An Interview with Mark Steyn (Part II)

(Photograph: manningcentre, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

In case you missed it, you’ll no doubt enjoy Part I of my interview with Mark Steyn where we discussed Islam, UK politics and free speech. What follows below is the second half of the discussion, where we get into the whole Covid saga and Mark’s interminable battle with ‘hockey stick’ twirler Michael Mann. For those who prefer the audio version, the full interview has just been uploaded as TNC’s inaugural podcast, which you can access here.

Interview continues…

HAVILAND: Absolutely. Mark, if I could now, I’d like to turn to your ongoing, I’d say, your interminable case with the climatologist Michael Mann. For readers who are not exactly au fait with this, and obviously I confess that myself, I can’t keep up…

STEYN: Basically, it’s been thirteen years, I could send you all the filings. You would need… the room behind you looks quite empty, but I can guarantee if I were to send you all the filings, you’d need to move to a bigger house.

HAVILAND: Yeah. Just to check that I’ve got this basically correct, this actually stems from even before 2012. This comes from the ‘climategate’ conspiracy or non-conspiracy from 2009, when I think it was the University of East Anglia… E-mails were leaked and there was suspicion or proof of falsification of data. And Michael Mann’s name was linked to that, and a couple of years later, I think you classified his hockey stick as fraudulent. That’s the beef he had with you. And he’s basically spent the next twelve years dragging you through the courts. And last week, I think it was, you had the judgment on that, which was that you needed to pay a dollar in compensation for defamation… So basically no defamation, it seems was caused, but you were expected to pay a million dollars in… what was the term?

STEYN: Punitive damages. The jury’s verdict was that I should pay a dollar in actual damages because he isn’t actually damaged. He’s all over Twitter boasting that he enjoys this fabulous bromance with Leonardo DiCaprio. I have no idea why Leo would want to have a bromance with Michael Mann. So I think Mann is getting the better end of that deal, I’ll just leave it at that. But, so, a dollar in actual damages because he’s undamaged and then a million dollars in punitive damages, which is against American law, but you have to spend five million dollars taking it to the Supreme Court to be told that, yeah, you’re right, you shouldn’t have to give him a million dollars. What this is, it’s part of the free speech battle, because, again, it’s part of this idea that certain things should be placed beyond the rough and tumble of vigorous public debate. And, you know, we see that [in the case of] the demographic displacement of the native population in the UK, but we also see it with a lot of other free speech cases. I was lucky in Canada because I had the support of… eventually I had the support of principled lefties like Margaret Atwood, and that would be the equivalent, I think, in terms of beloved national treasures, of my Ofcom case, having the support of David Attenborough. Well, dear old David is never going to do that. So what we’re seeing is this attempt on an ever-broader range of fronts, because people, you know, I remember people, free speech is never a sort of mass appeal thing, because people say, oh, well, you know, yeah, I understand, but I’m not the kind of, I’m not a blowhard like Steyn who wants to mouth off about Islam all the time. That’s just like, that’s a very niche interest. What’s happened is that Net Zero is going to make you colder and poorer—and it’s not beyond life threatening. I mean, the weight of the batteries in these cars means that every bridge in the country is going to have to be rebuilt, because bridges are going to be falling down. So London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady—it will be because too many electric vehicles were stuck in traffic on it. And so the ability to talk about… and again with the COVID vaccines, which Michael Mann, after the jury returned this verdict, more or less the first thing he said was, you know, this is also a win for people like Anthony Fauci, who was the guiding light of the US government’s COVID regime, because this is… they’ve… as he put it, this sends a message that attacks on… there will be repercussions for people who attack scientists. Every scientist in history has been attacked because every new bit of science starts out as a minority view. And then people test the hypothesis and say, oh, yeah, that holds up. But frankly, on climate alarmism and related matters, the hypothesis cannot stand up. And so they’re now a weapon. I would say it’s part of a general disturbing trend, which is the weaponization of the courts. You can’t have a jury adjudicating science. That’s madness. And that’s why I have to press on and hope it will be returned. But also on the broader front, which is what the Ofcom case is about, you know, there are thousands and thousands of dead people and chronically injured people across the UK, because Ofcom [the Office of Communications] exceeded its powers and basically decided at the start of the COVID pandemic that it was going to strictly enforce the propaganda. And the propaganda mostly turned out to be rubbish. And of course, as we see in the leaks, my old friend Boris talked a good game in this or that text message or WhatsApp message that he sent. But he didn’t actually dare to counter any of these people in public. So now I think we’ve got a change. It’s not like, you know, an Islamophobic blowhard mouthing off about mullahs. This is about what they want to stick in your body. This is about whether they wish to let you go on international flights, to have foreign vacations every year or so for a couple of weeks. So it’s about freedom of movement. Free speech is an abstract conception to most people, but what’s happened now is they’re moving on to control every aspect of your life, including what they’re going to shoot into your arms.

