Politic Matters — The American Stasi

Remarks on “The Devil’s Triangle” by Mark Judge

Mark Judge was a “supporting player” in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight. Judge was identified as a witness to Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault of Christy Blasey Ford when he, Judge, and Ford were high school students. His yearbook was read at a Congressional hearing for the titillation of the entire nation. Judge was depicted on Saturday Night Live as a drunken frat boy.

The problem for Judge is that the alleged assault never happened, and Judge had never met Ford. Since his testimony did not advance the Democrat line, and since the media is primarily a Democrat operation — something we know more about in the summer of 2024 after the media has embarrassed itself by flipping and flopping on the issue of Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities — the edict came down that Judge’s credibility was to be destroyed.

Another problem for Judge is that he gave ammunition for this project because he was a public figure as a journalist. Judge had started on the Left as an intern at the New Republic. He had been a heavy drinker and an alcoholic until he straightened out his life in his late twenties, and he had written a book about his experiences, painting the Washington D.C. crowd he had grown up with as decadent drunks.

Judge believes that his books gave Ford the idea of casting him as the other person in the room. Judge had written about his black-out drunks — which happened after his high school graduation — and decided that she could neutralize his denial of the event because he must have been black-outed drunk at the time. This also explains her inability to pinpoint the date of the alleged assault. Her inability was strategic: she couldn’t know when Judge started his heaviest drinking.

Judge learned from the experience how deeply the corruption of media involvement in politics runs. Journalists uniformly took the advocacy position against him. Journalists invaded his privacy, intruded upon the senile mother of a family friend, and put him under surveillance.

In one particularly chilling story, Judge describes how he was driving home to D.C. from Maryland when a young girl ran out into the street to demand that he drive her somewhere. Judge didn’t stop. On reflection, he decided that it was a set-up to nail a fiftyish man for driving a teenager across state lines.

He also describes how pressure was placed on Leland Keyser — Ford’s other witness to the alleged assault — who also denied that the assault occurred. Keyser was bombarded by journalists and friends who asked her to take one for the team and keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.

We might think that is paranoid, but in 2024, with lawfare experience behind us and having seen Democrat enclaves like D.C. and New York being used to railroad Republicans, it may not have been wrong. After the experience of watching the lies told about the source of Covid, the utility of social distancing, the efficacy of masks, and the mental stability of Joe Biden, we can no longer call “BS” on conspiracy theories like we would before 2016.

A warning is in order here. My recounting is straightforward. Judge’s narrative is not straightforward. He is writing a memoir which contains a lot of biographical reflections. There are long discussions into his drinking, rehabilitation, various friends he’s known, and filmmaking. These sections break up the story about the “Stasi media.”

That said, the life story is interesting. For example, Judge’s father was a long-time editor who was friends with William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist. Some of the characters in that book were based on Jesuit priests who taught Judge at Georgetown Prep. There are a number of stories about Washington D.C. in the 1980s, away from the politics.

Judge met Brett Kavanaugh in high school. He stays away from recounting stories about Kavanaugh or any conversations he might have had during the confirmation battle for obvious reasons.

During the confirmation battle, Judge was basically on his own. He had hired an attorney to represent him, but he was in a Democrat town during a time when Democrats loathed D.C. native, Brett Kavanaugh, and loathed Judge by association.

After cleaning up his life, Judge had become conservative and returned to his Catholic faith. Unfortunately, there was no support structure for him as there was for people on the other side, who feted Ford no matter how irrational and unsupported her story became. Democrats in this Democrat town seized on ever implausible fantasy spun up by attorney Michael Avennatti, including claims that Judge had engaged mass rapes of girls while in high school. On one occasion, Morning Joe had regaled the country with a story about how Judge had engaged in a threesome with another Catholic school boy. Mika Brzeznski gasped “My God” in reaction.

No lie was outside the lines during this awful episode.

Judge is really a wonderful writer. I started reading his columns after fame was forced on him. I have found that his reasoning is cogent and his writing is clear.