We still don’t know for sure if it was a stripper or a belly dancer.
We do know, however, that the dancer who performed for our high school music teacher at a bachelor party in 1982 was part of the news cycle in 2018. That’s when the American political left and the Stasi media tried to destroy me.
That’s why I need to hire a stripper to do the audio version of my book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.
It’s not a prank. Getting a professional adult dancer to read The Devil’s Triangle would work aesthetically and as a broader cultural commentary on modern politics and media. It would defy the new liberal Stasi who buzzkill everything, and even make a few tight-ass conservatives who were afraid to defend me nervous.
Our 1982 bachelor party erupted in the news in 2018, during the nightmarish Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Opposition researchers—including a couple of disgruntled classmates from my time at Georgetown Prep—tried to sink Kavanaugh, a classmate of mine, by depicting me, him, and the entire class 1983, as party people and womanizers. They found a description of the 1982 bash with the stripper in something I’d written years before, and were off to the races. It was The Wild Life meets The Lives of Others. The Washington Post employed a reporter to find out if we’d hired a belly dancer or a stripper. There’s still a debate about that. I only remember the dancer as very pretty and nice.
I survived the 2018 hit and wrote a book about the experience. The Devil’s Triangle recently got some media attention when I was interviewed by Martha MacCallum for a documentary that’s now airing on Fox Nation. This was followed by a blistering column by Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post—defending me.
Now, if we sell enough books, there will be an audio version.
Hiring a stripper to read The Devil’s Triangle is an in-your-face move, but there are also some layers to it. The first is artistic. Juxtaposing a narrative about an evil political plot and 1980s teen stream-of-consciousness with a rich feminine voice would work brilliantly. Two opposite elements that produce something dynamic.
Another is more personal. My high school friends and I weren’t drug addicts and rapists, just 1980s teenagers indulging in good clean fun (as well as a lot of studying and playing sports). The belly dancer/stripper was never touched—nobody even said anything particularly lewd. I heard she laughed when she later saw the “photo spread” of the party we ran in our underground newspaper The Unknown Hoya. In one shot our music teacher is looking her directly in the chest. Caption: “That’s definitely not a b-flat.” Having a lady whose stage name is Candy read my book is a big Fuck You to the killjoys who tried to shame us about being healthy young men.
Finally, there’s the punk ethos of making a sharp social critique using blunt instruments. Punk has come to mean a bunch of kids in a band screaming and playing loudly. In the 1980s punk meant to intelligently criticize the politics, religion and crappiness of your country and your life. A stripper is a meta-commentary on the real whores in this D.C.—not prep school kids or dancing girls, but the politicians. Compared to pimps like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the ladies at Camelot or Good Guys—both strip joints we visited in the 1980s that are still going strong—have some restraint and some self-respect. As Dov Fischer once wrote in The American Spectator, “It’s no secret but public knowledge that Kamala Harris slept her way up into California political life by being a very public escort and mattress for California Democrat Kingmaker Willie Brown. Willie Brown is 30 years older than Harris and was very married at the time. It was public. It was an embarrassment.”
In 1982, the year of the bachelor party, the Bad Brains released their debut record. Punk wasn’t just noise. It was calling out political hypocrisy and highlighting some of the awkward and goofy things that make life absurd. It was a good year for bachelor parties and a great year for punk.
When The Devil’s Triangle was published, the liberal media wouldn’t mention it. They still haven’t. They’re too terrified. I’d uncovered a plot to prevent a SCOTUS nominee by a modern Stasi using extortion, fake stories and death threats. Ruth Marcus, who once begged me for an interview, isn’t about to touch that. Yet the Dolores Umbridge conservatives aren’t much better. Where are National Review, the Daily Wire, and the libertarians at Reason? Sucking their thumbs. When it comes to truly defending freedom they are AWOL.
Candy the adult entertainer, a provider of joy and healing sexual energy, who’s also smart, reading the words I wrote under a storm of PTSD hell—that hits on a lot of cylinders. It would be an artistic triumph, offer sly cultural commentary, and strike a blow for freedom.