WaPo Committed The Worst Media Malfeasance During The Brett Kavanaugh Smear Campaign

This is an excerpt of “The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi,” by Mark Judge, out on Nov. 14 from Post Hill Press.

At various times in the fall of 2018, the Stasi media told the public that I had been Brett Kavanaugh’s wingman at a series of wild bacchanalian parties, bought and sold cocaine, and presided over no fewer than ten gang rapes.

As time went on the worst of these lies and distortions were exposed by conservative reporters doing the job that liberal editors at major publications should have done. Gradually the shabby methods of the Stasi media were exposed for all to see.

The most shocking instance of journalistic malfeasance is the failure of the [Washington] Post’s Emma Brown to include any reference to Leland Keyser in her initial story about the Ford memo. This was noticed right away thanks to the watchful eye of Kimberley Strassel. It should have been enough to get her fired, but apparently suppressing exculpatory facts in a high-profile confirmation hearing is not considered malpractice by current journalistic standards.

In a similar act of ideological fact suppression—also detailed above—NBC’s Kate Snow withheld damaging information about Michael Avenatti when to publish it would have undermined the claims of Julie Swetnick.

In February 2019, months after Brett was confirmed, Vanity Fair published a lengthy hit piece on Georgetown Prep [high school] by Evgenia Peretz detailing all kinds of bad behavior by the jock elite, including me and Brett, and the supposed “code of silence” that concealed our abuses until they were at last brought to light by the courageous Ford. Heavily sourced from my own candid confessional writings, the piece describes me thus: 

Judge took the cake. He was the loudest, edgiest, baddest ass. He was also the heartthrob. In Breakfast Club terms, you might say he had the dangerous allure of Judd Nelson’s Bender combined with the popularity of Emilio Estevez’s Andrew Clark. His body couldn’t contain his energy. He would leap onto people’s backs to start games of chicken. He could place his hands on a banister and jettison his body over an entire stairwell.

As one of my friends quipped, “Wow, part Mel Gibson, part Tom Cruise, part ape.”

More than an attack on Brett, the Vanity Fair piece is framed as an indictment of the entire white, male, upper-class American elite. The Prep boys are described as mainly the sons of wealthy, conservative families from the Maryland “horse country.” There were few middle-class kids, few “students of color,” and, of course, being a school run by Jesuits, few women: The original article read, “Any female presence consisted of the librarian, the secretary in the president’s office, and perhaps two teachers.” Peretz also alleges strong whiffs of homophobia and anti-Semitism.

Like so much mainstream reporting these days, Peretz’s article reflects the rage of the resentful people who never lost their hatred of what she called “the kings of the school”—swaggering, entitled bullies who liked to stuff underclassmen into garbage