Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

July 2025

Health Identitarianism

WHAT’S A SINOPHOBE TO DO?:

How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic (Robert Garry, Edward C Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Kristian G. Andersen, 7/29/25, The Conversation)


In the five years since our Nature Medicine paper, a substantial body of new evidence has emerged that has deepened our understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged through a natural spillover.

In early 2020, the case for a zoonotic origin was already compelling. Much-discussed features of the virus are found in related coronaviruses and carry signatures of natural evolution. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 showed no signs of laboratory manipulation.

The multi-billion-dollar wildlife trade and fur farming industry in China regularly moves high-risk animals, frequently infected with viruses, into dense urban centres.

It’s believed that SARS-CoV-1, the virus responsible for the SARS outbreak, emerged this way in 2002 in China’s Guangdong province.

Similarly, detailed analyses of epidemiological data show the earliest known COVID cases clustered around the Huanan live-animal market in Wuhan, in the Hubei province, in December 2019.

Multiple independent data sources, including early hospitalisations, excess pneumonia deaths, antibody studies and infections among health-care workers indicate COVID first spread in the district where the market is located.

In a 2022 study we and other experts showed that environmental samples positive for SARS-CoV-2 clustered in the section of the market where wildlife was sold.

In a 2024 follow-up study we demonstrated those same samples contained genetic material from susceptible animals – including raccoon dogs and civets – on cages, carts, and other surfaces used to hold and transport them.

This doesn’t prove infected animals were the source. But it’s precisely what we would expect if the market was where the virus first spilled over. And it’s contrary to what would be expected from a lab leak.

These and all other independent lines of evidence point to the Huanan market as the early epicentre of the COVID pandemic.

Brothers Judd

TWO SAD WORDS:

Dogless Walkers (DOMINIC WIGHTMAN, 7/29/25, Country Squire)

Last week, retriever man passed without his dog. He stopped. The dog was dead, he said, taken by cancer. He still walked the same route, he explained, because the habit was stronger than the absence. He could almost feel her padding beside him, could almost hear the soft pant of her breath. The movement was good for his mind, his body. His wife had died a few months before, the same disease. He spoke plainly, without self-pity, as though stating the weather. I invited him for tea. He gratefully accepted. Then he walked on.

Later, I saw the woman with the boxer. She was alone too—the dog with her ex-husband while she ‘cared for their children over the summer’. We talked for a change. She laughed about the chaos of holidays, the way time stretches and snaps without warning. There was no mention of why the dog lived elsewhere now, or what had fractured between them. Some things go unsaid.

It struck me then how many walk alone, and for how many reasons. Grief, habit, the need to outpace silence—all of them invisible beneath the surface of a nod, a brief exchange.

There is value in stopping, in removing the headphones. You never know what silence you might interrupt, or what quiet sorrow you might briefly share. The fields do not care, but the people do. Even if they don’t say it.

Our dog not only has a crew of folks who stop to chat and pet her–including three who carry treats–but if I walk without her (due to heat or snow) cars pull up to ask if she’s okay.

Russia

THANKS, VLAD!:

The Real Meaning of Putin’s Middle East Failure (Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani, July 25, 2025, Foreign Affairs)

But over the past 20 months, Russia’s standing in the Middle East has cratered. Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has devastated the so-called axis of resistance, the Iranian-backed network with which Russia had forged close ties. The Assad regime in Syria, long a valuable Russian client, collapsed spectacularly. U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities severely weakened Russia’s most important regional ally. As a result, Russia’s reputation as a patron and guarantor of security in the region lies in tatters. In the new Middle East now taking shape, Moscow is no longer needed.

Moscow’s failures will resound beyond the Middle East. Whether the result of Putin’s conscious decision not to intervene or of the Kremlin’s inability to do so, Russia’s abandonment of partners in the region should be a sobering lesson for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party: that in times of crisis, Russia will not be a reliable ally.

