One of Canada's biggest blowhard exports south of the border may have plunged a stake into the heart of one of their premier right wing media operations.
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.
Though the National Review likes to style itself as the genteel intellectual voice of American conservatism they are in fact a hard right operation that supported segregation, Apartheid South Africa and some of the most retrograde and reactionary ideas in American politics. More recently on the website side of their operation they suggested that President Obama's mother must have been a communist because only a communist white woman could have married a black man.
They've been losing money for years and far from depending on the all knowing unseen hand of the marketplace of ideas have depended on subsidization by various sources - they probably can't survive either losing the suit or having to settle it. Funny how calling someone a cheat and a fraud and comparing them to a child molester might have consequences isn't it?
Sitting back and enjoying the show.