HAVILAND: Absolutely. Speaking of that, Mark, I understand that you not only had one, I think you had two heart attacks, one while you were actually on air, and you didn’t realize what the symptoms were. And then you had a second one later, and luckily, you got to a hospital and are on the mend. How is your health at the moment?

STEYN: Well, it’s not great. That first heart attack, it was on what is apparently now the biggest holiday in the UK calendar, which is Albania National Day, which if you recall the Albanians, ten percent of the male population of Albania now resident in the UK brought London to a standstill. And so I was on my way to the studio to do my show and actually had to bail out of the cab and sprint the rest of the way. And as many viewers pointed out, I appeared to be having a heart attack on air during that show when they rewound the tape. I wasn’t aware of it. So at the end of the week, I got on a plane and flew to France and had my second heart attack, about ninety minutes after I got off the plane as I was driving through the Alps. I was very grateful to get to a little tiny county hospital where the emergency nurse Audrey managed to save my life. She said I was within fifteen minutes of death. One of the things if you keep having heart attacks in different countries, because I had another one in Italy, is that you get more second opinions than you would otherwise see. So I think I’ve had medical treatment in six countries. I was at second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth opinions. And there’s a little bit of a dispute, you know? Two of my cardiologists… one of my cardiologists just thinks that I had an unusually stressful previous year. And I can well believe that because GB News management weren’t the easiest guys to deal with. And I’d be quite happy to blame them for my heart attack. And then there are a couple of other cardiologists in different countries who say that one of the features of these COVID vaccines—I had two, the first two, because I had someone in my immediate circle who had a compromised immune system and we thought we were doing the right thing—you know, a lot of people who work with me here, the cameraman and the makeup lady, they were actually more sensible than me, they didn’t like the sound of any of these things and didn’t have them from the word go. But I had these two shots and a couple of my cardiologists from two different countries say that one of the things these vaccines do is act as an accelerant. So that’s something that would have happened when you were eighty-seven or ninety-four, instead shows up twenty or twenty-five years earlier. This is why we have these excess deaths among young adults and the middle-aged. So there’s no real excess death phenomenon among octogenarians and nonagenarians. But there’s something in these vaccines that acts as an accelerant and makes your heart attack or your stroke or your cancer show up twenty or twenty-five years early. I find that interesting. Well, let’s put it this way. I’m not a conspiratorially inclined person. But I do think that when you have had consistent levels of, say, excess death, diminished fertility, and all kinds of other phenomena, which I’m just not even [aware of] … I’m just looking at what, say, the insurers in the American Association of Actuaries have to say about stuff like this. I think it’s weird, weird and disturbing that the government that promoted all this stuff has absolutely zero interest in looking into what… [it has caused]. And in fact, this is why free speech is such a big thing of mine, because it’s slightly creepy, the way we’ve normalized things like school kids kicking a ball around on the pitch and suddenly dropping dead as if it’s a normal feature of life. No, it is not.

HAVILAND: ‘Sudden death syndrome’, that’s what they call it.

STEYN: Yeah, that’s the sudden death syndrome. That’s… or in my country, in Canada, where this amazing rise in unknown cause of death across the country, to the point where in Alberta it became the leading cause of death. You are… kind of a first-world jurisdiction in which the leading cause of death is unknown cause. So we’re being asked to swallow obvious hooey, and if… basically, you know, if you… I flew to Florida a couple of weeks ago, I was slightly astonished at airports and on the plane at all the people still wearing masks, you know? Let’s suppose that what the WHO warns us about disease X. Let’s suppose it’s coming along any day now. Half the population would still react… even after lockdown destroyed their kids, destroyed their businesses, destroyed their lives. Half the population would still react. Oh, I think I must follow the science. The science tells me I’ve got to get back into the mask and little Jimmy hasn’t recovered from missing his kindergarten and first year of primary school. I’ve got to… I’ve got to wreck him and make sure now he doesn’t do his fifth and sixth years of primary school. People would do exactly this, you know, and this is, just to tie everything we’ve been talking about together, you can have clampdowns on this and authoritarian reactions to that. But the deciding factor in your future is when a formerly free people lose the habits of liberty. Because then they don’t even… they can’t even comprehend what it is that they’re losing. And there’s a lot of that that is visible in the UK, in Canada, in Australia, throughout his Majesty’s Dominions, and in the United States. And certainly, you know, my general view is that the Western world is in the bizarre position that it gets more Western, the further east you go, because the… in some ways the least insane governments now are to be found on the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain. So the habits of liberty, when you lose them, you’ve got a whole huge relearning process that you have to come back to.