There is no bear in the woods

Identitarianism

JUST THE PANTS, PLEASE:

Why do fascists love yoga? : For more than a century, elements of the far right have been attracted by the rigour of eastern disciplines. But does the connection stand up? (Miles Ellingham, 7/24/25, The Observer)

After reading Home’s book, I met him near his old yoga studio. Home and I sat in the shade of an overhanging tree, meditative but not cross-legged upon a rock. I put it to him that if, say, ping-pong happened to have a number of fascist devotees, it doesn’t necessarily make it fascist. “But what about if the guy who came up with the game of ping-pong had a bunch of fascist and white supremacist followers,” he responds. “Also, ping-pong doesn’t have the mystical trappings of a cult.”

Home argues that fascist yoga continued into the late 20th century, only in a slightly more veiled way. “A lot of the earlier fascist yogis are referred back to,” he says of subsequent followers. “So even someone like Harvey Day, who is explicitly anti-racist in his books, can’t resist mentioning the Aryan origins of yoga and will reference Francis Yeats-Brown and other people, and I think it’s the credulity around the beliefs, it’s what I describe as anti-essentialism and belief in one’s own truth. Also, with QAnon and anti-vax stuff, you see this being discussed more.”

Home sees a telling similarity between the reverence QAnon adherents feel towards their saviour, Donald Trump, and the ardent spiritual devotion for Hitler displayed by the Nazis. “There’s a very clear parallel between the two things,” he says. Whether QAnon’s “esoteric Hitlerism” is consciously borrowed or simply emerges from the same mythic structure, he continues, “hinges on research I haven’t done”.

Travis View, via his QAA Podcast, has been examining the QAnon movement since its origins in 2017. View points out perhaps the most obvious recent collision point between far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and new age beliefs: Jacob Chansley, AKA “the QAnon Shaman”. Chansley became the mascot of the 6 January insurrection after he stormed the US Capitol in facepaint and a fur horned headdress. Having gained access to the Senate chamber, Chansley led the rioters in quasi-Christian prayer but, View explains, he was also fascinated by Native American mysticism and occultism.

“I also think there’s a broad overlap,” View says, “between the hyper-individualism of the far right and new age wellness thinking. There’s a distrust of, for example, public health measures and a belief that you have a moral obligation to take care of your own health entirely. This is why there’s so much overlap in anti-vaccine belief; it’s a far-right belief, but also something you’d see in crunchy yoga circles.”

Another similarity, View says, is that both camps prioritise esoteric knowledge. “If you’re very deeply into spiritualism, there’s a belief that there’s esoteric knowledge that is suppressed and you can ‘awaken’ to it … and then on the far right, they have the same belief, but it’s that the media and the education system is controlled by Jews or whatever, and in order to escape this thinking, you have to awaken to the lies of society. Both promote a personal hero’s journey you have to go through in order to reject mainstream orthodox knowledge.”

Anglospherics

CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE:

The Bookshelf: Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton! (Matthew J. Franck, 7/24/25, Public Discourse)

Buckley’s catchphrase about the eschaton is generally attributed to Voegelin’s 1952 book The New Science of Politics, but it does not appear verbatim in that work. The idea is there, in sentences such as this: “The attempt at constructing an eidos of history will lead into the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton.” What is he saying here? Voegelin’s New Science, based on lectures given at the University of Chicago, is an attempt to give an account of “representation” as the author understands that concept. At times he means just what any political scientist might mean by representation—the work of one who speaks and acts for a political community. But Voegelin abstracts much more from the concept, taking in a sweeping history from ancient times to modernity. He observes that “the early empires, Near Eastern as well as Far Eastern, understood themselves as representatives of a transcendent order, of the order of the cosmos.” A claim about “cosmological truth” was at the heart, for instance, of Babylonian politics. With the emergence of philosophy in Athens, an “anthropological truth”—an account of man’s nature as a political animal—came to be represented in Western political life, and, with Christianity, a “soteriological truth,” regarding the saving power of Christ to redeem the human race.


But here is the crucial point for Voegelin: “What made Christianity so dangerous [to pagan Rome] was its uncompromising, radical de-divinization of the world.” Politics—the city of man—was, in the Christian worldview, nothing sacred. Political life occurred in the “profane sphere of history in which empires rise and fall,” in contrast to “sacred history which culminates in the appearance of Christ and the establishment of the church.” Sacred history from the founding of the church onward has a known endpoint in the second coming of Christ, an “eschatological fulfillment. Profane history, on the other hand, has no such direction.” This much Voegelin drew heavily from St. Augustine.

Modern political thought, according to Voegelin—especially since Hegel in the early nineteenth century—had erased the Augustinian distinction between sacred and profane history. Cities and empires, nations and states, moved in a stream of history that could be viewed as an intelligible process, each age bringing us closer to the fulfillment of human destiny. This conflation of profane history with sacred history is what Voegelin meant by the “fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton.” The eschaton, the last judgment, is an event we cannot see coming: “you know neither the day nor the hour,” says Jesus in Matthew 25:13. But the gnostic (from the Greek gnosis, knowledge) claims a special insight into its arrival, and thus makes a claim of its immanence, its here-and-nowness in past and present events and its knowable realization just over the horizon.

The Anglospheric difference lies in our rejection of such earthly Utopianism and skepticism about any system–not least Reason–that promises to achieve one.

Identitarianism

APPLYING DARWINISM:

It’s Carl Schmitt’s Moment (James Traub, Summer 2025, Democracy)

Yet those, whether of the left or right, who wish to treat Schmitt as a guide need to fully reckon with what he meant by democracy in the absence of liberalism. With his flair for the resonant opening line, Schmitt begins The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy by declaring, “The history of political and state theory of the nineteenth century could be summarized with a single phrase: the triumphal march of democracy.” But by “democracy” Schmitt does not mean the political and civic institutions through which the wishes of voters shape the policy of the state, or even the deep conviction of human equality that Tocqueville regarded as the essence of American democracy. Schmitt means the idea of “the people” as supreme governing force that descends from the French Revolution. For Schmitt, as for Rousseau, the people are not a pluralistic group of individuals, but a single homogeneous mass possessed of a “collective will.” The leader seizes upon that will to guide the state. Democracy is thus incompatible with pluralism, which Schmitt describes as a form of “liberal individualism” that reduces the state to “a revocable service for individuals and their free associations.”

The whole panoply of individual rights set forth in the great democratic documents—and, indeed, individualism as an ethos—belongs, Schmitt argues, to liberalism rather than to democracy. The collective will is not the sum of individual wills individually expressed, but rather the single will of a unified people. That unity must be forged if it does not naturally exist. In one of his most brutal passages, Schmitt writes, “Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity, and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” The “other” must be excluded, he argues, whether by restrictions on immigration or the denial of citizenship.

Democratic homogeneity can in theory be based on any unifying characteristic. But in 1923 one did not have to look far for the deepest sources of identity, which Schmitt saw in “[t]he more naturalistic conceptions of race and descent…the speech, tradition, and consciousness of a shared culture and education.” Homogeneity meant racial identity. Schmitt goes on to ridicule the precept of “absolute human equality” as a meaningless article of liberal hypocrisy. A society that embraces people of every faith, doctrine, and language—that is, a pluralist society—will never cohere around a collective will. Democracy depends on exclusion of the other and of the non-equal. Behind this strange argument is Schmitt’s deep conviction that it is the state that ultimately creates the people rather than the people who create the state. A strong democracy is one in which the state has forged the people into a united force.

He had them at Identitarianism.

Anglospherics

UNIVERSALITY VS IDENTITARIANISM:

Rescuing the Declaration From Left- and Right-Wing Polemics (Peter Berkowitz, July 20, 2025, Real Clear Politics)

The first revolution of 1776 affirmed that just government is grounded in the consent of the governed. Without questioning God’s authority, the American view broke with the then-prevalent notion that legitimate political authority derives from divine right. And without challenging the classical premise that citizens should govern and be governed in accordance with human nature, America’s founders rejected the classical idea that wisdom or moral virtue provides decisive title to rule.

