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)

April 2026

End of History

TRUMPISM IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO LIBERALISM:

Hungary: Orban’s ouster heralds thaw in EU ties (Timothy Jones, 4/13/26, AP, AFP, Reuters)


Hungarian voters turned out in force on Sunday to deliver a landslide victory to pro-European candidate Peter Magyar, who has pledged to turn the country away from its far-right, authoritarian course under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Magyar’s center-right Tisza party is set to gain 138 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament, giving it five seats more than the two-thirds needed to push through the reforms the 45-year-old former Orban loyalist promised on the campaign trail.

Books

ONCE UPON A TIME IN SAN BERNARDINO:

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream (Joan Didion, 1967)

Like so much of this country, Banyan suggests something curious and unnatural. The lemon groves are sunken, down a three- or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark is too dusty, a place for snakes to breed. The stones look not like natural stones but like the rubble of some unmentioned upheaval. There are smudge pots, and a closed cistern. To one side of Banyan there the flat valley, and to the other the San Bernardino Mountains, a dark mass looming too high, too fist, nine, ten, eleven thousand feet, right there above the lemon groves. At midnight on Banyan Street there is no light at all, and no sound except the wind in the eucalyptus and a muffled barking of dogs. There may be a kennel somewhere, or the dogs may be coyotes.

Banyan Street was the route Lucille Miller took home from the twenty-four hour Mayfair Market on the night of October 7, 1969, a night when the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk, and Banyan Street was where, at about 12:30 A.M., her 1964 Volkswagen came to a sudden stop, caught fire, and began to burn. For an hour and fifteen minutes Lucille Miller ran up and down Banyan calling for help, but no cars passed and no help came. At three o’clock that morning, when the fire had been put out and the California Highway Patrol officers were completing their report, Lucille Miller was still sobbing and incoherent, for her husband had been asleep in the Volkswagen. “What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket:’ she cried to the friend called to comfort her. “How can I tell them there’s nothing left?”

In fact there was something left, and a week later it lay in the Draper Mortuary Chapel in a closed bronze coffin blanketed with pink carnations. Some 200 mourners heard Elder Robert E. Denton of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church of Ontario speak of “the temper of fury that has broken out among us.” For Gordon Miller, he said, there would be “no more death, no more heartache, and no more misunderstandings.” Elder Ansel Bristol mentioned the “peculiar” grief of the hour. Elder Fred Jensen asked “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” A light rain fell, a blessing in a dry season, and a female vocalist sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” A tape recording of the service was made for the widow, who was being held without bail in the San Bernardino County jail on a charge of first-degree murder.

Baseball

SHE DUG THE LONG BALL:

The surprising feminist history of baseball’s biggest anthem (Chloe Veltman, 4/02/26, NPR: All Things Considered)

“Take Me Out” was not only catchy, “it also had very unusual lyrics,” Clermont said. At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote, but were playing in women’s leagues and filling the stands at occasional “Ladies Days,” “Take Me Out” celebrates a fictional young woman’s deep and abiding passion for baseball:

Katie Casey saw all the games.
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong.
All along, good and strong.

“She didn’t want to just go to the ballpark, sit in the bleachers and be silent or whatever,” Clermont said of the song’s hard-hitting protagonist. “She wanted to participate.”

Identitarianism

FA HATES ANTIFA:

The Real Antifa (Livia Gershon April 2, 2026, Jstor Daily)

Copsey and Merrill note that the term “antifa,” short for anti-fascist, comes from the 1930s German Antifaschistische Aktion. But, unlike that Communist Party-sponsored organization, Antifa groups in the U.S. today are autonomous, ad hoc groups that exist for the narrow purpose of confronting white supremacists and other fascists.

Copsey and Merrill focus particularly on Rose City Antifa (RCA), one of the more high-profile local groups. They note that its members are typically between 25 and 35 years old, mostly white, and split fairly evenly by gender, with LGBTQ+ people well represented. Becoming an RCA member is a six-month process designed to ensure that members share values and are willing and able to work together.

