Brothers Judd Blog

RICHARD BEN CRAMER TRIED TO WARN THEM:

Joe Biden Is a Lousy Politician (Matthew Continetti, May 14, 2024, AEI)

We pretend that the chief executive and his inner circle have a deep and mystical insight into the mood of voters and how best to shape public attitudes. The reason for this illusion is that there is only one president at a time. Winning the White House is an enormous task. To achieve it, the president and his team must build a national coalition. They must earn a mandate. They have got to know what they are doing.

That’s the cover story. Every so often, though, a president comes along who dashes the nation’s expectations of fitness, capacity, and suitability for office. The president may be an honorable man or an effective demagogue. His record may be admirable or mixed. But, at some point, his poll numbers go south. Nothing goes right. None of his solutions work. Looking back, it appears as if he were doomed from the start.

Such was the fate shared by Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Donald Trump. They belong to a club no one wants to join: a motley crew of one-termers. It may soon welcome a new member named Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

All Joe was hired to do was beat Donald. No one thought he’d be an effective executive. He should have chosen a capable vp and resigned once his job was done.

STOP IT, YOU’RE SCARING THE CHILDREN:

The myth of “woke” indoctrination at American universities (JUDD LEGUM, MAY 16, 2024, Popular Information)

Open Syllabus, a non-profit group, collects syllabi from colleges and universities. The group has collected over 5.5 million syllabi at more than 4,000 American institutions of higher learning. The data is not comprehensive because Open Syllabus relies mostly on publicly available data. But it is the most robust database of what is actually taught on campus in the U.S.

Data collected by Open Syllabus reveals that, in 2023, “woke” terms like “critical race theory,” “structural racism,” or “transgender” appear in just 0.08% of college and university syllabi. These are all legitimate areas of inquiry but are derided by critics as evidence of academia’s decline. In any event, the data shows they are not significant components of college and university curricula.

Even generic terms that encompass these terms appear in relatively few syllabi. The term “race” — allegedly an obsession of the modern university — appears in only 2.8% of the syllabi collected by Open Syllabus in 2023. Moreover, the prevalence of “race” in syllabi has remained relatively consistent over the last 15 years. Similarly, “gender” appeared in 4.7% of syllabi in 2023 — a rate that has held fairly steady since 2008.

IT’S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

A gunman shot Slovakia’s prime minister. Here’s what you need to know. (MICHAL ONDERCO, MAY 15, 2024, Good Authority)

We do not know much about the motivation of the alleged shooter, who was apprehended quickly. While his immediate comments at the police station hinted at his political opposition to some of Fico’s recent domestic policy moves, journalists quickly dug up earlier racist anti-Roma texts, and his earlier affinity with Slovak Levies, a paramilitary group with ties to Russia.

ABRES LOS OJOS:

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum (JEREMY SCHWARTZ, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA, MAY 15, 2024, Texas Tribune)

[Courtney] Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

The Culture Wars are a rout.

“FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS”:

Winning for democracy: In Poland, Donald Tusk shows how to reach voters tempted by authoritarians (JOHN AUSTIN, LUCAS KREUZER AND KAMIL LUNGU 15 MAY 2024, Inside Story)

In the United States, Europe and beyond, there is a lot of unease about the future of democracy. Will Donald Trump regain the White House? Will the Republican congressional minority, enthralled by Trump, imperil democratic Europe and possibly NATO itself, despite a recent vote for Ukraine aid? Will France or Germany fall to ethnonationalists and fascists?

Against this backdrop, Poland’s parliamentary elections and the selection of Donald Tusk as prime minister last October offered a hopeful counterpoint. Voters embraced Europe and the world to rebuild democratic institutions torn apart by ten years of right-wing populist rule under Jarosław Kaczyński and his Polish Law and Justice Party.

A new analysis offers encouraging details. A larger-than-normal turnout, driven partly by a motivated cohort of younger voters, was a triumph for democracy. The analysis comes from two of the authors of this piece, Lucas Kreuzer and Kamil Lungu, graduates of Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Affairs. The Polish election recommitted the country to tolerance, democracy and Europe after a decade of right-wing, populist rule that had sought to dismantle democratic institutions and stigmatise marginalised communities.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Star witness Michael Cohen says Trump was intimately involved in all aspects of hush money scheme (MICHAEL R. SISAK, JILL COLVIN, ERIC TUCKER AND JAKE OFFENHARTZ, May 13, 2024, NY Times)

“We need to stop this from getting out,” Cohen quoted Trump as telling him in reference to porn actor Stormy Daniels’ account of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. The then-candidate was especially anxious about how the story would affect his standing with female voters.

A similar episode occurred when Cohen alerted Trump that a Playboy model was alleging that she and Trump had an extramarital affair. “Make sure it doesn’t get released,” was Cohen’s message to Trump, the lawyer said. The woman, Karen McDougal, was paid $150,000 in an arrangement that was made after Trump received a “complete and total update on everything that transpired.”

“What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen testified.

THE BLUE BRAND:

Despite warnings of violence at UCLA, police didn’t step in for over 3 hours (Jon Swaine, Hannah Natanson, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Sarah Cahlan and Jonathan Baran, May 11, 2024, Washington Post)

Late on April 30, Sean Tabibian called 911 to say police were needed urgently at the University of California at Los Angeles. “All hell had broken loose,” Tabibian recalled in an interview. Masked agitators were attacking pro-Palestinian protesters on a campus quad, video footage shows, and a team of hired security guards had retreated.

The call at 11:09 p.m. was the first of 11 that Tabibian made to police that night as the violence escalated, according to his cellphone’s call log. Other witnesses called 911 as well, records show.

“They said they were responding,” said Tabibian, a local business executive and UCLA alumnus who was near campus around the time commotion erupted at the encampment, and who said he was concerned that protesters had been discriminating against Jewish students. “They kept saying they’re responding, they’re responding.” […]

It’s not clear why police waited so long to respond. But in the hours before they took action, at least 16 people were visibly injured, the majority of them pro-Palestinian, including two protesters who could be seen with blood streaking across their faces and soaking into their clothes, videos and images show. The counterprotesters ignited at least six fireworks; struck protesters at least 20 times with wooden planks, metal poles and other objects; and punched or kicked at least eight protesters.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Beauteous Truth: On Literature, Culture, & Faith (Jared Zimmerer interviews Joseph Pearce, 5/07/24, Imaginative Conservative)

Jared Zimmerer: Throughout your collection of essays, Beauteous Truth (St. Augustine’s Press), there is a continuous message that culture and having a steeped understanding of authentic cultural approbations are of utmost importance and that Catholicism has helped shape a culture that can last. What advice would you give for others to be able to recognize those parts of culture that are worthwhile?

Joseph Pearce: True culture is a reflection of the transcendental trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The authentic sign of goodness is love and its manifestation in virtue; the authenticity of the true is to be seen in its conformity to reason, properly understood as an engagement with the objective reality beyond the confines of egocentric subjectivism; the authentic sign of the beautiful is a reverence for the beauty of Creation and creativity, properly perceived in the outpouring of gratitude which is the fruit of humility.

INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY IS AN OXYMORON:

Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes (Ernst Roets, May 12, 2024, European Conservative)

[Charles] Taylor’s remarkable book Sources of the Self was published in 1989—sixteen years before Revenge of the Sith. The book deals with the history of modern identity and the way we think about who we are. Even though Taylor does not claim to champion either liberalism or conservatism, he cautions throughout about the risk of modern disengagement. The disengaged self is an individual who has lost contact with his community, culture, and tradition, predominantly under the pretext of being an independent individual.

Taylor claims to endorse a certain version of the modern conception of freedom, while also expressing concern that a certain—we might even say, mainstream—strand of the modern conception of freedom is in important ways becoming unendurable from a philosophical perspective. The modern conception of freedom has become, in Taylor’s words, a “deeply confused” one. This is because it is built on two cornerstones that cannot be reconciled with one another.

The first is that the modern conception of freedom is primarily driven by a (new) conception of what constitutes the good. Where the traditional Western view teaches that freedom is bound up with the recognition of the common good within the context of the community, the modern view teaches that freedom is the result of liberation of the individual. It teaches, thus, that freedom of individual choice is the ultimate good that must be pursued. The second idea that underpins the modern conception of freedom is that it is ‘good’ to repudiate qualitative distinctions and to reject constitutive goods as such. The notion here is that it is not desirable for anyone to decide on anyone else’s behalf what constitutes the good, as this is something to be decided by every individual for themselves.

The problem here is that the former is in itself a qualitative distinction of what constitutes the good, while the latter claims that one should not work with qualitative distinctions of what constitutes the good. If the former is true, the latter cannot be true, and if the latter is true, the former cannot be true. Put differently, if it is indeed true that individual choice is the highest form of the good, then one cannot simultaneously claim that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with. And if it is indeed true that qualitative distinctions on what constitutes the good should be done away with, then one cannot simultaneously claim that individual choice is the highest form of the good.

Or, to put it even more bluntly, to claim that every individual should decide for himself what constitutes the good, is not reconcilable with the idea that individual freedom is indeed the ultimate good. The liberal claim that individual freedom is the ultimate good is the logical equivalent of Obi-Wan’s claim that only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Of course, it is precisely because liberalism requires that our law-making be participatory and that all laws apply universally that it is neither absolutist nor individualist. Indeed, it is rather disinterested in individual freedom.

WOKEISM FOR WHITE FOLK:

Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus: Conservatives have adopted social-justice tactics (Kathleen Stock, MAY 10, 2024, UnHerd)

In short, then, the past week served up ample material for riotous mirth or contemptuous eye rolls. Though many students are sincere and well-intentioned in their objections to what is unfolding in Gaza, watching self-appointed leaders role-playing at Left-wing radicalism in the hope of future glittering career prizes will never not be ludicrous. Equally, approaching a bloody war like a rabidly partisan football fan on matchday, as Taal seemingly does — automatically primed to deny atrocities committed by your favoured side, and to downplay the devastating effects on opponents — is hardly a sign of moral sainthood, albeit that the phenomenon is now near-ubiquitous.

But there are more alarming aspects to this situation other than the presence of narcissistic millennials. Scorn should also be reserved for those supine university bosses who — having spent years positively incentivising an entire generation to think of themselves as pleasingly disruptive social radicals, acting on behalf of a variety of oppressed victim classes — have now swung to the other extreme without missing a beat, and are cracking down excessively on behaviour they used to tolerate or even encourage. At Columbia, university president and member of the House of Lords Minouche Shafik eventually gave up on negotiation and brought in police against protestors, resulting in more than 100 arrests. At the University of Texas in Austin, riot gear and pepper spray were employed against those camping out; the encampment at UCLA was also flattened by law enforcement, with 200 arrested there. There have also been large-scale arrests at Dartmouth, George Washington University, Massachusetts Amherst, Wisconsin-Madison, and other places too.

It is often remarked that the modern liberal quest to free both self and society from traditional cultural norms and boundaries tends to coincide with increased acceptance of state surveillance and authoritarian social control. Even so, it is rare to see institutions openly inciting both liberation and repression at the very same time. Small wonder that susceptible young people are confused. “I thought that this university accepted me because I am an advocate, because I am someone who will fight for what they believe in, no matter what,” mournfully recounted one Vanderbilt alumnus, originally lauded by faculty and administrators for making a stand against perceived oppression, but now expelled for the very same thing. You can laugh with enjoyable schadenfreude at the naivety; but you should probably also be horrified at the unprincipled ease with which Frankenstein has set the dogs upon the pious, guilt-ridden young monster he had a hand in creating.

Equally depressing has been the way that many conservative commentators, normally professional scourges of wokeness, have become apparent fans of safetyism for Jewish students (please note — not safety, but safetyism). Just as the modern Left either tends to cheer or stay silent as Right-coded views are eliminated from the academy either by stealth or by force, many on the supposedly freedom-loving modern Right apparently have little to say about the violation of the basic right to peaceful speech and assembly, when it comes to defending the perceived interests of Palestinians.

Separate out the rest of the nonsense certain students are saying: the call for self-determination is conservative.