Free Republic

I have paid a modicum of attention to British and European media regulation ever since I was removed from UK broadcasting, now and forever. Probably would have been wiser to pay attention before my removal, but, be that as it may, Ofcom decided that my conversation with Naomi Wolf about the Covid vaccines risked causing "harm" to people. And we wouldn't want that, would we? So I was interested to learn from the weekend's Glastonbury Festival just who you can target for "harm". Back in my youth, Glasto was a big peace'n'lovefest with a somewhat tedious hippie aesthetic. But now...

I am so bored with being lied to. I am even bored with the new lies being told to cover the old lies: Now It Can Be Told!!! The Behind-the-Scenes Inside Story of How I Lied to You for the Last Half-Decade by Jake Tapper and Wossname. Exclusive Excerpt! The longtime granite-jawed Deputy Assistant Under-Counselor to the President for Running the Country peered thoughtfully through the Oval Office window to the vast city beyond before loosening his cocktail dress and kicking off his three-inch heels. I was stunned by the evident anguish on his face as he turned to me...

It would not have been surprising at all that a visitor to Mr. Mark Steyn’s home in New Hampshire, USA, on the evening of March 4th would have heard the popping of bottles of champagne being opened and the clinking of glasses amidst cheerful toasts. On that Tuesday, Justice Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr. of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia issued a long (over 14,000 words) Final Judgment Order, reducing the punitive damages charged against Mr. Steyn from an astronomical $1 million to a modest $5,000 in a 12-years long defamation suit launched by the plaintiff Dr....

BREAKING: A Washington DC court has just ruled on Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg's motion for sanctions against Michael Mann and his attorneys for misleading the jury at trial. Decision: Mann and his attorneys are SANCTIONED for bad faith misconduct and will be assessed costs

Being accused of "molesting" data to promote climate alarmism is not worth $1 million in punitive damages, a judge ruled Tuesday in a 13-year-old defamation lawsuit that could have bankrupted the nation's most venerable conservative magazine. The District of Columbia Superior Court slashed the seven-figure punitive damages awarded to University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, best known for his "hockey-stick" graph on climate change, to $5,000, rejecting Mann's "entire rationale" for preserving the $1 million award: "deterrence and punishment." Just the News covered the trial. Judge Alfred Irving wrote that Mann "presented no persuasive evidence suggesting that he suffered...

On last week's Clubland Q&A, I remarked en passant that almost everything connected with the Government of the United States turns out to be a racket, and it might be quicker for Elon Musk just to listen the seven things that aren't a racket. And several commenters protested that seven was a gross-overestimate of the non-racket component. After the weekend's revelations, I am inclined to agree with them. Just as a f'rinstance, USAid funds nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine, under the guise of supporting "independent journalism". Hang on. If words mean anything, wouldn't the "independent" media in...

... Did you ever see that show "Girls"? Nah, me neither. It attracted an audience of 500,000, in a land of over three hundred million. If I'd pulled half-a-mil guest-hosting for Hannity or Tucker, never mind Rush, I'd never have worked again. And yet Lena Dunham, the presiding eminence of "Girls", was profiled endlessly by a doting media as if she was the biggest thing since, oh, Dinah Shore. Or Eddie Cantor. Or Ukulele Ike.The point isn't Lena Dunham or Gregg Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres or Matt Lauer, all of whom are very disposable. The point is to maintain the overall...

~Tradition holds that most Americans don't start paying attention to the presidential election until after Labor Day. So on Tuesday morning millions of people are going to be discovering that the one candidate got shot in the head and the other was more effectively dispatched and whoever's actually running the United States no longer feels the need to pretend that the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet is the chief executive of the global superpower. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians say Moscow is "threatening the world with nuclear catastrophe". Given that an American client state has spent the last month bombing...

Not long after I came to New Hampshire, decades back, a chap in Littleton decided to hold up the local bank. Unfortunately, he made the elementary mistake of rolling the ski-mask down over his face not just for the robbery but also to case the joint. A teller at the bank, strolling back from lunch, noticed the ski-masked bloke standing on Main Street peering through the windows for some length of time, and she thought it rather odd. So, when he entered the lobby to hold up the joint, they were ready for him. That's pretty much what happened in...

Well, I guess the narrative has moved on to the next plot twist. As Joe Biden said just a few days ago:We're done talking about the debate. It's time to put Trump in the bullseye.It wasn't quite a bullseye: the bullet struck his ear.Which is to say the would-be assassin - one Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania - came within rather less than an inch of killing the Republican presidential nominee. From the intended target upon his discharge from hospital:I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that...

~Two years ago tomorrow - July 13th 2022 - GB News became the first over-the-airwaves (and, in UK terms, Ofcom-regulated) broadcast network anywhere to air a one-hour special on victims of the Covid vaccines. All that year, I had covered the story in nightly segments with concerned medical professionals and, more importantly, with individual victims triply injured - first by myocarditis or Guillain–Barré syndrome or some other affliction, next by government stonewalling, then by the media's denial of their very existence. But at some point we thought it worth tying it all together for our first ever single-issue show with...