Copsey and Merrill find that, in practice, RCA and similar groups tend to view violence as a poor choice.
While RCA and other Antifa groups are often connected with larger webs of activists engaged in different kinds of action, they themselves are essentially a defensive force rather than one focused on winning elections, fomenting revolution, or any other forward-looking goals. Their tactics often involve putting their “bodies on the line” to stop fascists from promoting their ideology, rather than relying on political or legal action.

Conservative Thought

GUESTING:

Annotation Tuesday! Tom Wolfe and radical chic ( Elon Green, 5/13/14, Nieman Storyboard: Why’s This So Good)

Storyboard: How did you get the idea for “Radical Chic”?

Tom Wolfe: It was December of ’69, it must have been, that I learned about this party for the Black Panthers, in the following manner: I was at Harper’s magazine, waiting for my wife-to-be — who was the art director — to get a break so we could go to lunch. And I just started wandering around — everybody was at lunch — poking my nose into other people’s business. And I was in David Halberstam’s office. There, on his desk, was an invitation to this party. And I said, “My God! 895 Park Avenue! That’s one of the greatest Park Avenue buildings.” And I said, “Somehow I have got to go to this thing.” So I copied down the phone number that was on the invitation to call to respond, and took a chance on it being a committee of some kind — which, in fact, in must have been, because there was a security check outside the door to Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. I mean, they put some big desks out there, so you couldn’t get by. There was no way you could sneak by. And my name was on the list, so no problem! And I immediately introduced myself to Felicia Bernstein and to Leonard Bernstein. I didn’t know them. I told them that I was from New York magazine.

Identitarianism

WHAT THEY MEAN BY aNTI-wOKE:

The Heritage of American Terror (Charles M. Blow, October 8, 2025, Bitter Southerner)

Peter H. Wood, a history professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that what he finds striking is the “longevity” and “gestational period” of America’s appetite and tolerance for the forcible control of bodies — then Black, now brown — and “a lot of the things we’re seeing now resonate with that [pre-Civil War period.]”

Out of this period came the slave patrol, official local law enforcement, and slave catchers, bounty hunters often prowling the streets of cities in non-slave states or monitoring known routes to freedom.

The lust for control didn’t end with slavery. In a way, it was amplified. As Wood put it, during Reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan picked up on the tradition of slave patrols and night riders, “but they intensified it partly because they had lost control, you know, that the country had become woke.”

That battle against liberalism and multi-racialism, a form of wokeness, keeps resurfacing and has now done so again in the Trump era.

Sport

PERAL BEFORE SWINE:

A Fan’s Notes on Earl Monroe (Woody Allen, November 1977, Sport)

Give the basketball to such diverse talents as Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Dave Bing, or Bob McAdoo, to name a tiny fraction, and you get dramatically distinctive styles of dribbling, passing, shooting, and defensive play. There is great room in basketball for demonstrable physical artistry that often can be compared to serious dance.

So there I was in 1967 leafing through the sports section of a newspaper one day (I still read that section first) when I came across the name Earl Monroe. I had never heard of Monroe, knew nothing of his daily rookie brilliance nor ever heard of his astounding feats at Winston-Salem. I just liked the name, free-floating, three syllables, and euphonious to me. Earl Monroe. The name worked. (Years later, when I did a film called Sleeper, I named myself Miles Monroe. On me it was kind of a funny name.) I came across Monroe’s name again every few days as I glanced over the basketball box scores in a casual, disinterested way and noticed that he invariably led the scoring column.

Monroe 34, Monroe 36, Monroe 24, Monroe 28, Monroe 40! I was impressed by the consistent high numbers and repeated his name every now and then like it was a mantra. It still sounded musical. Earl Monroe. I think I even recall seeing a picture of him on the cover of Sports Illustrated that year and thinking he was very interesting looking. I was, and I don’t know why, aware of Monroe in some special way. Although I didn’t follow his sport much then, if someone had awakened me in the middle of the night and said, “Quick, name your favorite basketball player,” I’d have snapped back: “Earl Monroe.” This was probably his first working of magic on me, though I had no real idea of what Baltimore Bullet fans were witnessing and feeling each night when they saw him play and referred to him as the Pearl or Black Jesus.

