My last post was on Mann v Steyn podcasts so Cliscep denizens would have a place to comment on the trial. There’s also posts at Climate Etc. and WUWT with longer running comment threads. If you’re looking for a blog on the other side, there’s Peter Sinclair’s This Is Not Cool (formerly Climate Denial Crock of the Week). I spared my Paterno/Sandusky trutherism in my last post, so now I’m going to go full bore. Before I attempt a brief summary of the relevant parts, I want to post the two best current links summarizing the case. I also want to emphasize that they are just the tip to a continually growing iceberg of material. The first is a review of Graham Spanier’s new book, In The Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment. The next is a listing of serious, accomplished people who have done and are doing work on the case.

The way the Sandusky case relates to Mann v Steyn (and Simberg) is that Steyn is bringing up that Michael Mann acknowledged Graham Spanier in what looks like pretty much all of his books. Spanier was the president of Penn State when they did an inquiry into Mann and his hockey stick in the aftermath of the Climategate emails and when Mike McQueary informed Joe Paterno about seeing Jerry Sandusky with a boy in a Penn State shower. Steyn also references the Freeh Report from an investigation commissioned by the Penn State Board of Trustees. Spanier went to trial, was acquitted on some felonies, and convicted on one misdemeanor child endangerment charge and served a short jail sentence. The point of Steyn’s and Simberg’s blog posts is that Penn State’s lax handling of Jerry Sandusky makes its handling of Mann’s inquiry suspect.

Steyn relishes in embellishing Graham Spanier as a convicted criminal. He may actually be technically wrong about that. Spanier’s conviction was thrown out by a federal judge, but Pennsylvania’s crusading AG, Josh Shapiro, put Spanier in jail anyway. He’s now Pennsylvania’s governor and Spanier, being a good democrat, voted for him anyway after being released. Didn’t he get a report of Sandusky sodomizing a boy in the shower and then cover it up? Didn’t Sandusky get convicted of sodomizing the boy in the shower? No, no and no. Yes, Sandusky was charged with this, but of the 48 counts he was charged with, this is one of the three where he was acquitted. This is also the only charge of a sex act where there was a witness at trial. This charge is also what caused a national outrage and led to Joe Paterno being almost immediately fired. In order for this charge having been reported to Spanier, (and consequently covered up) it had to first be witnessed by Mike McQueary. There’s now an email record showing that he complained to a prosecutor that his words were twisted and that he could not say he saw sodomy. The prosecutor says she knows some of this is incorrect and not to talk about it.

So was this boy in the shower ever identified? In their closing statement the prosecutors said his identity was known only to God, but it’s now well established that his name was Alan Myers. He was a Second Mile kid who had lived with the Sanduskys, remembered the incident, wrote letters to editors defending Sandusky, went to Sandusky’s lawyer and made a sworn statement and then disappeared. His mother worked for a lawyer who would go on to get multi million dollar settlements for several accusers, including Myers. He was later subpoenaed to a Sandusky appeal hearing where he answered almost every question with “I can’t recall”. The two summary links above plus two of my previous Cliscep posts should help anyone who develops a Better Call Saul level of interest.

The Freeh Report is an odd document for someone with Steyn’s political views to be relying on. Louie Freeh was a Clinton appointed head of the FBI. He recently made a donation to the Biden’s grandchildren’s trust fund. A cynical sort might suspect him of whoring his credentials. He was paid 7 or 8 million dollars to do an independent investigation by Penn States Board of Trustees. Might the BOT have had anything to whitewash? Well, they fired Joe Paterno in a couple days before knowing anything about the charges or the accusers. They gave away $100 million to a few dozen adult men. There’ve been allegations that he may’ve been in cahoots with the prosecutors. I think I’ve found a smoking gun. On page 12, paragraph 2 of the actual Freeh Report it says they did NOT interview Mike McQueary, .. at the request of the prosecutors! Journalists John Ziegler and Ralph Cipriano collaborated on a cover feature story for Newsweek (killed at the last minute) where they were leaked all of the Freeh documents as well as the settlement documents. The cover on a draft had scribbled in “NO EVIDENCE AT ALL!” For more information on the settlements (such as court accusers padding their stories to get bigger settlements and other entertaining stuff) there’s a (probably up to 100 hours by now) podcast series by John Ziegler with cohost former FOX LA sports anchor Liz Habeeb called With the Benefit of Hindsight.

There’s one more aspect of the story I’m going to cover, because it’s so well known. This is the telephone interview Sandusky did with Bob Costas. Costas famously asked him if he’s sexually attracted to young boys. Sandusky gave a long stumbling pause and said he enjoyed being with young people and eventually answering no to the question. This convinced a large portion of the public that he was guilty. Whenever this video is played, bob Costas’s previous question is almost never included. He asks him if he is a pedophile and he abruptly says no. Why did he answer the next question the way he did? Sandusky is by all accounts a rather square, teetotaler, religious type of person. Unlike in other pedophile cases, there was no pornography found. His wife has stuck with him. His children are all adopted because he has low testosterone along with a number of other medical ailments. Among his conditions were abnormally small testicles which where never mentioned by any accuser. So why the pausing answer? There are lots of possibilities. He has a ponderous manner of speaking. He could’ve been startled or confused by the question. Perhaps he once lusted in his heart like Jimmy Carter. Would a real pedophile trying to hide the fact be more quick to lie than someone who would think about the unexpected question before answering?

