Here we go again. 

    Vanity Fair broke the news that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, was involved in a police investigation into an alleged sexual assault in 2017, local officials in California confirmed. When asked for response, Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer representing Hegseth, told CNN: “This statement confirms that although an allegation was made, it was fully investigated and no charges were filed.”

    It was years ago and investigated and no charges were filed. So why run with the story? Obviously, the smear and trash Pete Hegseth.

    I was also trashed by Vanity Fair, but to be honest they made me sound kinda awesome. It was during the 2018 maelstrom over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. As I deserve in my book The Devil’s Triangle, I went to high school with Kavanaugh and the American Stasi tried to knock Kavanaugh out with allegations that he and I were abusers and gang rapists who drugged girls. You would think after that media fiasco the press would know better than to report nothing where things had been fully investigated - although in the case of me and Kavanaugh investigating was difficult because the accusers, DNC activists all, could never name the time or place where our rampages allegedly occurred. The witnesses they named all said it was garbage.

    Some of the funniest coverage of me came in the pages of Vanity Fair. Writer Evgenia Peretz came up with this beauty to describe my high school heyday in the 1980s:

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. 

    Damn, I need to cut and paste that bad boy for a dating profile. I’m a beast. As one of my friends quipped, “Wow, part Mel Gibson, part Tom Cruise, part ape.”

    The VF piece also contains this absolutely astonishing passage: “To many Americans, Kavanaugh didn’t seem like a sexual predator—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he couldn’t give an inch of possible culpability. He couldn’t say, ‘I’m sorry for what I might have done.’”

    To anyone who has escaped a communist country, that excerpt is too real. It no longer matters if one is innocent or not. All that matters is if we submit to our liberal betters.

    The Vanity Fair piece also quoted a woman named Evie Shapiro who claimed to have gone to college with me at Catholic University. Only one problem: Evie Shapiro went to the University of Maryland. The Daily Wire found a lot more mistakes.

    The intent of the Vanity Fair piece was to make me sound dangerous. A similar tactic was used by New York Times fabulists Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, whose careers should have ended with their abysmal coverage. Their “reporting” was like those “my last day at Home Depot” videos that show a forklift driver demolishing multiple rows of product bays. 

    In their book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, Pogrebin and Kelly describe me in the 1980s as “tall and lean, with floppy hair, an angular jaw, and often, an antsy, searching expression. Dressed in his regulation sports jacket and necktie, he looked every bit the smart but insouciant schoolboy.” While to Vanity Fair I’m Jason Statham, to the Times I’m Angus Young.

    There’s only one problem - I’m not tall. I’m 5’ 8”, the height I’ve been since high school. That’s not “tall and lean,” but average height. I’ve also never had “floppy” hair and have always been athletic.

    It’s not a small thing. Getting my height wrong was, like the Vanity Fair Hollywood fantasy, intended to make me seem threatening. I wasn’t a normal teenage kid with insecurities who was more often than not terrified of girls. I was the Delta brothers in Animal House, a live grenade about to go off.

    It was a sinister and ridiculous attempt to make me and my friends into monsters. It was what so  much reporting is these days - the rage of the resentful, anger by the people who never lost their hatred of what Vanity Fair called “the kings of the school.” It makes no difference if some of those kings were just regular teens, like everyone else full of fear about life, love and sex. It doesn’t matter if you had a tender side and liked art and poetry and even cried whiny got your heart broken. Hey, didn’t Hitler play football?

         Vanity Fair hasn’t figured out that it’s not 2018 anymore. The American Stasi has been rejected.