When I realized that President Trump had won a landslide re-election, I was struck by an unusual thought. I couldn’t stop thinking about The Unknown Hoya T-shirts.

These were T-shirts that I, along with my high school friend, Fletch, had commissioned for our 40^th class reunion in 2023. In the aftermath of the political storm that had consumed our Georgetown Prep class of 1983 during the  over the ordeal of our classmate, Brett Kavanaugh,, many of us considered it a good way to punch back. The Unknown Hoya was a little underground newspaper that a few of us had published together when we were in high school. The left, our American Stasi, stopped at nothing in its mission to smear and harm us, so we took delight in the opportunity to own our defiance.

That’s right: One of the things The Washington Post actually bothered to examine, in all of its overheated commentary, was the contents of The Unknown Hoya. Yes, there were stories about keg parties, rival girls’ schools, satire about teachers, and vulgarity. There was also some solid journalism here and there—indeed overall we were more accurate than The Washington Post. The Democrats used this little sheet, as well as our 1983 yearbook, to try and destroy us because of their determination to derail Brett’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. It was genuine madness.

When it was over, people told me to just leave the battle behind, that there was nothing to be gained from “poking the bear.”

The thing most people, even on the right, still don’t understand is that my ongoing defense of myself, Brett, our high school class, and the America of the 1980s has not just been about reliving a traumatic episode—even though it’s fair to say that it has been that, too. It’s been an attempt at assuring that future American generations stay free. 

The journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote that the insidiousness of the woke agenda isn’t just that it censors people, but that it causes atrophy in the muscles needed for   questioning things. The ever-present fear that one may say or do something in a way that might be considered offensive to the left makes people behave like serfs. Had the baseless accusations against me and Kavanaugh worked as intended, the precedent would have been a nightmare. Anyone could then be accused of anything by someone who couldn’t even designate the time or place of the alleged crime, and whose witnesses all denied it ever took place. Kids would be petrified of putting satire, jokes, or anything remotely edgy in their yearbooks—never mind cranking out an underground newspaper. There would be no punk rock, no challenging novels, and no serious movies. That’s not America.

Indeed, the fog of oppression made evident by the Kavanaugh hearings remained thick, even though Kavanaugh was eventually seated. The target just moved to another person’s back … or ear. Which brings me back to the T-shirts.

Approaching our 40^th class reunion, word got out that Fletch and I were ordering a couple hundred T-shirts with the old paper’s nameplate on the front. Our class responded with gusto, pinging us with nonstop orders for serval days. Others, however, were not so enthusiastic.

Some well-meaning but overly scrupulous friends, neighbors, and even journalistic colleagues—some of whom (allegedly) are even on the right—solemnly scolded us about the shirts. Sadly, some of the most pusillanimous voices have always been on the right. “You survived the Stasi assault on you and Kavanaugh. Leave it alone. Don’t provoke Sheldon Whitehouse,” they warned.

The Devil’s Triangle, my book about the Kavanaugh battle, was praised by Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker in the pages of The Washington Post. It was summarily ignored by National Review, the Bulwark, the Dispatch and other weak neocon platforms. At one point I was interviewed for an hour by two reporters at the Washington Free Beacon, but the piece never ran. The sole negative review appeared in The American Conservative—a piece that claimed I was obsessed with the Washington social pecking order. “They managed to describe you as the exact opposite of what you are,” a friend observed.

Finally, Fox News ended up producing a decent documentary—yet even that came only after one of my accusers wrote her own book. No prominent outlet on the right was interested in a full-throated defense of me or free speech just as a matter of principle. It was shameful. To them, the moment had passed, and it was time to move on.

This all gets to the heart of Matt Taibbi’s point and to why when Trump won, I immediately thought back to The Unknown Hoya shirts. We were adults living in America and were being warned about putting something on a T-shirt for a high school reunion. It was unreal. This is the “chilling effect” that liberals always used to warn about, excerpt now they are the oppressors. Ban a T-shirt today, ban a book or a band tomorrow. That’s where this was headed.

Of course we did the shirts. They were a huge hit at the reunion. One striking fact that mirrors the outcome of the election is how working-class friends and minorities loved the shirts, showing more courage and humor than the elites who told us to halt production. One old friend, a bartender named Rick who defended me in 2018, proudly wears his shirt and tells anyone who asks that he hates the media. Another woman I know, who was once Miss Latina D.C., informed me that in 2018 friends, colleagues, and strangers were approaching her and demanding that she lie about me—going so far as to suggest that she make up a story about me attacking her while a drunk. She refused and was appalled that the left had tried to destroy me in that way. She enthusiastically accepted her Unknown Hoya shirt. These were the people who went to the wall for me in 2018, regular Americans who saw what was in store for them if these other people triumphed.

Though it’s only been a week since Trump’s reelection, I’m already feeling freer. The censorious people who told us not to print up the shirts seem like craven anachronisms. They are like the German Stasi, reduced to a cowardly joke mere hours after communism collapsed and regular German citizens stormed their offices. Finally, at long last, I can take a breath. Future generations of Americans will be free to tell jokes, drink beer, produce smart-ass underground newspapers, and even tell offensive jokes. It’s a new day. The American Stasi is dead.