Climate scientist’s lawsuit could wipe out conservative National Review magazine

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

The National Review magazine, longstanding house news organ of the establishment right, is facing a lawsuit that could shutter the publication permanently. According to The Week, a suit by a climate scientist threatens to bankrupt the already financially shaky publication and its website, the National Review Online (NRO).

Scientist Michael Mann is suing the Review over statements made by Canadian right-wing polemicist and occasional radio stand-in for Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn. Steyn was writing on the topic of climate change when he accused Mann of falsifying data and perpetuating intellectual fraud through his research.

Steyn went on to quote paid anti-climate science operative Rand Simberg — an employee of the right-wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute — who compared Mann to Penn State’s convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Mann, Simberg said, is “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.”

Mann sued for defamation. Steyn and theReview vowed to fight the suit, given that defamation is notoriously difficult to prove in court.

“My advice to poor Michael is to go away and bother someone else,” said Review editor Rich Lowry. “If he doesn’t have the good sense to do that, we look forward to teaching him a thing or two about the law and about how free debate works in a free country.”

As the case has played out, however, Lowry’s hubris has proven to be unwarranted.

“In July,” wrote The Week’s Damon Linker, “Judge Natalia Combs Greene rejected a motion to dismiss the suit. The defendants appealed, and last week D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg rejected the motion again, opening the door for the discovery phase of the lawsuit to begin.”

The Review, which has run at a loss since it was founded on money inherited by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955, appealed to readers and supporters for help paying its rapidly mounting legal bills.

Lowry wrote:

As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have. Of course, we’ll do whatever we have to do to find ourselves victorious in court and Professor Mann thoroughly defeated, as he so richly deserves to be. Meanwhile, we have to hire attorneys, which ain’t cheap.

The bills are already mounting.

This is our fight, legally. But with the global-warming extremists going all-out to silence critics, it’s your fight too, morally. When we were sued, we heard from many of you who expressed a desire to help underwrite our legal defense. We deeply appreciated the outpouring of promised help.

Now we really need it.

Then, at Christmastime, Steyn abruptly fired the legal team representing him and the magazine, white shoe firm Steptoe and Johnson, after an argument over a highly inflammatory — andappallingly typed — NRO post about Judge Combs Greene. Steyn accused her of “staggering incompetence,” called her stupid, and accused her of deliberate obtuseness regarding the Mann suit.

Now, Steyn is representing himself against Mann and he and the Review have parted ways.

Steyn wrote to Mother Jones, saying that he was simply no longer able to contain his sense of disdain for the federal judge and her decision not to dismiss Mann’s suit.

“I spent the first months attempting to conceal my contempt for Judge Combs Greene’s court,” said Steyn. “But really, it’s not worth the effort.”

On his personal blog, Steyn wrote, “As readers may have deduced from my absence at National Review Online and my termination of our joint representation, there have been a few differences between me and the rest of the team.”

Now, as the suit grinds onward, the Review faces fairly dismal prospects. The suit could eventually be dismissed, but that is looking less likely. What’s looking more likely is that Mann could win a substantial judgment in court or the magazine could settle out of court.

The Week doubts that the publication could financially survive either of those outcomes. In 2005, before his death, Buckley estimated that the Review had lost more than $25 million in its 50 years of operation. It has never enjoyed a single moment of robust financial health competing in the “free market of ideas,” but has relied on reader contributions and bailouts from wealthy donors for the entirety of its history.

Conservatives like to point Buckley’s legacy and the Review as the reasonable, moderate edge of an regressive, reactionary party. In its history, the magazine has consistently staked out far-right positions that favor whites over nonwhites and plutocrats over the middle and working classes.

National Review authors have railed against racial integration, called Hitler a left-wing radical, and argued with a straight face that African-Americans are inherently more violent and less civilized than whites.

Lowry himself famously declared “We’re winning” the War in Iraq just before catastrophic waves of sectarian violence engulfed the country and permanently scuttled the American-led reconstruction effort.

Lately contributor Mona Charen has authored a series of wildly LGBT-phobic articles, lamenting the mainstreaming of “unusual sexual identities” and accusing parents who allow their transgender children to be themselves of “child abuse.”

National Review’s New Contributor: White Nationalist David Yerushalmi

By Matt Duss/Think Progress

Back in April, National Review finally parted ways with longtime contributor John Derbyshire after Derbyshirepenned an especially racist piece advising non-black American parents on how to talk to their kids about black people. Explaining his decision to sever ties, editor Rich Lowry called Derbyshire’s piece “nasty and indefensible,” and wrote that Derbyshire:

“is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues,but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”

While National Review’s decision to can Derbyshire was commendable (if long overdue), ThinkProgress noted at the time that it continued to feature the writings of prominent Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, and Daniel Pipes, and called on the magazine to sever ties with these figures as well.

Unfortunately, not only has National Review continued to publish these Islamophobic authors, it has now taken on as a contributor one of the Islamophobia network’s worst offenders, David Yerushalmi.

Back in September 2010, ThinkProgress examined Yerushalmi’s long history of extremists statements, which include a proposal making it “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.” In a 2006 article, Yerushalmi lamented in the inability to engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist. He also wrote that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men. “There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

As Mother Jones noted, the Anti-Defimation League said Yerushalmi has “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”

In short, he has espoused white nationalist views very similar to John Derbyshire’s, with the added bonus of anti-Muslim “creeping sharia” nonsense. Were the editors of National Review simply unaware if these statements? Or don’t they consider this stuff “nasty and indefensible”?