Maureen Dowd went viral this week for a column blasting the woke cult. According to Dowd, the “identitarian” policies of the Left, or liberalism’s propensity to reduce everyone and everything to race and Marxist archetypes, cost Kamala Harris the election. Americans, Dowd wrote, are sick and tired of wokeness, which “alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.” Americans of all races got tired of being told they are racist, sexist, and colonialist.
Dowd then offered this from Rahm Emanuel: “When the woke police come at you, you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”
Like the rest of the mainstream media, Dowd’s a hypocrite. Six years ago she was happy to pronounce people guilty with no trial and no Miranda rights and no due process. Specifically, I’m wondering if Dowd has the courage to take back her hits on Brett Kavanaugh and me. Dowd declared Kavanaugh guilty in 2018. When Kavanaugh was accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault at a 1982 party when they were teenagers, Dowd tossed aside due process. She was the worst of the woke.
Dowd’s strategy was to compare Blasey Ford to Anita Hill, and claim that the conservative media was unfairly smearing Ford. “We are still watching a bookish university professor from the West,” Dowd wrote, “who tried to anonymously report an alleged blight on the character of a man about to ascend to a lifetime of power, get smeared as a demanding, mixed-up, uptight, loony fantasist.” You’ve gotta love that “bookish university professor from the West” bit.
“Dr. Blasey is dealing with some demonic forces not in play with Professor Hill,” Dowd wrote. “A vicious partisan internet that drove her out of her house and being discredited not merely by the White House but personally by a president who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault, who has consistently defended predators such as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Roy Moore, and who is advised by the same man who enabled Ailes’s loathsome behavior at Fox News.”
Like the rest of her media colleagues, Dowd has shown no interest in the other side of the story. In 2018 I was dragged into the Kavanaugh battle when Christine Blasey Ford claimed I was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her. I have no memory of the alleged attack. Moreover, I have a lot of evidence that suggests that the Blasey claim was, as Kavanaugh said, a well-funded and orchestrated political hit.
I’ve written about this for six years and in 2022 published a book about it: The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. Earlier this year Blasey Ford published her own book, One Way Back. The New York Times reviewed Blasey Ford’s book—they wouldn’t review mine. In her review of the Ford book, Alexandra Jacobs says that reading Ford’s book, “one longs for more about Mark Judge.” So the Times is longing for me but won’t review my book.
On the night of September 14, 2018, I got a call from Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker. Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court on July 9. Farrow was calling to tell me that Brett and I had been named in a letter claiming “sexual misconduct in the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me who the accuser was, or where it allegedly happened—only that it was "sometime in the 1980s." A September 16 piece in the Washington Post followed. In it Ford claimed that Brett sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in 1982. Post reporter Emma Brown interviewed Leland Keyser, a childhood friend of Ford’s whom Ford claimed was at the party. Keyser denied it and denied even knowing Kavanaugh. Brown left that out of her article. Maureen Dowd lamented "the merciless pummeling of a woman who dares to obstruct the glide path of a conservative Supreme Court nominee.” Merciless pummeling? Reporters were hunting me wherever I went, breaking into my car, and using as sources people who never laid eyes on me or Kavanaugh.
Six years ago I wrote my first article about what happened and challenged the narrative Dowd and her colleagues pushed. In it I noted that for the entire summer of 2018 Ford was working with an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. According to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, written by New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, Koegler had “spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties… and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.”
In six years no reporter or columnist has picked up the phone to ask Koegler if this is true. (They don’t even care to ask who was paying Michael Avenatti.)
Maureen Dowd is trash. She’s happy to ruin lives but couldn’t care less about the truth. Koegler and others had set things up, and the next step was preordained: hit me with an unexpected allegation (Farrow) and get me to start talking. Then entangle my life, which has included a struggle with alcoholism when I was younger, with the life of Brett Kavanaugh, who had a much different journey than me. It was an oppo research hit whose lynchpin was me crumbling, babbling, and using my life to take my friend down, even if he had nothing to do with my struggles. Reading accounts of Ford’s behavior it becomes clear why she never went to the police or released her therapist’s notes (which never mention Kavanaugh) and why she kept asking for delays. She was waiting for me to crack.
On September 24, 2018, I received a sinister phone message from a California number. A reptilian voice on the other end told me I was about to be messed with (the caller used more colorful language), and then abruptly shifted to a slightly softer tone: “Hey, give me a call. We’ll work something out.” This was flat-out extortion, witness-tampering, Mafia-style strong-arming.
It was around this time that Dowd wrote a lengthy essay, “Of Monuments, Arguments, Vampires and Thanksgiving.” Dowd’s brother Kevin had been a basketball coach at Georgetown Prep. He’d coached Brett, praising his work ethic and amiability. “They stayed friends for the next 35 years,” Dowd wrote, “and he sometimes referred to Kavanaugh as ‘half a rung below my own sons.’ Kevin gave interviews to The Wall Street Journal and The Times, describing how the teenage Kavanaugh willed himself to be a better shooting guard and showed leadership on the basketball court.”
However, Blasey Ford caused a rupture in the Dowd clan, with all of them except for Maureen believing Kavanaugh. Dowd: “My sister told me that if I sided with Blasey, Kevin would cancel our trip west. I disagreed with Democrats who said that women should automatically be believed. Think about Rolling Stone and the ‘Jackie’ story it entirely retracted because it was based on a made-up account of gang rape and some of the later Kavanaugh accusers whose stories fell apart. But women have an absolute right not to be disbelieved without further examination.”
That further examination came with a series of articles I wrote, then my book, and then a documentary on Fox News and then a piece by Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post, which criticized the media for ignoring my story and research.
So now, in 2024, with the election results in and the Democrats and the media in tatters, Maureen Dowd has arrived to condemn the woke. Will she apologize for leading the same mob in 2018?