The first time I saw Monroe, an actor friend said, “Come with me to the Garden tonight. I want you to see this guy. You’ll like his style. It’s real herky-jerky.” That was in 1968. By then I was more interested in basketball and had begun following the Knicks a little. They had made the playoffs and had captured the imagination of New York. I went and saw Monroe score 32 points against Walt Frazier. This is Walt Frazier, mind you, who played the guard position as perfectly as it has ever been played and who was to be voted on the all-defensive team seven years running. Thirty-two points and Frazier said, “I had my hand in his face all night. He shoots without looking.”

I went the next night too and while the Knicks double-teamed Monroe at every turn, he tore the place up with a buzzer beater that he flipped in as he ran across the midcourt line at halftime, and he kept running right into the locker room.

My impressions of Monroe then? I immediately ranked him with Willie Mays and Sugar Ray Robinson as athletes who went beyond the level of sports and sport to the realm of sports as art.

Health

EMPATHY IS A LIE WE TELL OURSELVES:

Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?: Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences (Michael Pollan, 19 Feb 2026, The Guardian)

So is the effort of sampling inner experiences a game worth the candle? The half century Hurlburt has spent collecting samples of conscious experience has yielded some interesting and important findings. The first finding, to which I can personally attest, is just how little most of us know about the characteristics of our own inner experiences. “That’s probably the most important finding that I’ve got,” Hurlburt said.

Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are “inner speakers”. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re “likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought”. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true.

But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of “unsymbolised” thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images.

The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar – not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognise the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word – thinking – and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.

Baseball

NO THOUGHT TERRIFIES HUMAN BEINGS MORE….:

The Bottom of the Ninth: In baseball and in life, there is a cost to our pursuit of an error-free existence (Elizabeth D. Samet | March 26, 2026, American Scholar)

The 1985 Fall Classic, pitting cross-state rivals against each other, was billed as the I–70 or the Show-Me Series, and it really mattered in Missouri. In the wake of The Call, Denkinger received hundreds of ominous messages and letters. Someone even phoned his house in neighboring Iowa threatening to burn it down. Whether his mistake ultimately affected the outcome of the series became a matter of debate for the participants, too: “If that doesn’t happen,” McRae told reporters, “we probably don’t win.” Jamie Quirk, the Royals’ backup catcher, had a different reaction: “Other things happened, too. … Does a bad call mean you have to lose 11–0 in the next game?” Quirk’s rhetorical question implied that he didn’t want to be remembered as an accidental winner. Although they may readily acknowledge an instance of good fortune, most winners like to believe that they had something to do with their victory. If Orta is out, do the Cardinals win? Who can say? The correct call would have removed only the most egregious mistake from an equation full of mostly hidden variables. Quirk preferred to believe in his own agency rather than imagine himself dependent on what Leo Tolstoy called the unseen “laws of space, time, and cause.” Tolstoy proposed that for winners and losers, belief in autonomy is equally illusory. War and Peace advances a theory of historical causation in which even emperors are powerless: “Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements … acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude).

…than that no one is in control of events. Free will forces personal accountability.

Health

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains what we do — and still don’t — know about pain (Marielle Segarra & Margaret Cirino, 4/04/26, Life kit)

In your book, you say that one of the most significant developments emerging in pain treatment is the fact that the brain is at the center of any pain experience. Can you tell us more about why that matters?

What I think has become clear — and I’m not the first person to say this — is the idea that if the brain doesn’t decide you have pain, then you don’t have pain.

The brain can also create pain where it seems like it wouldn’t exist.

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Energy

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End of History

FUKUYAMA WINS AGAIN:

Identitarianism

DONALD HAS RUBBED THEIR NOSES IN WHAT THEIR VOTES MEANT:

All Comedy is Conservative

THE HUMAN COMEDY:

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