Outrageous DC jury verdict defies common sense and reason; Steyn is a hero; make no mistake about it
February 13, 2024
To put it another way, the jury verdict was complete bullshit.
Conservative author, broadcaster, and journalist Mark Steyn was sued, for defamation, by climate scientist Michael Mann (author of the infamous “hockey stick” chart)—the suit was launched 12 years ago.
The case crawled through the courts, and now the verdict is in.
The jury awarded Mann one dollar in compensatory damages, and one million dollars in punitive damages.
Follow this. Compensatory damage is an award for injury to reputation. The jury decided Steyn had injured Mann’s reputation to the tune of only a dollar.
Yet, as punishment to Steyn, for his one dollar’s worth of injury to Mann, the jury ordered him to cough up a million bucks. In punitive damages.
This makes about as much sense as taking a person’s total possessions away for waving a feather at a passing driver of a car.
It’s insane.
How did it happen?
Here’s one explanation:
The jury was somehow convinced that Steyn’s critiques of Mann (articles and a book, spanning years) were an exercise in pure malice. Steyn wasn’t trying to tell the truth about a scientific issue. He was just out for blood. Therefore, on that basis, the jury punished him.
I find that factually ridiculous.
Furthermore, so what if, in the process of refuting Mann’s warming claims, Steyn used colorful and dismissive language?
Is that now outlawed? We writers have to adopt a bland exterior and speak and write like neutral machines?
We can do that in one simple way: use AI to write for us. That solves everything. We declare ourselves extinct.
Great idea. We surrender ourselves to the intelligence of the Washington DC jury who ruled in this case.
There is another crucial point here:
