David Brock speaks calmly and deliberately, exuding the kind of knowingness you would expect from someone who has been immersed in Washington politics for decades. But in 2004, when he started Media Matters for America, the left-leaning advocacy group that monitors the right-wing press, he encountered a situation he wasn’t quite prepared for.
“Our liberal researchers would debate whether they were being fair to Rush Limbaugh,” Brock recalled recently, referring to the ultraconservative radio host. Media Matters had little trouble finding instances of Limbaugh saying outrageous things — in any given episode there was a decent chance he would call a woman a “feminazi” — but Brock’s young staffers were earnestly discussing their moral obligations: “Let’s not rip it out of context. Let’s be fair and portray what he’s saying accurately.” Brock laughed, remembering how incredulous he was.
“Coming from the right, that was a shocking concept to me, that you were trying to be fair.” After all, Brock made his name in the 1990s as a journalist for whom fairness was not much of a priority. He was a proud conservative then, writing high-octane hit pieces that gleefully mowed down liberal targets. Among his career-defining coups was “His Cheatin’ Heart,” a 12,000-word 1993 article for The American Spectator in which Arkansas troopers dished about President Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assignations when he was governor of the state. Christened “Troopergate” by the media, the story Brock broke became one more scandal in the lurid chain leading to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.
By then, Brock had renounced his past as a “right-wing hit man” in an essay for Esquire, declaring that his Troopergate story had “launched the print equivalent of poison-gas canisters on the Clinton White House.” The essay featured a photo of Brock lashed to a tree and staring moodily into the distance, ready for his auto-da-fé.
Even in our age of political disarray, Brock’s tortuous trajectory stands out. Here is someone who went from having “conspired to damage you and your presidency,” as he confessed in an open apology letter to Bill Clinton; to allying himself with the Clintons; to founding the Democratic super PAC American Bridge in 2011; to being a vocal surrogate for Hillary during her presidential run in 2016. He quickly proved his formidable skills at creating organizations, political strategizing and raising money.
But earning trust — perhaps the most valuable currency of all — has been stickier. His political journey to the other side of the aisle has been anything but smooth; he continues to be a lightning rod, not just for the right but also for those on the left who recoil at his evident comfort in the shadowy world of opposition research and dark money. His attempts to redeem himself are bedeviled by his enduring fascination with the machinations of political power.
Brock insists he is still doing penance for what he calls his “original sin”: participating in a right-wing campaign to smear Anita Hill. In 1991, Hill testified before Congress that Clarence Thomas, then a nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas denied the allegations and was confirmed by a vote of 52-48.
Still, Brock says, the new justice’s conservative supporters wanted to burnish Thomas’s reputation by trashing Hill’s. So Brock collected dubious information fed to him by dubious sources and in 1992 dumped it into an article larded with invective — “Hill may be a bit nutty, and a bit slutty” — for The American Spectator. Limbaugh was so impressed that he read sections of it aloud on his radio show, and Brock went on to turn it into a best-selling book, “The Real Anita Hill.”
Now, three decades later, Brock is publishing “Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America.” As the graphic title suggests, the book, which will be released on Tuesday, is a full-on denunciation, tracing how the center of gravity on the Supreme Court came to tilt toward Thomas, among the most conservative of a supermajority of conservative justices. Brock, ever the connoisseur of power, also plots out the decades-long effort by right-wing activists to transform the judiciary.
Of course, liberal excoriations of the court are increasingly common, and much of “Stench” synthesizes other journalists’ reporting — Brock had been working on his book for less than a year when stories started to emerge about Thomas’s ties to the billionaire Harlan Crow.
But the real interest of Brock’s book lies in his singular personal history. He enumerates some of his misdeeds, including blackmailing a woman who was a source for a book by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, because their reporting supported Hill’s testimony — “testimony that I knew was likely true.” He apologizes, not for the first time, to Hill and to “others I smeared.” Repairing credibility is an ongoing process. As Abramson, a former executive editor of The Times, once put it, “I think the problem is that once David Brock admits he knowingly wrote lies, it’s hard to figure out when to believe him.” “Stench” is inevitably suffused with dramatic irony: Brock, a seasoned political street fighter with an inglorious past, is warning about “the integrity of the high court.”
Brock and Thomas have never met. (Justice Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.) But as Brock sees it, the two men are inextricably connected. “I observed it, I survived it,” Brock told me, describing how his role in disparaging Hill fuels the case he makes in “Stench”: “The seeds of the monstrous court, and the campaign to capture it, start with Thomas. And so everything leads there and comes from there.”
On a swampy afternoon in July, I met Brock, 62, at his office in Washington. He was wearing a slate-gray jacket over a black T-shirt — a far cry from his “old fogy in training” look from the 1990s: bow tie, pipe, horn-rimmed glasses and the occasional walking stick.
