In 2023, shortly after the Sundance Film Festival, I spiked a movie from a major Hollywood director. The movie, Justice, is about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his crazy nomination in 2018. The director of Justice is Doug Liman, who kept its existence a secret for years before premiering it at Sundance to a sold-out theater surrounded by guards.
How I spiked Justice and how conservatives should create art in its place is the central cultural question of our time. Hot Air readers know I’m doing my part by planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival. Yet to build culture takes resources and funding. To be honest, I’m tired of being in the trenches fighting for art without any help from conservatives who cry for the kind of cultural change I’m attempting but offer no support for that change. They need to stop talking and writing white papers and start writing checks.
In November of 2022, weeks before the documentary Justice premiered at Sundance, I got a text from Doug Liman. Liman, the director of Justice, wanted me to come to New York, right away – like now – to be interviewed for a film he was working on. “I’m an 80s guy like you,” Liman cajoled me. “I’m doing a documentary about Brett Kavanaugh.”
I knew who Liman was. He’s a successful director of the Bourne movies starring Matt Damon. He did a remake of Roadhouse for Amazon starring Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s a filmmaker who has worked with Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow and American Made. The latter is the story of Barry Seal, a real-life Louisiana TWA pilot-turned-drug smuggler for the Medellin Cartel who got rich in the 1970s and 1980s before turning DEA informer. American Made is for people who find Oliver Stone too subtle. Liman called the film “a fun lie based on a true story.”
Why was Liman interested in me? Because I played a role in the battle of 2018, when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford said that in 1982 I was in the room when she was assaulted by a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. Ford could not remember the time or place of the alleged incident, and her claim was rebuked by people Ford said had been at the party. I wrote a book about my experience: The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. I reveal what conservatives know – that the media, opposition researchers and Hollywood form an American Stasi, similar to the old East German secret police. They use extortion, intimidation, and personal threats to destroy the lives of others, ignoring any facts that point away from their narrative.
I told Liman and crew to get bent.
As I wrote recently on Hot Air, I don’t write about these things to relive them or to cash in. I do so because the left would like America to forget them, and we shouldn’t. More importantly, I do so in order to move forward and build conservative culture and institutions. Had I not euthanized Justice, the movie, it would have played and spread a lot of lies. We should replace it with our own vision.
It was a surprise in 2023 when Liman was frantically contacting me – how did he get my number anyway? I quickly realized it was because he did not anticipate my book. When The Devil’s Triangle was published in November 2022, Liman and crew were deep into completing Justice. My book is full of facts that the left and Hollywood do not want exposed. I reveal extortion attempts, death threats, and a honey trap. I was in their blind spot. They tried to get me to New York, “all expenses paid,” and gaslight me. It reminded me of when Ronan Farrow called me in September 2018 to tell me that I was in a letter accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, but Farrow could not say who the accuser was, or where it allegedly happened – only that it had taken place “in the 1980s.”
Liman and his associate Amy Herdy – who has been criticized for omitting key facts from previous documentaries – talk about the “bravery” of the people who spoke to them for Justice, implying that there was a campaign in 2018 to keep people quiet. In fact, the campaign was to get people to lie. As Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said after seeing the FBI report, “Anybody who thinks this is a search for the truth and not about politics ought to put down the bong.” Michael Avenatti, who charged that I and Brett presided over ten high school parties where girls were drugged and gang raped, is now serving time in prison for extortion.
When I got a call from one of Liman’s producers after the film screened at Sundance and did not find a distributor, I spent about 30 minutes blasting him and their ridiculous movie. Justice does not include an interview with Leland Keyser. Keyser is Ford’s friend who was allegedly at the party where the assault took place. In 2019, Keyser revealed to Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, two reporters for the New York Times, that she did not believe Ford’s story. Further, Keyser said she felt threatened to change her story. “We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or any others like it,” Pogrebin and Kelly reported in their book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.“In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy. ‘I don’t have any confidence in the story.’”
Also not in Justice is the fact that Blasey Ford’s father apologized to Brett’s father.
I laid out all of these facts to Liman and his producers. They realized they’re in trouble. There was no way they could make their movie without me and my book, and yet The Devil’s Triangle destroyed the premise of their movie. That’s why Justice will never be seen. When the conversation reached its boiling point, I yelled that they could not show this movie without revealing that I was being extorted and that there was witness tampering going on. The producer asked me who was doing these things. I told him the names. He said nothing. He was toast.
The death of Justice is an opportunity for conservatives. Why not make a film of The Devil’s Triangle? It has everything – politics, courtroom drama, sex, skateboarding, Jesuits, and 1980s flashbacks. Me and a couple of other writers have even crafted a 20-page treatment outlining how we see the movie. Failing that, conservatives can get behind the Anti-Communist Film Festival. It would have a major cultural impact for a small investment.
In October 2024 Ryan Anderson, the present of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, published an essay in First Things, “The Way Forward After Dobbs.” outlines what is needed after the overturning or Roe v Wade to truly create a culture of life in the Western world – to actually transform Western culture into one that respects life, marriage, and a culture that elevates. In order to create a better culture, Anderson writes:
We now need culture-forming, opinion-shaping organizations. What might this entail? We might task a small group with studying how other groups have succeeded in their domains, and devising a plan for meaningful reforms in new areas. What the Federalist Society did to reform the judiciary, and what Alliance Defending Freedom has done to create a generation of elite socially conservative lawyers through its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, we need to create for other culture-shaping institutions. This is a daunting task. But if the real root causes of abortion are the sexual practices in which Americans have been habituated for generations, then post-Roe America needs institutions to combat the sexual revolution with the same sophistication that the conservative legal movement brought to overturning Roe.
He goes on:
Some of this work will be intellectual, and conservatives tend to start there: Ideas have consequences. But ideas aren’t the only things that have consequences. So, too, do social practices, habits, virtues and vices, the movies and TV shows we watch, the music we listen to, and the events the youth ministry and young adult groups sponsor. Our cultural incrementalism can be broad-spectrum: new TV shows and movies that aren’t hokey after-school specials, policies to protect kids from the harms of social media and online pornography, effective church ministries. The task is enormous. But we haven’t devoted enough time, treasure, or sophistication to it. We can learn from the fact that America waged a successful campaign against teen pregnancy, but the result wasn’t more marital pregnancies. What would a campaign for marriage look like?
Anderson concludes that “the next Robert George, Hadley Arkes, Brad Wilcox, Mark Regnerus, or Leon Kass will not spontaneously emerge. They must be sought out and supported. All of this will require funding.”
Yes, it will require funding – and to be blunt, it will require funding of people like me. Too many conservatives in elite positions do not get this -that we need punk rock warriors, not just philosophers.
In October 2020, when I was struggling after the Kavanaugh nightmare, the conservative scholar Joseph Bottom sent out a tweet. “The treatment of @markgjudge was awful, and the failure of those who published him to defend him was among the most despicable — so he ends up washing dishes.” Bottom was responding to the news that I had taken a job washing dishes. Writing in National Review in 2021, editor Charles C.W. Cooke recounts the 2018 attack on Kavanaugh:“Sometime soon, the hideous standards that were crafted and reinforced by those attempting to bring down Kavanaugh will be used against someone with no power, money, name recognition, or institutional backing.” In fact those “hideous standards” were already deployed against someone without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards. That person was me.
Outside of the corridors of conservative power, shunned by a lot of conservative media, I spiked a Hollywood hit job and launched an Anti-Communist Film Festival. It’s probably just the 1980s do-it-yourself punk rock kid in me, but conservatives need to stop talking and writing white papers and start supporting the 300 Spartans in the trenches.
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