A New York Times Book Reviewer “Longs” for Me. So Why Won’t She Touch My Book?
It’s the Bizarro World of book reviews.
The New York Times recently gave Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk, a terrible book I wrote in 1997, a review. At the same time they are refusing to touch The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi, a superior and even historically important work, which was published in 2022.
Making it even weirder still, Times book reviewer Alexandra Jacobs recently wrote that she “longs for more about Mark Judge.” Yet she won’t touch my most recent book.
Long no longer, girl. Here I am.
Let me explain. In September of 2018 Brett Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine, was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. In an attempt to take him down, the left came after me. They tried to attach us at the hip, accusing Brett and me of drugging girls, gang rape, fights on boats in Rhode Island, and generally debauchery. The plot failed, and I reveal its slimy underbelly in the book The Devil’s Triangle.
The Times, like the Washington Post, refuses to touch The Devil’s Triangle. Even the failing Bezos Post did not have one of their book reviewers claim to want to know more about me even as an entire book I wrote is sitting on the shelves. Jacobs’ line appears in her review of One Way Back, a recent book by Christine Blasey Ford. Ford famously and falsely accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high school party in 1982, and claimed that I was in the room when it happened. I spent several years debunking Ford’s claim and exposing the truth in The Devil’s Triangle.
While it’s appalling and pathetic that the Washington Post will not review my book, it’s just bizarre that New York Times critic Jacobs is expressing a yearning for me in the body of her review of Christine Blasey Ford’s One Way Back. Jacobs is praising Ford and seeking out more information on me while my very book, which contains much autobiography, is mere seconds and one click away on her computer. This is like a journalist going to Rome, wandering the streets, and wondering aloud why she can’t find some information about the Catholic Church.
Compounding this strangeness is the fact that in 2018 the New York Times reviewed Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk, a book I wrote in 1997. It’s not a good book, I should not have written it, and it makes me squirm today. In fact, Times reviewer Dwight Garner liked it more than I did. His conclusion: “It’s moving when Judge finally admits he has a problem and gets the help he needs. Reading the end of Wasted, I felt the way the theater producer Joseph Papp reportedly did when he first read The Normal Heart, the AIDS-era play by Larry Kramer. Papp said, ‘This is one of the worst things I have ever read, and I’m crying.’”
Of course, there’s an easy explanation for Jacobs’ unrequited love for me. To read The Devil’s Triangle is to risk losing one’s faith in the orthodoxy of #MeToo and the liberal narrative. They simply cannot risk encountering the idea that me and Brett Kavanaugh were set up by politicians, opposition researchers, and outright criminals like Michael Avenatti (remember him?). They even used the stories in Wasted against us. This is why Stasi journalists had to butcher even Garner’s faint praise of Wasted. This was done by the awful Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times. In her error-driven book Dissent, Calmes uses as a source a man who by his own admission has never laid eyes on me, Brett Kavanaugh, or anyone from Georgetown Prep. Calmes then uses this line about me from Garner’s review: “Wasted is the story of a privileged young white man, a cocky princeling among cocky princelings.”
That’s only half of the sentence. Here is the full quote: “Wasted is the story of a privileged young white man, a cocky princeling among cocky princelings, who loses his virginity, loses his religion, loses his lunch and nearly loses his mind. These things happen to a cassette-powered soundtrack by AC/DC, The Clash, Eurythmics, R.E.M. and The Replacements.”
So let’s see if I have this straight. The New York Times will review a bad book I wrote in 1997, offer it some faint praise, then have that faint praise butchered by a reporter – who is walking arsenic – for the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times (and Los Angeles Times and Washington Post) will then all refuse to touch The Devil’s Triangle, a 2022 book that has important historical and cultural meaning and answers every question the Stasi media bombarded me with in 2018. Then, in the copy of a different book entirely that attacks me, New York Times reviewer Alexandra Jacobs expresses longing for me. She is the same reviewer who refuses to download my book and read it.
Adhering to leftist orthodoxy can sure get confusing.
Maybe if I send Alexandra a review copy? I’ll even sign it.
Read the full article here