I had to remind people that most of official conservatism, or Conservatism, Inc. as it is sometimes called, is a gated community that doesn’t really have a taste for real battle. The people manning think tanks or legacy magazine are like the flaccid senate in the movie 300, diddling and pontificating and lecture-circuiting and never-Trumping while back home a small group of soldiers goes out to meet a threat. 

The 300 get wiped out, but their sacrifice inspires the lazy asses back home to rise up and defeat their enemies.

Will Trump’s defeat in a Stasi show trial awaken America? For the past five years I have been warning anyone who would listen that the American Left has become a version of the East German Stasi, the dreaded secret police under communism. The ”Devil’s Triangle” of the press, politicians/lawmakers and opposition researchers would stop at nothing to attain their goals - including destroying Donald Trump.

I was told I was paranoid, caught up in my own drama, and to get over it. 

Now my warnings are validated: there is a direct connection between my “drama” and what just happened to President Trump, who got convicted in New York for - well, something. Nobody can really explain it. 

In 2018 the Washington Post published an article in which Christine Blasey Ford, a psychologist in California, tried to destroy my life. With the help of the media and opposition researchers, Ford claimed that Kavanaugh, who had been nominated for the Supreme Court and was about to be voted out of committee, had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school at Georgetown Prep in 1982. Ford claimed that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place and that I witnessed everything before jumping in and breaking it up.

The entire thing was a set up. The plan was to tie me, a former drinker with a rebellious past, to Brett. They wanted to, as the ubiquitous talking point at the time put it, attach us at the hip. They accused me and Brett of drugging and gang raping girls, a charge brought by disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti. Avenatti also kicked off the Stormy Daniels scam against President Trump.

The plot against us failed. I have since written a book about it (The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi) and launched a GoFundMe for interested supporters. The reaction from grass roots conservatives has been good.

The plot against President Trump has succeeded. The president was just found guilty in a kangaroo court.

 For the past five years, I have been told to pipe down and stop making the argument that what they tried on me and Brett they would do to you - and Trump. Official conservatism has been oblivious. They are out of touch with the dish washers of the world. 

National Review editor Charles Cooke wrote an engaging piece that reveals this. “Our Illiberal Moment” argues that Americans are losing the virtues that are necessary to sustain a democratic republic. Those virtues are humility, tolerance and forbearance, and the modern totalitarian Left has no regard for them 

Cooke recounts the 2018 attack on Brett Kavanaugh, when a mob formed and attempted to disregard due process and the presumption of innocence. Cooke then offers this: “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.”

Sometime soon? In fact those “hideous standards” were already  deployed against someone without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards. 

That person was me.

In 2018 I became Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, a man who is accused of a crime but isn’t told who, what, where or how the crime was committed. The novel’s opening sentence still haunts me: “Somebody must have slandered Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”  In October 2018, as my name was still on the cable shows, critic John M. Ellis wrote a perceptive essay on Kafka. The great Czech author, observed Ellis, “saw something that the Enlightenment philosophers didn’t: that even after they have persuaded everyone to be guided by reason, human nature will not have changed. Those people who are now supposedly on a better path will still be essentially as they were before. The irrational side of their nature will not have gone away: it will just find another way of expressing itself. It will co-opt reason and employ it in the service of the same drives, ambitions, and even foolishness that were there all along.”

In short, without law, virtues, and due process, people become like wolves. The first I heard of Ford’s accusation was not from a politician, despite the fact that Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office had a letter that Ford had sent to her in July, nor from law enforcement, which would have been the most obvious and responsible route. 

No, I got a call from Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker. Farrow asked me about “sexual misconduct in the 1980s” involving myself and Brett Kavanaugh. Allahpundit put it well: “Judge apparently found out he was named in the letter when Ronan Farrow called to ask about it. Farrow offered no details about when the incident supposedly happened or where, or even the name of the woman. Judge has been accused of participating in an attempted rape with a would-be Supreme Court justice, in other words, and can’t even get the basic facts of the allegation provided to him. It’s Kafkaesque.”

There are few people who know how deep or dark the hit on me was. There were extortionate phone calls, indefatigable press mobs, declarations by supposedly responsible people braying that guilt or innocence didn't matter, and some truly terrifying episodes involving honey traps, people following me, and vile threats.

Now they’ve come for Trump. Everyone who had ignored me for five years is just shocked, shocked.

In fact, the “hideous standards” that Cooke warns about in his National Review piece, the Kafkaesque nightmare that comes for a normal person, already came for one, in spades. 

Hopefully the 300 didn’t die in vain.