The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi
“Do you remember the woman in To Kill a Mockingbird who falsely accuses a black man of raping her? What could possess anyone to do such an evil thing—to viciously attempt to destroy a life by knowingly lying? For that answer look no farther than the riveting and gloriously candid The Devil’s Triangle by Mark Judge, who himself was targeted for destruction by that same evil, and who lived to tell the tale, if only so that we might all recognize the dark forces at work in our nation. In a voice evoking J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, and yes, Lester Bangs—within a narrative that brings to mind All the President’s Men and Fast Times at Ridgemont High—Judge tells us the truth, in all of its brutality and beauty. May this book open the way for a spate of similar memoirs, whose honesty will lead this once-great nation out of the fetid triangular swamp of lies that is this brave book’s eponymous Devil’s Triangle¾and toward a new sunlit frontier, in which genuine liberty and unvarnished truth once more become our beacons and our hope.” —Eric Metaxas, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life and Host of Socrates in the City In 2018, in the midst of a contentious Supreme Court confirmation battle, Christine Blasey Ford named Mark Judge as a witness to her alleged attempted rape over thirty years earlier at the hands of a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. Overnight, the unassuming writer, critic, videographer, and recovering alcoholic was unwillingly thrust into the national media spotlight. Reporters combed through Judge’s writings, pored over his high school yearbook, hounded him with emails and phone calls, and invaded the privacy of his relatives, friends, and former girlfriends. He was mauled in the press, denounced in the Senate, received threatening late-night calls, became the target of a classic honey trap, and was even called out by Matt Damon on Saturday Night Live. As the lunacy reached its crescendo, Judge began to fear for his sanity⎯and even his life. A year later, still traumatized by this Kafkaesque experience, Judge found himself washing dishes in a Maryland restaurant, trying to piece his shattered life back together. Even at the time, it was clear that Judge himself was not the target of this campaign of vilification. Instead, it was an attempt to use his spotty record as a teenage alcoholic, and later, a political and cultural conservative, to destroy Brett Kavanaugh by proxy. The actors in this malicious and cynical plot were an informal cabal of partisan reporters, Democrats in Congress, and shadowy opposition researchers: a “Devil’s Triangle” whom Judge aptly compares to the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police who terrorized citizens during the Cold War. Now, in a frank, confessional, and deeply moving book that stands comparison to Arthur Koestler’s Cold War classic Darkness at Noon, Judge rips the mask from the new American Stasi. Using pop culture, politics, the story of his friendship with Kavanaugh, and the fun, wild, and misunderstood 1980s, Judge celebrates sex, art, and freedom while issuing a timely warning to the rest of us about our own endangered freedoms.
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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 largely 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 out 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 DC crowd he had grown up with as decadent drunks.
Judge believes that it was his books that 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 on the grounds that he must have been in a black-out 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 for sure when Judge started his heaviest drinking.
Judge learned from the experience about 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 and a young girl ran out into the street to demand that he drive her somewhere. Judge didn't. 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 know, 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 most 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. It is unfortunate that 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.
