In 1925, John Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution. He lost. It was called the trial of the century and captured the nation’s attention. For Americans, assaults on free speech are intolerable. Speech is the lifeblood of freedom. It is the hill we will die on because, instinctively, we know that without it, it would also mean death. At least, we used to know.

Last week, the 21st century’s trial of the century came to a similarly ignoble end, but nearly without coverage, without interest, without outrage. Polymath Mark Steyn, appearing pro se, lost a defamation suit (ironically) defending against Michael Mann when a DC jury ordered Steyn to pay damages of $1 but imposed staggering punitive damages of $1 million.

Some background: Michael Mann co-wrote a paper in 1999 using tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature (thicker rings, warmer temperatures) to show that over the last 1000 years, temperatures declined slightly until 1960 when they dramatically spiked up—the shape of what would infamously be called the “Hockey Stick.”

The IPCC featured Mann’s work prominently in their 2001 report. It catapulted Mann to stardom and ignited the radical climate-industrial-political complex. The resulting Green agenda has consumed trillions and turned everyone’s life upside down.

Image: Mark Steyn. YouTube screen grab.

The problem was that hundreds of scientists were highly critical of Mann’s work. Stephen McIntyre, for one, an Oxford-educated PhD in mathematics, published several papers, one in the same journal that published Mann’s original paper, concluding Mann’s result “lacks statistically significance,” and worse, he showed that Mann’s data manipulation “is so strong that a hockey-stick … is nearly always generated from (trendless) red noise.”

For McIntyre’s efforts, Mann called him “a professional liar,” a “denier-for-hire,” a “heinous climate villain,” “a barely perceptible $hitstain,” “a horrible, horrible person,” and a “white supremacist.” Comments like this were not isolated: Professor Emeritus Judith Curry, whom Mann called a climate denier, testified that Mann “violated norms of science and codes of professional conduct repeatedly and egregiously.” (The testimony can be found at 16:35 at the link.)

A few years later, emails were hacked from the University of East Anglia. One email read, “Let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline.” Mann’s data “trick” would come to be known as Climategate. The tree-ring data showed decreasing temperatures after 1960, not increasing temperatures. Mann had removed the post-1960 tree-ring data, replacing it with temperature data, and smoothed the curve to give the appearance of a Hockey Stick. The backlash was immediate and devastating (don’t miss the music video).

Berkeley professor Richard Muller presented a lecture to his students rebuking Mann’s work:

They deceived the scientists, they deceived the public… The justification [for inserting temperature data] would not have survived peer review in any journal I’m willing to publish in… You’re not allowed to do this in science.

The Climategate scandal prompted Penn State, Mann’s employer, to launch an “independent” investigation that ultimately cleared Mann of “manipulating data,” “deleting records,” and “hampering…scientific discourse.”

Notoriously, Penn State had cleared football coach Jerry Sandusky of sexual misconduct with young boys in the locker room, only to have the FBI bring charges that landed not only Sandusky in prison but, for his part in the coverup, university President Graham Spanier as well. Mann’s investigators were about to censure him until Spanier insisted on Mann’s exoneration (at 28:22).

Shortly afterward, Steyn’s co-defendant, Rand Simberg, would pen the statement that led the jury to find him liable for defamation: “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for, instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.” Steyn was found liable for requoting Simberg with the comment, “Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point.” Steyn added that Mann was “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.”

Mann asserted he suffered actual damages, but the evidence at trial showed that his income increased. Additionally, per his resume, Mann was appointed Distinguished Professor at Pennsylvania State University and received over 70 other “Honors and Awards.” His attorneys showed the jury a lost grant for an astronomical sum but probing revealed that the amount lost was quite different, as Steyn explained in his closing argument:

Did I say $9,713,924? I meant, in fact, $112,000. Michael Mann purports to be able to tell you the correct temperature for the year 1403 to within point 00 whatever of a degree, but after 12 years in the witness box, under oath, he can’t tell you the value of a supposed lost grant proposal to within $9.5M.

Mann also testified that he was the victim of a mean look once while shopping at Wegmans. Steyn addressed that point, too, in his closing argument:

He told you he had a traumatizing experience in aisle 9 of his local supermarket. So traumatizing that he remembers it vividly 12 years later. We don’t know whether the guy gave him a mean look, as he put it, did so because he reads Rand Simberg or because Mann cut him off in the parking lot. We don’t know whether he shot that mean look because he reads Mark Steyn, or because Mann beat him to the last avocado.

At trial’s end Mann’s attorney—whom Mann has not paid since the suit was filed—implored the jury to award punitive damages, not for defamation, but rather that “these attacks on climate scientists have to stop.”

Mann’s suit is one amongst many that effectively threatens to silence those who criticize the Green agenda. Before this suit, the climate cabal had sued professor of climatology Tim Ball in Canada. The case was against Ball was dismissed with prejudice because the plaintiff failed to prosecute it, and the court ordered Mann to pay attorney’s fees which, at last report, he seemed disinclined to do.

Many prominent men have been appalled by the brazen censorship of the climate elites. Ivar Giaever, an actual Nobel Prize winner, spoke up after attending the 2008 IPCC Conference, issuing a statement that Mark Steyn included in his book, A Disgrace to the Profession: The World’s Scientists—in their own words—On Michael E. Mann, His Hockey Stick And Their Damage to Science: “I was horrified by what I learned... Global Warming has become a new religion—because you can’t discuss it, and that’s not right.” In protest, “I resigned from the Physical Society and I hope I can get one or two of you to resign as well.” Incidentally, Steyn’s book has been excised from the Wikipedia entry on Steyn.

Steyn knew early on the stakes and filed for certiorari with the Supreme Court…which was declined. However, Justice Alito wrote a blistering dissent arguing the Court should have taken the case:

The petition in this case presents questions that go to the very heart of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press...The controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors’ determination will be colored by their preconceptions on the matter... If the Court is serious about protecting freedom of expression, we should grant review.

Like the Scopes decision 100 years earlier, this result couldn’t be more significant. The jury’s massive verdict is a death blow to our First Amendment. Steyn, a Canadian and unlikely defender of America’s Constitution, couldn’t have been more prescient when he addressed the Heartland Institute in 2015:

We would be in a bizarre situation that if Mann wins this case you’d be able to say things in Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and Australia about Michael Mann’s science that you can’t say in the U.S. And I do not believe it was the intention of the framers of the First Amendment that Americans should have fewer free speech rights than countries that remained in the British Empire. This is the most important free speech case in half a century... If he wins, it will be an absolute catastrophe. His Hockey Stick will have, in effect, smashed the First Amendment into pieces.

Huck Davenport is a pseudonym.