One Day to Trial

Happy Martin Luther King Day - or, as I like to think of it, Happy Steyn Trial Eve! After twelve years of pseudo-jurisprudential bollocks in the city where justice goes to die, jury selection in Mann vs Steyn will finally commence in Courtroom 518 of the DC Superior Court tomorrow, January 16th, at 9.30am, just in time for my fourth heart attack.

Nevertheless, greetings from the diseased and depraved capital city of the United States! If you seek a sane alternative to Michael E Mann's global-warming "hockey stick", there's always our handsome limited-edition trial souvenir: the SteynOnline Liberty Stick, made in the USA and showing both Magna Carta and the US Constitution. They're exclusively available here - and I sign and number each one.

~Ahead of tomorrow's opening statements, my fellow professional defendant Donald J Trump will have acquired the first actual delegates in the presidential-candidate nominating process via tonight's Iowa caucus. (Democrats are being permitted to vote online, so Joe Biden won't get his delegates until March apparently.)

If DeSantis can't come second, it's the end for him. If Nikki Haley comes within twenty points of Trump, the donor class and Conservative Inc media will hail her nomination as inevitable. But that's just the codswallop du jour. The donors can big her up into second place, but no further: she's blundering and tone-deaf on the stump, and ideologically the last gasp of the all-war-all-the-time wing of the party that discredited itself because it proved incapable of winning anything. I'm with Rand Paul - who's #NeverNikki - but her problem isn't that she's running against Trump or DeSantis or Asa Hutchinson; the reality is that she's running against the disposition of party voters who have no desire to go back to pre-Trump Republicanism, no matter how many times Conservative Inc tells them they have no choice in the matter.

Of course, all the above is only relevant if the general election is free and fair. And you know my view of that.

~Just in time for Michael E Mann's appearance in court, a polar vortex is about to descend on America's grisly capital. So Mann is tweeting up his own storm about nothing to see here:

Yes, it's very cold over a sliver of North America that accounts for less than 1% of the planet (https://t.co/JxNnbB8L9j).
Yes, the planet is the hottest it's every been in mid-January (https://t.co/ZyRSUDcTFA). pic.twitter.com/RljNRnmul6

— Prof Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) January 14, 2024

Mann's first sentence actually makes quite a useful point, albeit not the one he thinks he's making: As I noted in my hit deposition video, a "global climate" is not actually one that anybody lives in.

With that out of the way, Mann returned to his core scientific mission of denouncing Steve McIntyre as a white supremacist:

In "The Hockey Stick & the Climate Wars" (https://t.co/18kGAdsVCm) I show how fossil fuel-funded Steve McIntyre played "hide the hockey stick" (there's a disturbing connection w/ the bad stats used to support early theories of white supremacy): https://t.co/az0OMJr3yh#HSCW pic.twitter.com/JlQ6bkeMdJ

— Prof Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) January 13, 2024

In functioning jurisdictions, that would be regarded as witness intimidation: You really sure, Steve, you wanna get on that flight to Washington and testify against me?

But it's DC, so who knows if witness intimidation is even a thing here...

~On this eve of trial, I thank you for all your good wishes, including from Alex Hernandez and Arch Stanton:

Wear a dress to court, they'll put you in the women's prison.

— ArchStanton (@ArchSta45192278) January 12, 2024

Now you're thinking. Excellent advice.

~Despite twelve years in the choked septic tank of the District of Columbia courts, I still have the capacity to be surprised at how brazenly corrupted American "justice" is. A few months ago, I wrote:

If you're a foreigner and thinking of hopping a flight, renting a car and traversing the fruited plain, you may be wondering what your sentence is likely to be if, in the course of your motoring, you mow someone down. Well, it's a spectrum. Mr Brandt got five four years for taking out a suspected 'Republican extremist', but, on the other hand, twenty-year-old James Alex Fields Jr, whose car fatally hit Heather Heyer during the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, was threatened with the death penalty. So he too agreed to a 'plea bargain' - and what a bargain! He's serving one (state) life sentence plus an additional 419 years plus a second (federal) life sentence just in case he rises from the grave.

So in America sentencing guidelines for vehicular homicide run from four years to half-a-millennium. Useful to know.

Everything about American 'justice' is bollocks.

And then some. Six years after that 2017 Charlottesville rally, the Commonwealth of Virginia decided it was going to retrospectively J6ify the day and drag people into court just for being there: Perambulating while MAGA.

Unfortunately, at least for countries that believe in the rule of law, there were a couple of problems with that.

A week ago today, the judge heard oral arguments on the motion of Peter Frazier, attorney for defendant Jacob Joseph Dix, calling for the entire Albemarle County office of Commonwealth's Attorneys to recuse themselves on the grounds that they're prosecutors with a pretty obvious conflict of interest:

Mr. W. Lawton Tufts ("Tufts"), the Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney prosecuting this case, personally helped lead, organize, and advocate for the counter-protestors who physically—and in certain cases, violently—resisted Defendant and his Co-Defendants during the events of August 11-12, 2017. A self-proclaimed "anti-racist activist," he acted as a liaison between organized counter-protest groups and local law enforcement prior to that fateful weekend.

So the man supposed to be representing "the people" in prosecuting Mr Dix was in fact out on the streets that day facing down Mr Dix and "picking a side", as Judge Padrick put it.

Somewhat to my surprise, the judge granted Mr Frazier's motion, and dismissed the entire county attorneys' office from the case.

But then again the recently appointed Judge Padrick is only hearing the case because, after another motion by Mr Frazier, the entire bench of Virginia's 16th Judicial Circuit has had to recuse themselves - because Chief Judge Charles Worrell and his wife Kathryn ("I kind of do hate white people") Laughon had also been out on the streets of Charlottesville that night as activists for the other side.

I congratulate Mr Frazier on getting the entire prosecutors' office and slate of judges removed from the case. But the fact that he had to file motions to force these bums to do what they should have done themselves speaks very poorly for the integrity of US justice - as does the presence of judges and prosecutors in street protests.

~My first and second Statements of Claim against the UK media censor Ofcom have been accepted for judicial review by the High Court of England and Wales. The King's Bench Division will hear the case in March. So, after a quick post-Mann break for the Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise, I will be jetting into London for yet another courtroom appearance. Many readers have inquired about how to support this landmark free-speech lawsuit against Commissars Michael Grade and Melanie Dawes 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 near-and-dear one a SteynOnline gift certificate;

c) ordering a copy of my latest book, The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell);

d) snapping up one of the above-mentioned limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Sticks; or

e) lavishing upon your beloved a once-in-a-lifetime Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise.

With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause - and, in the rest, a significant chunk thereof. And, in all cases, you or your loved one gets something, too.

~Notwithstanding Mark's one-step-forward-three-steps-back health, we had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark addressing various topics related to his and Trump's court cases. Rick McGinnis's Saturday picture date was Burt Lancaster in The Leopard, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week celebrated "The Glory of Love".

If you were too busy wondering whether Joe Biden needs to know that another cabinet secretary has come down with a urinary tract infection, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.