One of The Stream’s top writers, Mark Judge, achieved something nobody on our staff yet has: a one-on-one interview with Martha McCallum on Fox Nation. Sadly, the subject wasn’t his thoughtful essays on popular culture, literature, and faith, but a new book by Christine Blasey Ford and his own book, The Devil’s Triangle. In it, Judge comprehensively debunks the unsupported charges Ford made during U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings that at some point in the 1980s he tried to rape her, with Judge as an accomplice. Judge’s book is also a masterful dissection of media bias, and a poignant memoir of growing up in Ronald Reagan’s America, which seems like a far distant country to all of us now.

John Zmirak: With Christine Blasey Ford doing a book tour, you recently went on Fox Nation with Martha McCallum to give your side of the story about the allegations she made during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Given that you’ve tried to preserve your own privacy and dignity through all that, how did it feel opening up to a mainstream media venue about what happened to you?

Mark Judge: I really didn’t want to do it. In fact, I resisted for a long time. You have to understand … people I love suffer whenever this comes up. Because Christine Blasey Ford did not have the decency to make her case quietly to the legal authorities — which would have been safer for everyone involved — it caused a lot of destruction. I didn’t want to relive that. Yet when her book came out and was being promoted with all this deference and fluff, I just couldn’t take it any more. As the courageous Kathleen Parker noted in her piece in The Washington Post, we’ve been hearing Ford’s stories for years, but still with absolutely zero corroboration. Enough is enough. I spent years researching my book, collecting the actual facts. I was tired of all those facts being ignored.

JZ: The Stream was one of the first places to suggest that pro-abortion activists desperate to stop Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination chose you as the “fall guy” precisely because you admitted to a few memory lapses in your addiction memoir Wasted. They thought you’d be the perfect “unreliable witness” whom senators could “discredit” and pillory with opposition research.

Furthermore, the only concrete details Christine Blasey Ford could offer in her narrative were those her researchers had mined from your book. Let me ask you: Have you gone back and reread Wasted? Can you bear to read it now, knowing how it was used against you, your friends, and the integrity of the Supreme Court?

Wasted is a bad book, so no, I haven’t revisited it. I wrote it in a month when I had been sober for about two months. I also think their opposition research of me went far beyond that book. They were looking at everything I’ve ever written. Or watched. Or said. Still, it’s not great when young people are taught to not freely think and read and write, even if they could produce a mediocre book. Fear isn’t conducive to art.

What was it like to watch Julie Swetnick recounting completely made-up stories during the confirmation hearings about a pattern of gang rapes at D.C. area parties in which you and Brett Kavanaugh were allegedly involved? What got you through that experience?

At first it was funny. My lawyer called me and told me the accusation and I laughed. It was like saying I had been seen on Mars. Then the media began to report on it seriously, and it became a horror movie. I was actually happy when [Swetnick] said she had filed a police report. This never happened, so of course there is nothing to report. Only one reporter paid to get a copy of that fictitious report, then withdrew the order when Swetnick changed her story yet again. What a horror show. On the serious side … it was demonic.

The America We Have Lost

The Devil’s Triangle isn’t just about the Ford perjury narrative. It also is a reflection on the America of the 1980s, how free it felt, how fun — and what we have lost in the meantime. Can you speak to that?

I think it was the last time people, especially young people, had frequent mystical experiences that connected them to God. There were no cell phones, and computers were primitive. When you went out clubbing at night or to church or to the beach, you could spend hours and hours with just other people, sounds of nature, the moon, the cross. Chesterton said that “mysticism keeps us sane.” I think we were a lot more sane and happy then. We would go to the beach for a week in high school and no one could get in touch with us. We had to fend for ourselves. Of course the music was amazing.

The first time you wrote about the experience of being the drive-by victim of a pro-abortion campaign to control the Supreme Court was on The Stream — and you’ve been one of our top writers since then. If you had your druthers, what would you like to write about in the future, instead of all this?

I still write about the stuff I like: skateboarding, movies, books, music, and how God is revealed in those things. I never stopped writing about those things. Thanks to The Stream for giving me that platform. Still, the economics of journalism are not good now. It’s probably time to hang it up for something else. If people want to help me keep writing, they know what to do.

How Do You Keep Your Cool?

In the Fox interview, and in every conversation we’ve had about this case, you have managed to keep a cool head. You don’t show the kind of incandescent rage that I (for instance) would have experienced and vented, if this had been done to me. What are your feelings about Christine Blasey Ford? 

The thing that is still so enraging is that it simply didn’t have to be this way. If Ford had a complaint, it would have been better for all involved had she simply gone through the proper legal channels to address it in private. It even would have been easier for her. She could have spoken freely and at length with investigators, rather than in five-minute increments in the Stalinist freak show we ended up with. In months of research I found so much that is false, phony, made-up, and malicious about her story that I stay cool to just try and get the facts out there.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.