I have a challenge for Politics and Prose, the famous bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Sell my book. That’s it. That’s the challenge.

Of course, Politics and Prose would never carry my book. The Left cries a river about the banning of books while refusing to see or read books that challenge their political orthodoxy.

P & P advertises itself as open-minded, diverse (of course), LGBTQ, and, most elementally, against the banning of books. Every year they virtue signal about “Banned Books Week.” Former President Barack Obama shops at Politics and Prose, and wrote an essay about the importance of reading what you want: “That’s why I’m celebrating Banned Books Week and the freedom to read with people across the country,” he said. “Because the ability to learn about each other and engage with different ideas doesn’t just open our minds and broaden our perspectives — it brings communities together and strengthens our democracy.”

Exactly. That’s why P & P should carry my book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi . It recounts the nightmare I lived in 2018 when the Democrats tried to draw me into the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. Using opposition researchers, lies, extortion attempts, and even an attempted honey trap, the Stasi Left tried to bury me and my high school friend. In it, I argue that these criminal and unconstitutional tactics are indeed a great threat to our democracy.

Of course, I am biased in favor of my own book. Still, one can objectively make the case that my book should not be blacklisted by the Left. I am a native Washingtonian. My grandfather was a professional baseball player for the Washington Senators. My father worked for National Geographic, a D.C. institution. My late brother won the Helen Hayes Award in 1986, given to the best actor in Washington, D.C. And in 2018, I was thrust into one of the most explosive political battles of the 21st century. Every media outlet in America wanted to talk to me. The Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times did hit pieces. Reporters harassed my friends and family.

My perspective is just as relevant and important as Ruth Marcus’s or Dahlia Lithwick’s, two former Politics and Prose speakers whose anti-Kavanaugh books were featured prominently in the store. Another speaker was Joan Biskupic, CNN Supreme Court reporter and the author of an anti-Kavanaugh book called Nine Black Robes.

My book is also one of the only honest retellings of Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle. Knowing that the Stasi media and the corrupt liberal politicians would lie about anything that came out of my mouth, I purposely controlled my own narrative. I wrote in detail about the criminality of those who tried to destroy Kavanaugh’s character — and mine.

It’s as good a case as any for a spot on a display row — especially at a liberal bookstore. Bookstores like P & P were once the fearless places where you were able to get edgy and bizarre books. When I was in college in D.C. in the 1980s, the big three cutting-edge books were Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

Importantly, in bookstores, you could also find books that had been banned in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: The Gulag Archipelago by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Darkness at Noon is still relevant today, as it depicts the victim of a Stalinist show trial who doesn’t even know the crimes he has been charged with. As Adam Kirsch observed in the New Yorker, “Its central theme will probably always seem timely, because every political creed must eventually face the question of whether noble ends can justify evil means. As Koestler saw, this problem reached its pure form in Communism because its avowed aim was the noblest of all: the permanent abolition of social injustice throughout the world.”

For the Left, that abolition of injustice now means censorship and book banning. They sic “sensitivity readers” on writers to tell them what they can and cannot put in their books. They even go through old books and bowdlerize them of anything “insensitive” about race, gender, and anything else.

So what about it, Politics and Prose? On your website you say you champion “books that have been banned or threatened with banning by a school district, library, or municipality.” What about a book that has been banned by your own bookstore?

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.