“A spirit of hatred born on a dark wind.” This is how J.R.R. Tolkien describes Sauron, the evil Dark Lord in his masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. Sauron is not just a physical body but a spirit, and one that can reform itself after being vanquished. The Silmarillion describes how Sauron’s spirit fled to Mordor after his body was destroyed. Sauron “dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is the Sauron not of Middle Earth but of America, and he is also trying to reform himself after being vanquished. Last week Whitehouse issued a report that alleges the investigation six years ago into allegations of sexual assault by then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was “flawed and incomplete.” Whitehouse criticized the FBI for not “following up” on thousands of tips it received, and instead passing them along to the White House. “The supplemental background investigation was flawed and incomplete, as the FBI did not follow up on numerous leads that could have produced potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information,” the report said.

 Sauron, it seems, is trying to reemerge. It won’t be easy. “We followed the normal procedures for a Supreme Court nominee to do his background investigation,” Mike Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to former Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), told Fox News. “And the Senate does its own investigation.”

Davis noted that Democrats in the Senate “refused to cooperate” during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. “We had witnesses come in for live testimony, including Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh,” he pointed out. “They came in for live testimony. And the Senate Democrats are saying that the FBI didn’t investigate all the tips that came in.”

“There were thousands and thousands and thousands of tips that came in,” he added. “Those tips were printed. Every one of those tips was printed, and it was delivered to the Senate for every senator to review.” Every senator had access to all the tips, Davis explained, “but they could have also asked for an investigation or “done the investigation themselves with their own staff.” Most of the tips were “garbage.”

When the Whitehouse report was issued, I did something counterintuitive for me—I held back my anger and called someone older and wiser to ask for some advice. I was tired of being dragged into this nightmare, tired of throwing facts and counterpunches for six years. Yet my sense of honor told me that when it came up, I had to defend myself—even if the left is still too cowardly to face me or my arguments. The person I consulted, one of my best editors and an old friend, gave it to me straight: “At this point,” he said, “you can come across as shrill and defensive. People don’t have honor anymore to face people calling them out. It probably doesn’t even do much good to call them out. They don’t care. Your book can speak for itself.” I then told him what Whitehouse aka Sauron was conjuring. “Well,” he said. “That’s different. He’s the head of the Nazgul.”

My friend had referred to my book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. It reveals how I was slimed during the Kavanaugh hearing. Lies were told, I lost jobs, a girlfriend, it even chipped away at my mental health. The political left tried to destroy Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine. Using opposition research, extortion threats from criminals, and even an attempted honey trap, the left tried to make me the nomination about me. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when we were all in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room when it happened. 

The media was complicit. The Washington Post withheld information from an exonerating witness from their explosive first story about Ford. NBC’s Kate Snow withheld damaging facts about Michael Avenatti, whose fever dreams of drugs and gang rapes were touted by New York magazine as the end of Kavanaugh. Avenatti is now in jail for extortion and other crimes. 

Leland Keyser, a woman Ford claimed was at this infamous party, not only denied even knowing Kavanaugh but said she was pressured by Ford’s “team” to change her story. In fact, the real story is one about witness tampering. Senator Whitehouse is not interested in any of that.

Whitehouse is our Sauron—however many times you defeat him, he will dissolve into his hole in Mordor, Capitol Hill, and reconstitute himself. In 2018 I was like Frodo, minding my own business when the Ring of Power fell into my lap. Rather than hand it over to the nine Nazgul on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I carried it and destroyed it.

Part of my trauma is reliving the events of 2018 long after the fact, with my psyche and body reacting as if it is happening all over again, no matter how much time has passed. It’s like the evil Morgul-knife that a Nazgul uses to wound Frodo. Even after the wound is treated, years later Frodo can still feel some pain. Just this weekend, Robin Abcarian at the Los Angeles Times, fired up by the Whitehouse report, wrote that during Ford’s assault I was “inebriated and laughing” and that my book Wasted “chronicles an alcohol addiction that nearly killed him.” The orcs never sleep.

Abcarian and Whitehouse were cheered by Jackie Calmes, a journalist at The Los Angeles Times and the author of Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. In Dissent, Calmes writes this: “Kavanaugh’s close friend and football teammate Mark Judge would provide a revealing window into the guys’ attitude toward the non-Catholic girls, writing in his ‘underground’ student newspaper The Unknown Hoya that Holton Arms … ‘is the home of the most worthless excuse for human females.’ A Holton girl was an ‘H.H.,’ he wrote: Holton Hosebag.”

There’s only one problem. I did not write those words. Editors don’t write all the articles in their publications—not even editors of rambunctious high school underground newspapers. Calmes also says that FBI “agents spoke with Judge more than once.” This is false. I spoke to the FBI exactly once.

Calmes then uses as a source a writer named Mike Sacks. I’ve never met Mike Sacks. Mike Sacks didn’t know any of my friends. Mike Sacks did not go to the same school that my friends and I attended. Mike Sacks was profiled in The Washington Post in October 2018 because the Post could not find anyone who knew us and who wanted to talk to them. “For the record,” the Post noted, “Sacks didn’t go to Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, the school Kavanaugh and Judge attended. He went to public school. He didn’t belong to a country club, just the neighborhood pool.” (For the record: my family never belonged to a country club. My parents were not fans of them. I have never belonged to one.)

On Oct. 2, 2018, Dwight Garner, a book critic for the New York Times, reviewed my book Wasted—the same one that is still being used against me. Calmes cites this line about me from Garner’s review: “Wasted is the story of a privileged young white man, a cocky princeling among cocky princelings.” It’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.”

Garner’s quote got chopped because the mission of the media, our American Stasi, both in 2018 and now, is to spread lies and ruin people who oppose the left. Part of that mission is to quash any intimation that anyone on the right might be a complex human being worthy of empathy. This is why The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post all refuse to review The Devil’s Triangle. I cannot be seen as human. Jackie Calmes is careful not to quote Dwight Garner’s conclusion about my book Wasted: “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.’”

And with that, I leave Sauron to Mordor. I am going West, to the Grey Havens, to go surfing.