Mark Steyn has been trying the defamation case that Michael Mann brought against him in the D.C. Superior Court for the last three weeks–literally trying it, since Mark is pro se. Yet somehow he found time not only for an update on the trial proceedings, but for commentary on my visit to Washington last week and the firebombing of my organization’s offices a few days earlier. He included in his post a tweet in which I talked about the arson, followed by video footage of the devastated building. ...

I don’t know whether Mark will win his case, but I fervently hope that he will. In recent years we have seen an effort, across a broad front, to suppress views–facts as well as opinions–that are inconvenient to powerful people. Climate change is one of the topics on which speech has been suppressed. Much as critics of the government’s covid policies turned out to be right, critics of climate alarmism as expressed by Mann’s hockey stick, which I believe is now generally discredited in the scientific world, have turned out to be right, too. But even if they were ultimately shown to be wrong, the right of free speech doesn’t require one to prove that he is correct before he is allowed to speak.