HAVILAND: Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think the worst aspect of it was the level to which people went to self-censor and to deceive themselves. I’m actually in South Korea at the moment. And I was not viciously attacked, but certainly verbally lambasted by friends [saying] why are you not having your third COVID shot? Why are you not wearing a mask? Well, okay, the masks don’t work. The vaccines don’t work—and they might kill you.

I had to have it here, because they won’t let you operate businesses unless you’ve done it. But I mean, I stopped it too. You know, I thought that was enough. But the degree…

STEYN: Oh, I’ll tell you. My GP in New Hampshire was very surprised that I’d agreed to have these two because she’s always trying to get me to have things done that I never do. I sort of drag it out for a decade. And so she was stunned that I’d actually gone. And over here, you go to your local firehouse, the fire station. And there’s a little old lady. It’s not a doctor or a nurse. It’s a little old lady who jabs you in your arm. And the minute I was in that firehouse, I thought, actually, this is really weird. Just a little old lady you know from the local historical society or whatever, she’s now administering a vacc… The whole… You know, we were having a trial run during the COVID years for a new model of society. All the things, whether you’re talking about vaccines or whether you’re talking about fifteen-minute cities or whether you’re talking about this Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister who is on board with the WEF plan to centralize all food production in five global food hubs. I mean, we talked about conspiracy theories, but I don’t know that it can be a conspiracy theory when prime ministers or kings, in the case of your sovereign and mine, actually standing up and saying this stuff out loud at public meetings.

HAVILAND: Yeah, absolutely. And Mark, just finally, how can our readers support you in your never-ending quest for justice?

STEYN: Well, I always… I will be at the High Court in London on June the 11th for the case against Ofcom, on the grounds… both free speech grounds and lawful grounds. It’s in breach of even the somewhat constrained version of the right to freedom of speech that prevails in Europe. But it’s also unlawful in UK law. And we’ll see how that goes. I’ll tell you something after a suit that is… My Michael Mann climate thing will go on for twenty years. And that’s expensive. I’m happy for people just to buy my books and CDs and other things. But… And I appreciate the uptick in that. But there are… If you want to add a little more, you’re welcome to join the Mark Steyn Club. We have gift certificates for people. And that all helps. I’m careful about that because the state is serious. As you know, GoFundMe screwed over the Canadian truckers. They announced that they’d taken bazillions of dollars from people who wanted to support the Canadian truckers. And then they said they didn’t like the sound of these Canadian truckers. So they were going to give it to a more deserving cause. I don’t know whether that meant Black Lives Matter or Antifa or whatever. They were eventually prevailed upon to return the money. But those truckers never saw a dime from GoFundMe. And then Justin Trudeau instructed the Big Five Canadian banks to freeze the bank accounts of people who’d… You know, we interviewed these people on my GB News show. I remember we had one Canadian chap on who’d discovered that his bank account at… I think it was the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, had been frozen. And then his… So he’s just digesting that because he’d given 50 bucks to the Canadian truckers. … Just as he’s digesting that, his ex-wife calls. And he’s like reached… And it was a nasty divorce, but he’s reached a level of equilibrium with the ex-wife and things. And the ex-wife complains that her account has been frozen too, just because she happened to make the catastrophic error of judgment of having been formerly married to a guy who donated to the Canadian truckers. So, I’m concerned about this. I don’t want people to give me money and then to discover that Rishi Sunak wants to freeze their bank account or anything like that. And that’s why with these regular commercial transactions rooted through the dwindling number of jurisdictions that still believe in general equal access for all that don’t operate, politicize justice systems, politicize banking systems, as Nigel can tell you all about and all the rest of it, it’s becoming increasingly difficult. But we have to learn the lessons here because it’s going to get harder before it gets better. I used to make jokes about how… you know, five or six years ago I used to make jokes about how pretty soon we’d be down to the last photocopier in the woods. Someone would have a 1978 Xerox machine and with more fading would be doing these things, often they’d be distributing them by hand. But the online harms thing in the UK and the impending one in Canada and the politicized justice system in the United States are all pushing us toward the last photocopier in the woods far quicker than anyone would have thought.

HAVILAND: Absolutely. Mark Steyn, it’s been a great pleasure. Thank you for joining me today.

STEYN: Thank you very much, Frank. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Mark Steyn can be found at Steynonline.com, which is heartily recommended!

Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.

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