America’s founders held that while human beings are not equal in all respects and not free in all ways, we are born equal in rights and therefore neither masters over nor subordinate to others. Each has equal right to govern himself or herself, but no one has the right to govern another. One crucial exercise of the right to govern oneself consists in consenting to the exercise of political authority. In practice, that means that each has an obligation to obey only those laws – the disagreeable as well as the agreeable – that issue from established constitutional processes to which he or she has consented. Consent can be given expressly, as in the formal ceremonies by which immigrants officially acquire citizenship, or tacitly, as in the manner of the native-born who acquire the obligation to obey the laws through living under them and enjoying their benefits.

The second revolution of 1776 taught that government’s primary purpose is to secure natural or unalienable rights. America’s founders parted ways with the traditional view that government’s purpose was to perfect or save souls, but the parting was not driven by indifference or hostility to higher concerns. Rather, the founders proceeded from the conviction that care of the soul was the proper responsibility of individuals, families, and religious institutions.

Securing rights did not preclude government from assuming additional responsibilities, provided that they were consistent with the equal rights of all, to advance the common good. “Unlike influential progressive thinkers such as Herbert Croly and political leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt, the founders did not hold that a fundamental purpose of government is to provide directly for the people’s material needs or to ameliorate all unfortunate circumstances,” Muñoz writes. “They instead understood the role of government as securing the conditions, including the economic conditions, that would allow Americans to be responsible – to employ their natural rights to provide for themselves, their families, and those under their care.”

The third revolution of 1776 maintained that religious liberty, the right of individuals to worship in accordance with conscience, was an essential right. Far from expressing or implying antipathy to religion, limiting government’s authority over religious belief and practice stemmed from a determination to protect faith. Prohibiting government from establishing religion or impairing its free exercise reflected the belief that true religion could not be dictated by civil law because it was grounded in conscience and choice. Another reason to restrict political control over religion was the distinct tendency of government officials to lack competence in interpreting scripture and managing religious teaching and observance.

Energy

A BIG BUSINESS SUBSIDY IN A GREEN DRESS:

How Big Agriculture Mislead the Public About the Benefits of Biofuels: Michael Grunwald on the Cascading Impact of Ethanol Production on Climate Change (Michael Grunwald, July 21, 2025, LitHub)

Searchinger’s spidey-sense kept tingling, though. His father, another question-everything guy, liked to quote H. L. Mencken: “For every complex human problem, there’s a solution that’s clear, simple and wrong.” That’s what ethanol felt like. And the more he thought about the study, the less he understood its conclusions.

Yes, corn soaked up carbon as it grew. But it soaked up just as much carbon whether it was grown for fuel or food! Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?

That led back to his original concern: If more corn was diverted from food to fuel, how would the lost food be replaced? Presumably, Midwest farmers would plant more corn, converting more wetlands into farmland that would get blasted with more chemicals. Again, he wasn’t focused on the climate impact, just the environmental impact of losing habitat and increasing pollution. But he had a hunch the Argonne researchers and their spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.

Homocentric Universe

IT NEVER RECOVERED FROM HEISENBERG/SCHROEDINGER:

REVIEW: of Escape from Shadow Physics By Adam Forrest Kay (Reviewed by Stephen Case, July 20, 2025, Washington Independent Review of Books)

The “best summary of quantum physics,” writes Kay, “[is these] five words: ‘Don’t look: wave. Look: particle.’” The phrase refers to the cryptic double-slit experiment used to determine whether electrons are waves or particles. The shocker? When humans are not observing, this experiment reveals electrons to be waves. But when they are observing? Electrons are particles. (For a clever and convincing demo, see Jim Al-Khalili’s video on YouTube.)

Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynmann said the two-slit experiment is “impossible…to explain in any classical way,” yet many physicists couldn’t care less about such quantum puzzles. When newbie students ask skeptical questions, in fact, some professors in the field allegedly bark, “Shut up and calculate!” Their reasoning? “[W]e cannot do better than the probabilities…even in theory,” Kay says. “The…hidden variables that would [explain what is happening] do not even exist.”

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