An American Caught in the Machine

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File, Pool

Franz Kafka long ago imagined a scenario in which an innocent man is caught up in a rigged justice system for a crime he not only didn’t commit, but isn’t even told about. Kafka’s "The Trial" is harrowing enough to read, but Mark Judge did more than that: he lived it.

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You remember Mark Judge. He is an American who, like so many who have lived and died in totalitarian states, was quietly living his life and causing no one trouble until the day that he became useful to the powerful elites. Useful, that is, not as in gainful employment, but as a sign to the rest of us that this is what would happen to us also if we got out of line. 

Judge’s great sin was being a high school friend of Brett Kavanaugh, whom Donald Trump had just nominated for the Supreme Court — and not just an ordinary friend, but supposedly a partner in Kavanaugh’s crimes. “At the tip of the spear,” Judge recounts, “was an accusation that Brett had sexually assaulted a woman named Christine Blasey Ford in 1982, when he and I were seventeen and she was fifteen, and that I had been in the room when it happened.” He adds that he was “first approached with this news by a reporter, who made the accusation without telling me who was making it or where and when it allegedly occurred.” And most tellingly: “In the madness that followed, I was living in an America I did not recognize.”

"The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi" details the entire nightmare that Judge lived, and how virtually every innocuous detail of his rather ordinary early 1980s school experience was picked over and willfully misrepresented as evidence that the teen Kavanaugh was running an industrial-level sexual molestation industry under the noses of his unsuspecting teachers and mentors. His friend Judge’s reputation was just collateral damage, but the slightest hint of moral turpitude on Judge’s part could be weaponized against Kavanaugh, and so when such evidence did not materialize, it had to be manufactured.

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Judge recounts one such incident that happened as he was driving down a dark road one night:

I was nearly home when the girl sprinted into the road, frantically waving her arms. She was beautiful—like a blonde Megan Fox [the other one, not the PJ Media writer]. She was also with a guy around her age who hung back behind her furiously texting on his phone. I slowed to a stop, leaned over, and asked what was wrong. “We got stranded at a party,” she said. “Can you give us a ride back to Washington, DC?” Normally I am happy to help stranded teenagers. But in this case I just shook my head, rolled up the window, and drove on. Something about it was off. It was twenty miles back the way I had just come to DC—across state lines. Who in the year 2018 got stranded at a party out in the country twenty miles from home? In a world with smart phones, Ubers, buses, trains, and so on, who got stuck like that and had to be out hitchhiking at night on a dark country road?

Who indeed? Could it be someone to set Judge up with a false accusation and make Kavanaugh’s friend appear to be some kind of serial sexual predator, thereby lending credence to Blasey Ford’s claims? Would anyone think that the Washington elites who were determined to prevent Kavanaugh from taking a seat on the Supreme Court would be above such skullduggery?

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Those elites’ attempt to destroy Kavanaugh, and Judge in the process, are now five years in the past, but they are still very much with us. Anyone who stands between the leftist establishment and anything it wants is liable to be in for the same treatment. That’s what makes "The Devil’s Triangle" so important, and so enduring. It is a virtual guidebook to how the left operates today, and how the vaunted peaceful and tolerant side doesn’t hesitate to savage reputations and destroy lives in order to attain its goals. 

What happened to Mark Judge, and to Brett Kavanaugh, could happen to any of us. In fact, it has happened to me, to a lesser extent, in my being branded a “hate leader” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies for the crime of opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. What is termed “cancel culture” is actually a far larger and insidious phenomenon. People aren’t just being “canceled”; they’re being branded, defamed, marginalized, and destroyed, without any opportunity for appeal or recourse. Cross the machine, and the machine will cross you out. 

The foremost lesson of "The Devil’s Triangle" is that those who hold political and cultural power today are a conscienceless, remorseless claque of authoritarians who are operating a machine of defamation and destruction in order to attain and protect their own interests. If America is going to have even the remotest hope of surviving as a free society, that machine must be broken.

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