Yes We Have No Menckens

Exactly 10 years ago (March 1, 2014), I released a Media Rant alerting readers to what was at that time the early stages of climate scientist Michael Mann's defamation lawsuit against climate change denialist  trolls whose "critique" of him consisted of character assassination and allegations of research fraud. Thanks to our ridiculously slow legal system, it took literally more than a decade for Mann's suit to go before a judge and jury. In the end, after a contentious four-week trial, the six-member jury unanimously sided with Dr. Mann, awarding him over $1 million in damages. To prevail, Mann had to meet the actual malice standard for public figures charging others with defamation, a high bar that required showing the defendants knew they were making false statements or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. 

H.L. Mencken was an intrepid reporter and pundit for the Baltimore Sun and other sources. Though some of his writings can legitimately be accused of elitism and intolerance, his aggressive confrontations with the demagogic trolls of his time inspired a generation of journalists. 

Climate change activists hoped Mann's lawsuit would put climate science itself on trial. After the verdict, Dr. Mann did argue that the trial results were a "victory for scientists and science." Maybe that is true in a technical sense, but the fact that the mainstream media ignored and/or minimized the courtroom proceedings while they were going on meant that few people knew that the courtroom struggle between climate change science and climate change denialism was even going on. Think of it this way: imagine that the date of the Super Bowl wasn't  announced in advance, and when the game finally got played it wasn't televised. Kansas City might still have "won," but who would care? 

The United States is a global outlier in terms of the number of people who deny climate change is occurring or--even if they do accept the science--do not see it as urgent. The Mann trial featured defendants who typify the trolling style of discourse against climate science that, especially for large segments of the population caught in right-wing echo chambers and algorithms, is typically unquestioned and taken as fact. During the trial, the defendants did not hold back from launching attacks on climate science. Thanks to the limited media coverage, so far there's little evidence that the trial did anything to deter denialism from continuing; perhaps in the future the trolls might not be dumb enough to compare people they disagree with to pedophiles, or accuse scientists of fraud with scant evidence to back it up. Denialism does not require character assassination or accusations of research fraud to be effective; all it requires is unchallenged repetition of falsehoods. 

The tragedy of the Mann trial is that, because of media negligence,  it ultimately was not an event that allowed the public to hear and see  a thorough debunking of climate denialist nonsense. For the trial to be THAT kind of event would have required major news outfits to report from the courtroom every day, like they did with Depp v. Heard, the Alex Murdaugh murder trial, or numerous other celeb and/or sensationalist courtroom clashes. 

What the Mann trial needed was an H.L. Mencken, an intrepid reporter with an ear for bullshit and the kind of acerbic style needed to go toe-to-toe with modern internet trolls. 

I mention Mencken purposely in reference to the Michael Mann trial. In the 1920s science was under attack by Christian fundamentalists who pressed state legislatures and school districts to make it illegal to teach the theory of evolution. Very much like the modern online trolls, the critics of evolutionary theory resorted to absurd arguments to make their case, often preying on the fears and prejudices of religious folk convinced that science and spirituality could not coexist. (Very much like modern critics of climate science prey on the fears of working class people worried about potential job losses that could accompany the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.). 

The conflict between fundamentalist Christian creationist dogma vs. evolutionary theory came to a head in the famous 1925 State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial, called the "Scopes Monkey Trial" by Mencken. Covering the trial for the Baltimore Sun, Mencken in his trademark style employed bitter sarcasm, ridicule, and mockery to call out the attempt to discredit secular knowledge not with reasoned evidence, but with superstition. He was especially bitter toward William Jennings Bryan, the four-time presidential candidate, former Secretary of State, and fundamentalist preacher who led the prosecution's argument against John Scopes. Mr. Scopes' "crime" was teaching the theory of evolution in violation of Tennessee's Butler Act which prohibited such teaching. 

Scopes, represented by the legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, actually lost the trial. But Darrow masterfully turned the proceedings into a public referendum on what a democratic society should expect from its public schools. Should schools be spaces for expanding minds through rational exploration and discovery? Or should they be indoctrination centers for fundamentalist dogma?  The fact that the trial was covered nationally, and passionately by people like Mencken, allowed the mass media audience of that time (primarily print newspapers and radio) to gain access to a vital debate that still plays out in public school districts across the land--today more typically targeting LGBTQA+ tolerance or Critical Race Theory instead of evolution. 

Michael Mann's lawyers took on the climate denialist trolls in a manner very similar to the way Darrow handled the fundamentalists in 1925. Darrow was condemned at the time by "liberal" media outlets like the New York World for being too mean to the fundamentalists. Mencken's response reads like a blueprint for how to handle modern trolls: 

"What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame."

In short, Michael Mann and his attorneys did their part. They clashed with the trolls, defended climate science with real evidence, and put denialists on notice that there could be consequences for continuing to choose reckless disregard for the truth and character assassination as debate strategies. 

Mann did his part, but the establishment mass media did not do theirs. A recent study exploring the consequences of climate denialism concluded that, "As a form of knowledge vulnerability, climate denialism renders communities unprepared to take steps to increase resilience." The Mann trial gave mass media the opportunity to broadcast the facts of climate science to a national audience, expose the nonsensical attacks against it, and thus make us all a little less vulnerable against the "knowledge" spewed by bad faith actors who place fossil fuel and other corporate interests above human needs.