Sandusky did this interview because his lawyer recommended that he do it, about an hour earlier. He had just gotten the sworn statement from Allen Myers and thought the case was in the bag.

Bob Costas does not take a position on whether Jerry Sandusky is guilty. He wrote a quote for Mark Pendergrast’s book proposal saying that he had a case to make and that it deserved a hearing, but balked at a jacket blurb. Costas called in on his own to be included for an interview on Ziegler’s podcast series.

Now back to Michael Mann. Why did he acknowledge Spanier in his books and in particular, why did he do it in his latest, Our Fragile Moment, published September of 2023? Well he’s now been directed and crossed and said he doesn’t keep close tabs on his acknowledgements. That’s certainly keeping in character with his sort of absent minded professor who did all the serious mix ups with grant submissions and award tallies uncovered by Simberg’s attorney, Victoria Weatherford in her brutal cross examination. But Mann’s pricey lawyers don’t have that excuse. My February of 2021 post, Is Mark Steyn Walking into a Trap, has a tweet by Steve McIntyre that shows Steyn mentioning Mann’s previous post Sandusky acknowledgements in a legal briefing. Could this just be similar incompetence (at least professed incompetence) on the part of Mann’s legal team? It certainly seems plausible from what I’ve seen, but the conspiracy ideationist in me just can’t help but wonder about those acknowledgements. In their first episode of reenactments, McElhinney and McAleer show Mann’s team trying to sneak in 5400 pages at the last minute and getting admonished by judge Irving. It looks like they were related to the NAS Panel, but who knows?

I can think of two opposing strategies for Mann to play these acknowledgements and they amount to a low key and high key plan. The low key one is the path effectively chosen if indeed it was a plan. It looks like Mann’s supporters are keeping quiet (except for Bill Nye) and bracing for defeat. I suspect all the press organizations that wrote all those amicus briefs hope Mann will quietly lose and that will be that.

To cover my a$$, I will say that I’ve said the use of the acknowledgements is only a slight possibility, at least in my second Mann v Steyn post. I will also admit to having my own agenda of seeing justice done and truth coming out in the Sandusky case.

The high key strategy would be to show that Spanier and Penn State did nothing wrong when they received the report from McQueary. This would negate the premise of the If they did this they likely did that of the logic in Simberg’s and Steyn’s blog posts. They could also make a big diversion of attention away from the case or since it doesn’t seem to be getting that much coverage, to draw attention to it. For whatever reason, would Mann’s team have the chutzpa, guile or guts to pull this off? Mann did call himself a Nobel Prize winner with a straight face, although I’m not sure if it was with a poker face or a straight man face. Would Mann have the smarts? How about multidimensional thinking. He used Principal Component Analysis. According to Andrew Montford’s book, The Hockey Stick Illusion (if I read it right), PCA is taking a bunch of time series and making them into the coefficients of multidimensional equations and doing matrix math on them. When Mann recently went all Goodwin’s Law on Steve McIntyre in a tweet, he was conflating his “modern” PCI centering technique with Stephen J. Gould’s analysis in his book, The Mismeasure of Man. He knew Gould was long dead and wasn’t going to complain.

Would he have the receipts to back this strategy? He likes to use exonerations from investigations. It looks like he was trying to get the federal NAS panel inquiry in at the last minute. Graham Spanier was actually exonerated on the Sandusky case by a federal investigation. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agent John Snedden did an investigation into whether Spanier should have his top secret security clearance renewed. He found that Spanier did not cover anything up, because there was nothing to cover up. His security clearance was renewed. He found the case to have stemmed from a political vendetta by republican governor Tom Corbett against Spanier over a failed proposal to cut Penn State’s funding. The report is publicly available and could’ve been entered into evidence. As for finding evidence of malice in Simberg and Steyn’s blog posts, I suppose he could’ve subpoenaed me to be deposed of my tweets and blog posts. Perhaps he could’ve flown me to DC to testify. I could go see the Smithsonian and Holocaust museums.

It could also give Mann some moral high ground. He could emphasize how he is sticking up for a friend who was targeted by a republican governor for supporting higher education. Some years ago (it looks like almost five), I wrote a post on one of my other blogs saying that I would give Mann credit, even praise, if he would give Spanier some support in his dire situation. Of course I also said I’d go right back to criticizing him for everything else.

It looks like my warnings were all for naught. While I want Steyn and Simberg not to mention the First Amendment to win, I’d also like to see truth and justice win.