He has also come a long way from the Wood-Ridge, N.J., of his youth. As Brock recounts in his 2002 memoir, “Blinded by the Right,” he was raised by an ultraconservative Catholic father and a mother who insisted that he and his sister hide that they were adopted. The secrecy left him with shame and a fear of self-reflection, which were compounded when, as a middle-schooler, he realized he was attracted to other boys.
Before being blinded by the right, Brock was annoyed by the left. He was a teenage liberal, casting his first vote for Jimmy Carter, in 1980. In college at Berkeley, he felt alienated by the doctrinaire leftism he encountered. So Brock — who says he “had a reactive personality” — responded by becoming a Reagan Republican.
His break from the right would play out differently. As a rising star in Washington’s conservative media, Brock found status, money and community; he was propelled by a brawler’s delight in smiting enemies with sharp turns of phrase. But as a closeted gay man who had “fallen in with the by then transparently anti-gay G.O.P.,” he was leading a “bifurcated existence.” He came out publicly as gay in 1994.
Coming out, Brock says now, “was a step that strengthened me.” He no longer wanted to launder scurrilous gossip and expedient falsehoods. In 1996 he published “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham,” a surprisingly mixed portrait — decidedly not the hatchet job the right wing expected.
For his conservative allies, the book was heretical, and Brock realized he was being iced out. After he burned his bridges with his Esquire essay, he says, only one person from his previous life deigned to keep in touch with him: Grover Norquist, the crusading founder of Americans for Tax Reform, known for demanding a government so small “I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
The two have something in common: a belief that ideology goes nowhere without power. Norquist praises Brock’s effectiveness as a builder of organizations within a movement. “There aren’t that many people that you can talk to who have done that in the world,” Norquist told me. “He’s very good at what he does. He draws blood.”
During the 2016 election cycle, Brock’s aggressive tactics against Hillary Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders — insinuating links between Sanders and Venezuela’s former president Hugo Chavez; demanding that Sanders release his medical records — turned off even some people on Clinton’s team, who in private emails (that were later hacked and leaked) called him a “nut bar” and “an unhinged soulless narcissist.” After the election, Brock wrote an open apology letter to Sanders, calling for unity, and — as has always been the case when Brock offers such public displays of contrition — not everyone was convinced. The progressive philanthropist Leah Hunt-Hendrix decried him for devoting so much energy to “hyperpartisan insider power plays.”
Brock, who had a heart attack in 2017, stepped down from Media Matters’ board in 2022 to focus on fund-raising and start another organization, one aimed at rebutting Republican charges of corruption by President Biden’s family. The idea for “Stench” came to him that summer, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, effectively overturning 50 years of protections for abortion rights since Roe v. Wade. Brock had already been thinking about Justice Thomas “for a long time.” But Dobbs prompted him to consider what had happened to the Supreme Court as a whole.
“I just thought, wow,” Brock said. Though the standard liberal reaction was dismay, he couldn’t help being impressed by what his former allies on the right had accomplished. “I have kind of a weird admiration for what they did, because I’m like an entrepreneur in terms of building organizations,” Brock said, referring to Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, whose methodical campaign to staff the judicial branch with conservative-approved judges features prominently in “Stench.” “I don’t admire the result. But I kind of admire how they got there.”
Brock wants “Stench” to mobilize readers. But he also wants to reach people who “don’t identify so much with either camp.” His narrative is only sparingly interrupted by extravagant flourishes: a country in danger of becoming a “Christian nationalist abomination”; a remark by Thomas’s wife, Ginni, that conveys “plutonium-powered nuttiness.”
There are a few details that rely on only Brock’s word. He says that some of Thomas’s supporters admitted privately that they didn’t believe his disavowals at his confirmation hearings (a claim they have publicly denied). One of Brock’s biggest scoops is attributed to two unnamed sources: He alleges a “cover-up” involving an attempt by former Representative Liz Cheney, as vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, to block scrutiny of Ginni Thomas, who sent text messages to Donald Trump’s chief of staff saying the 2020 election was stolen.
As for the book’s pungent title, it comes from the public record — from the oral arguments in Dobbs, in a question posed by Justice Sonia Sotomayor: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Brock’s editor at Knopf, Peter Gethers, says he was delighted by the title, but acknowledges “it made some people in our sales and marketing departments a little nervous because it is so powerful.”
Powerful is good, as far as Brock is concerned. Idealism can only get you so far. “I think liberals are always trying to find the silver lining in this cloud, and they’re always looking for a little glimmer of hope,” he said. “I understand why it happens. Because we don’t want to face reality.” Underlying the liberal politics he promotes are some dark assumptions about what humans are capable of.
He knows firsthand that people’s paths, like their motivations, are often morally convoluted. “A question I have about myself is, if I had stayed in the right wing, would I be for Trump or Never Trump?”
Brock wasn’t sure of the answer. “I would like to think I would have ended up Never Trump, because I think of myself as at least a thinking person. But could I have gotten swept up in Trump for reasons of ambition and getting ahead? Maybe. It’s scary, but possibly.”
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