Programming note: Join me tomorrow, Saturday, for another edition of our weekend show, Mark Steyn on the Town, which airs on Serenade Radio every Saturday at 5pm GMT - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~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:
I'll add a million dollars to that. https://t.co/b2dcYR4oak
— Prof Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) February 19, 2024
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:
There is now an EMERGENCY situation regarding the UK's political prisoner Tommy Robinson.
— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) March 6, 2025
Jordan Peterson & Ezra Levant are so concerned about his state torture they are now on death watch.
But, to their eternal shame, the British MSM & political establishment still looks away. pic.twitter.com/7syLGprrHB
Another cruisemate, the indomitable survivor of Rotherham's Pakistani Muslim rape gangs Sammy Woodhouse, did manage to get in:
I visited UK activist and online journalist Tommy Robinson today at Woodhill Prison.
My update on him will be out soon, over at https://t.co/gObMJKoMgv
They actually let me in!!! pic.twitter.com/NP3XctBzUd
— S A M M Y woodhouse (@sammywoodhouse1) March 6, 2025
I look forward to hearing Sammy's report. As readers of The Prisoner of Windsor will know, I anticipated 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.
~Re Reform UK, we might have to introduce a Ben Habib of the Month Award for Nigel to hand out. Ben was the doughtiest defender of the Union, when Nige decided his interests were best served by falling silent on the Northern Ireland Protocol. And so it was eventually splitsville for Habib and Farage. In recent weeks, Rupert Lowe has likewise been the doughtiest defender of the gang-raped girls of England. So now he and Nigel seem to be heading in a predictably Habib-like direction:
🚨NIGEL FARAGE FIRES BACK AT RUPERT LOWE
"WE ARE NOT A PROTEST PARTY!"
"HE'S UTTERLY WRONG, UTTERLY, COMPLETELY WRONG... PERHAPS HE WANTS TO BE PRIME MINISTER!"
This in response to Rupert Lowe criticising Nigel Farage today saying Reform UK needs to do more
Who's right? https://t.co/1mdQl2AUVj pic.twitter.com/tBhOHhykvF
— Basil the Great (@Basil_TGMD) March 6, 2025
We're told that what even enthusiastic supporter Kathy Gyngell calls "Farage's fence-sitting" is necessary because politically he has a very difficult needle to thread - so he has to "triangulate", as Bill Clinton used to say. In the case discussed above, he seems quite willing to triangulate Tommy Robinson to death. Which is morally contemptible.
But I think, as Ben discovered and Rupert Lowe is now learning, the truth is rather simpler. Farage can't work with anyone worth working with:
As a former Ukip candidate myself, I regularly witnessed anyone seen as a threat to Farage sidelined and dumped. No one who knows the man who single-handedly upturned British politics and brought about Brexit would describe him as a team player.
The reality is: No one who knows Nigel likes Nigel.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
