I had any comment. So I said:
As the Court has had occasion to remind Mr Mann in recent weeks, the plaintiff has an obligation to prosecute his case; Mr Simberg and I don't have to do anything. This bloody stupid case is now supposed to stagger on into its thirteenth year because the plaintiff represents to us that he is only available to prosecute his case for three weeks in the late autumn of each year. That would not meet the definition of prosecuting your case in any other jurisdiction.
Peter Fontaine, another of Mann's lawyers (and the guy who managed to threaten a rather amusing satirist into removing this video from the Internet), did not care for the cut of my jib. He thundered:
I take umbrage at Mr Steyn's remarks. He is demonstrating total disrespect for the process. This is not a 'bloody stupid case'...
Etc. Just for the record, Michael E Mann has form in this regard. He lost his case in the British Columbia Supreme Court for failure to prosecute.
So, after Mr Fontaine's huffin' and a-puffin', the judge said he'd let the "bloody stupid case" stuff go, and declared (for the first time) that this matter had been going on for twelve years and it was necessary to get it off the docket. So he advised Mann's lawyers to come up with some earlier options, or he would have to impose a trial date.
We shall see.
(I note that the unavailability of his witnesses at any time other than late autumn each year is total bollocks: None would be in the witness box for more than a few hours, so it would be a day off from work.)
Thank you, incidentally, to all those who have ordered our limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Stick - that's me at top right with Stick #1 outside the DC Superior Court on what should have been the first day of trial. The agreeable alternative to Mann's hockey stick, the Steyn Stick features Magna Carta at one end and the US Constitution at the other, so you can wave it at whomso'er you wish. These Liberty Sticks are individually signed and numbered by yours truly - and, you'll be stunned to hear, not made round the back of the Wuhan Institute of Virology like everything else, but right here in the USA - in Minnesota, to be more specific. They're proving rather popular. From Peter Marsh, a First Month Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club:
My Liberty Stick just arrived in the mail today. As promised, it was signed by Mark himself. I couldn't be happier.
From First Weekend Founding Member Jamie Marsh (no relation, I assume):
I just got my SteynOnline liberty stick in the mail, she's a beauty.
One more, from Minnesota Steyn Clubber Larry Jordan:
I received my Liberty Stick today. Worth every penny. Highly recommended.
~Meanwhile, what of my other free-speech case? That's against the UK state censor Ofcom and its "rulings" on my coverage of the wretched Covid vaccines. (As most readers know, a couple of months back I filed my second Statement of Claim against Ofcom in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court.) One of the best things about The Mark Steyn Show on GB News was that, just for a moment, the channel lived up to its cheap and glib slogan of "The People's Channel". After two years of pathetic stultifying media abasement before the Ofcom Narrative, we simply invited actual victims from up and down the realm to tell their stories. A year ago this week, for example, John Watt made his first appearance on the show:
A year ago @MarkSteynOnline gave me a voice on GBN news
Forever grateful 🙏🏼 @MattHancock was called a 🐀
Benjamin BUTTHOLE was born& @BorisJohnson was called a bawbag.
Incredible we're nearly 2 ½ years down the line and still not recognised by the mainstream Media. pic.twitter.com/ePWOc0KlKj
— BRING_THE_NOISE (@Nohj_85) November 14, 2023
I am humbled and honoured to have brought John's and Wayne's and Vikki's and Jules's and all the others' stories to the British public. It made the UK iteration of The Mark Steyn Show a far nobler endeavour than, say, my outings on Fox News Primetime. And I regret that, after my defenestration by the craven GB management, the station has banished the vaccine injured, the Islamic rape-gang victims and other unfashionable groups from UK TV screens, and degenerated week by week into a Tories'n'trivia channel with a constantly rotating cast of transient mediocrities.
But that's by the by. The ultimate question for any honest government inquiry is whether what happened to John is just a tragic accident - or the foreseeable consequence of public policy for which evil and self-serving men at the highest level of the state should be behind bars.
When Ofcom's Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes ruled against me, they made much of my friend Naomi Wolf's assertion that what has taken place is a "mass murder". That might seem a touch inflammatory to you, but, given what governments on both sides of the Atlantic knew before they went ahead with these pseudo-vaccines, it is not in any sane world an unreasonable characterisation.
Indeed, it becomes less unreasonable by the day. You can tell things are getting serious because in Washington the jab-pushers are lawyering up:
The Justice Department has just posted a new jobs ad — it's looking for eight new attorneys to defend the federal government in vaccine injury cases.
In London, the AstraZeneca suit likewise has the jabbers on the backfoot: the jab has been withdrawn in the UK, even if its creators' knighthoods and damehoods inventors haven't. But even the texts and emails to the lousy fix-is-in Westminster Covid inquiry supports by inference Naomi's claims that, given what officials knew before they told us to roll up our sleeves, what has happened is homicidal.
As to the heavy hand of UK state censorship, consider this vignette from our friend, Dr Ros Jones:
In another Telegraph piece on November 8, 2023, health editor Sarah Knapton noted that they had in fact published an article about the blood clotting risks in March 2021. She added this damning snippet:
'On the day we published the story we received a threatening phone call from a senior official at the MHRA [Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency] warning that the Telegraph would be banned from future briefings and press notices if we did not soften the news.'
So what did they do? They joined the rest of the legacy media and stopped reporting anything remotely critical of the vaccines until now.
Commissar Grade and Deputy Commissar Dawes' rulings are indefensible under oath - as long as we have an impartial judge willing to follow the evidence whereso'er it leads. That, I'm afraid, is slightly more of an open question than it should be in today's England.
~Many readers, listeners and viewers have inquired about how to support my landmark lawsuit against Lord Grade and his goons over their throttling of honest discussion of the Covid and the vaccines. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;
b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of my latest book The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it); or
d) treating yourself to the above-mentioned Liberty Stick.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds and, with the latter two, a significant chunk thereof go to a grand cause - and you or your loved one gets something, too.