The U.K. Blowout: Mark Steyn’s View [Updated]Mark Steyn comments on yesterday’s U.K. election. His thoughts are consistent with Scott’s, but expressed in Mark’s unique voice:Across the United Kingdom almost every constituency voted for lefties of various stripes – not just victorious Labour lefties, but also Scots nationalist lefties, Irish republican lefties, eco-lefties, Islamo-lefties and, of course, duplicitous pseudo-conservative lefties: you can get it in any colour as long as it’s red. So, if you’re one of those Britons concerned about, say, transformative mass migration or the right to freedom of speech, things are going to spend the next few years...

~As I first wrote over two decades ago, Islamic supremacism attaches great importance to the annexation of the public space. To mark the Canadian centennial of 1967, half of Dominion Square in Montreal was renamed Place du Canada. Half-a-century later, during a Defund-the-Police protest, the magnificent statue of Sir John A Macdonald was toppled and decapitated, and the craven city council decided he would not be returned to his pride of place. But these are mere poseur flourishes. (Pierre) Trudeaupian nationalism is dead, and the "anti-colonialist" nihilism that supplanted it is a mere death-spasm of demographically irrelevant western youth. Like...

snip ~Back in 2017, I was the guest-host for Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. But Rush died and Tucker got fired, and, with one or two exceptions, the conversation these days on talk-radio and cable-news seems to be nowhere near where it needs to be to effect meaningful change. Seven years ago, the two major anglophone electorates had just voted for such change - Trump and Brexit - and the permanent state on either side of the Atlantic immediately set about subverting the people's will, and teaching the ingrate masses a hard lesson in what happens when you start looking...

[Tweets excerpted]: The judge is going over the verdict form question by question Simberg - defamatory? Lead Juror: Yes Provably false: Yes Simberg's statement false: Yes Simberg knew it was false: Yes Mann suffered injury: Yes Simberg Verdict Compensatory Damages: $1 Punitive Damages: $1000.00 Steyn's verdict Defamatory statements: Yes Provably False: Yes False Statements: Yes Published With Knowledge Of Falsity: Yes Entertaining serious doubts: Yes Reckless Disregard Mann Suffered Injury: Yes Compensatory Damages: $1 Punitive Damages: $1,000,000.00

On Wednesday, late in the day at 4pm Deep State Standard Time, Mann vs Simberg and Steyn finally went to the jury, and they retired to deliberate. So now we await their verdict - as, on this same day just a few blocks away, President Trump awaits the decision of a supposedly "conservative" Supreme Court on whether he can be permitted to appear on the ballot. I am exhausted by what passes for "justice" in America, and I expect he feels the same. In my case, the last phase of the trial - closing arguments - began yesterday after lunch:...

In the meantime, here are Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer with their dramatised reconstruction of the most recent events. In this episode, Dr Judith Curry takes the stand - a woman sorely traduced by the misogynist pig Michael E Mann, who spread false rumors that she was a slut who slept her way to the top. Simply click below: Mark is played by the Australian actor Thomas Bromhead, who in America is one of the voices of the Geico Gecko and also Rocket in I Got a Rocket, and in the UK and elsewhere is perhaps best known for the...

Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer are back with their dramatised reconstruction of Mann vs Simberg and Steyn, now installed in a far grander courtroom - 132 - at the District of Columbia Superior Court. Day Eight began with Steyn's continuing cross-examination of the plaintiff. Michael E Mann's misogyny regarding Judith Curry audibly shocked the courtroom, but he recovered sufficiently to assert that the best proof that he really is a Nobel Laureate was that he was one of only two people to receive a standing ovation at some climate beano in Hawaii. Then, at the end of the day, the...

Michael E Mann's sixth and final witness is some guy called John Abraham, from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, who presented himself to the court as an "expert" in investigations, whatever that means. Perhaps he's worked with Hercule Poirot. Mr Simberg's lawyers and Steyn promptly announced they would "voir dire" him, which will take place today. "Voir dire" is an old Norman French term meaning "truly dire", which accurately sums up the American justice system. The courtroom is turning into a mini-Minnesota, with not only Mr Abraham on the scene but also Mark's favorite presidential candidate Michele Bachmann...

The action of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. The Plaintiff's case hinges on making you, or rather the jury, believe — nay, they have to prove — that Mark and Rand knowingly falsified information and had an intent to ruin Mann's reputation. How are Mann's lawyers trying to do that? By making data falsification, fabrication, and every other journalistic standard, such as plagerism (which has been in the news of late, if we recall correctly), the exclusive domain of academia. These really smart people are the only ones who are educated enough to say what is right and what...