Free speech: our unalienable right

Mark Steyn fights on to protect our unalienable right to free speech.

Should hockey-stick huckster Michael Mann's interminable lawsuit against me succeed, it would be the worst setback for the First Amendment in half-a-century. Such unlikely Steyn allies as NBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, etc, all agree on that - in their amicus briefs. But actual editorials on this case have been far thinner on the ground. Indeed, the biggest difference between the hockey-stick huckster's suit and the Canadian Islamic Congress' attempt to criminalize my writing north of the border is that (by comparison with the CBC, The Globe & Mail et al) mainstream US media editorialists have been entirely silent. So I was pleased to see this piece from the editors of The New York Post, headlined "DC Court of Appeals' Global Warming Decision Threatens First Amendment":

As Americans were preparing to trade Christmas presents last week, the DC Court of Appeals was moving to take a gift away: Americans' right to free speech.

The court ruled that Penn State climatologist Michael Mann's defamation suit against National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute can go to trial. That should send shivers down the spines of anyone who cares about open debate and challenges to scientific findings.

Mann's suit claims bloggers Mark Steyn, on NR's site, and Rand Simberg, on CEI's, defamed him when they slammed his global warming research, particularly his famous hockey stick graph...

The Post notes that both Mr Simberg and I were making "statements of opinion" and that, "under the First Amendment, Americans can express their opinion". That's true - or it was until Judge Vanessa Ruiz and her colleagues came along. Her ladyship's view that, once an "expert" body has ruled on a subject, freeborn citizens are obliged to accept that ruling and shut the hell up is perverse and repugnant.

But the Post also adds:

And, after all, who's to say the authors are wrong?

Which is my position. I believe the hockey stick is fraudulent - which is why I stated that it's fraudulent. I've said it's fraudulent in major publications in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, inter alia, since the end of the 20th century - without any slapdash jurists in those countries presuming to say that I had no right to do so.

For the record, I did not write that Mann himself is a fraud, although I'm happy to prove that in court. As that is what the sclerotic and diseased husk of DC justice apparently requires of me, I wish they'd get on with it - as I've been petitioning for over three years. The Post concludes:

The First Amendment, NR notes, is designed specifically to safeguard the right "to express caustic criticism of scientific theories that purport to resolve hot-button political controversies on matters as sweepingly consequential as the extent and cause of global warming."

By opening the door to curbs on that right, the court does the nation a huge disservice.

Just so.

I thank all those readers committed to ensuring that a malodorous ideologue doesn't get away with hijacking the First Amendment. If you're interested in keeping me in the game until this outrageous case comes to trial, well, I wrote a whole book on this subject.

Unalienable rights

Robert Curry writes at American Greatness,

The Constitution is ours, yours and mine. The Founders wrote it for us and intended for us to understand it. That is why it is brief and clearly written. Their meaning and their intent is available to anyone who can read. Understanding it requires common sense, not advanced study in emanations and penumbras.

...we no longer think politically at all, but are only expected to act as passive consumers of what the “experts” dispense. That makes it difficult for us to understand the Founders, though they are not in reality difficult to understand.

...The Declaration of Independence states we have “unalienable rights.” It challenged the legitimacy of every government then in existence, declaring that to secure these rights is the very purpose of government (“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”).

To understand this question rightly, we need to remember what the Constitution does. It defines how the federal government is to function—and the very purpose of government, according to the Founders, is to secure our unalienable rights. Consequently, unalienable rights are senior to, on a higher level than, even the Constitution itself. The sequence in logic goes like this:

Unalienable Rights
The Constitution (the Founders’ brilliant design for securing those unalienable rights)

...The Constitution is not the source of our right to freedom of speech because freedom of speech is an unalienable right. What the First Amendment can do is recognize that already existing unalienable right by forbidding the government from abridging it. And that is precisely what it does.

...I hope that remembering this most fundamental fact about the Founding may help you navigate the blizzard of nonsense which will soon sweep across the federal city and the media. And pray that our new justice is another Clarence Thomas—possessing both the courage to endure an often cruel and unjust confirmation process and the wisdom to grasp the Founders’ intent.

Read more here.

"Orwellian"

Judge Andrew Napolitano has spoken out against Obama's proposal to use the FCC to take over the internet.

"Net neutrality," which is being pushed by President Barack Obama, will eventually lead to control of content on the Internet, says Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano.

"This is so Orwellian that they want to call it 'net neutrality.' It's anything but neutral," Napolitano said Tuesday on Fox Business Network's "Cavuto."

The administration wants to regulate the cost of the Internet by allocating the cost to servers rather than having the free market allocate it, "which has worked magnificently and with near perfection," Napolitano said. "Once he is able to regulate costs, then the next step would be to regulate content."

Obama has had no success getting Congress to pass a net neutrality law, so he is trying to get the Federal Communication Commission to take over the issue. The problem, Napolitano said, is that the FCC can regulate only what Congress has authorized it to regulate.

"It doesn't regulate cable television, it doesn't regulate the Internet. They will have to aggregate to themselves, the commissioners, out of nowhere the authority to regulate the Internet," he said.

The FCC regulates broadcast television and radio and also controls content, Napolitano said.

Individual stations, in exchange for a broadcast license, have "agreed not to say certain things, and to say certain things," Napolitano said. "Who the heck wants to see the Internet become that?"