Dave Portnoy said he “smelled a rat.” Portnoy, the head of Barstool Sports , had been approached by a writer at the left-wing website Slate who wanted to write a piece about him. Despite the writer being “very complimentary,” Portnoy knew what was up .
Of course, Portnoy was right. The Slate article was a hit piece. What’s impressive about this episode, however, is Portnoy’s level of media literacy. He knew Slate was untrustworthy from the get-go.
ALL EYES ON RON: PRESSURE MOUNTS ON DESANTIS AHEAD OF FIRST GOP DEBATEThirty years ago, Portnoy may have naively trusted the reporter. Yet things have changed. Conservatives have altered the media culture. With books, websites, publishing houses, podcast hosts, and a strong X, formerly known as Twitter, presence, the Right has educated the public on the many reasons not to trust the media. Portnoy is an example of this.
It’s a major sea change and one that conservatives should be proud of. It’s easy to forget just how bad things once were. Before the internet, we were stuck with three network channels and liberal newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. If they lied about you, a million people saw it, and there was very little you could do about it. You could write a letter to the editor, which no one would see.
Things are different now. People know the media are crooked, and their victims can not only survive but get the truth out.
I have personal experience with this. On Nov. 17, 2018, Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post sent my lawyer an email. Marcus, a far-left writer at the Washington Post, wanted an interview with me. I had just survived a major political explosion, and I told my lawyer I wanted nothing to do with Marcus and the Washington Post.
The Marcus email read as follows:
Hi, I know this is a long shot but I’m on leave from my job as columnist/deputy editorial page editor at The Post to write a book about Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh and I wanted to ask about the prospect of speaking with Mark Judge. My pitch is: there are going to be a number of books about and continued interest in what did or didn’t happen. I am truly hopeful that what I produce will both interest contemporary readers and serve as the definitive, at least initially, historical account. I am open-minded about what transpired and determined to write as full and fair a book as possible. To that end, it would obviously be great from my point of view to hear directly from Mr. Judge, but perhaps there is some way in which it might serve his interest as well to have his perspective more fully related than was possible or advisable in the heat of the moment. I’d be happy to talk about this further, and of course to speak, with you or him, on whatever basis is most comfortable. My cell is [redacted] and I appreciate your consideration,
Best,
Ruth
Marcus wanted to ask me about being at the center of an opposition research hit that was put out on Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Brett and I had gone to high school together, and a woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982, when he and I were 17. She claimed I was in the room when it happened.
Of course, like Portnoy, I smelled a rat. Marcus had no interest in serving my interests. However, I knew that, unlike in the past, there is now conservative media where I can go to tell my story. My book The Devil’s Triangle was published last November. The legacy media, which do not come off very well in the book, have ignored it.
In 2019, Marcus published Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover. While Marcus won’t acknowledge my book, I read hers (conservatives are always open to hearing liberal arguments — it’s never the other way around). Reading Supreme Ambition revealed something that has bothered me for a while. Shortly after Brett was nominated in July 2018, Ford thought she “would call Mark Judge,” Marcus claims. She would convince me, Marcus writes, to “call Kavanaugh and advise him to spare his family the ordeal.” According to Marcus, Ford “found Judge’s twitter handle.”
I was a working journalist who was all over social media. However, Marcus claimed Ford “wasn’t sure how to go about contacting [Judge].” What? Ford didn’t know how to contact me, a published author and journalist with a visible social media presence?
There’s more. At the same time she mysteriously couldn’t contact me, Ford was using a friend as an opposition researcher. So, while Ford looked up my Twitter handle but “didn’t know how to contact” me, she was at that moment using someone to dig into my work and track everything I did.
How do you not know how to contact someone you are having probed?
The oppo researcher’s name is Keith Koegler . He is a friend of Ford’s and is described in the book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation. It was written by two New York Times reporters, Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin. From the book: “A tech industry lawyer, Koegler was a voracious reader and a technical thinker. In his second-floor home office, he’d spent many hours that summer [2018] 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.”
Again: How can you not know how to contact someone you are at that very moment having researched?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICADoes Marcus have an answer to this question? Of course not. Her mind was made up about me and Ford’s bogus allegations before she ever wrote my lawyer.
Thankfully, in the last three decades, conservatives have changed the consciousness of the people. Like Dave Portnoy, most people now smell the rat.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.