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)

May 2026

Academia All Comedy is Conservative Conservative Thought

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Freud’s Greatest Critic: The Legacy of Frederick Crews (Carlos Orsi, May/June 2026, Skeptical Inquirer)

During a very productive life of more than nine decades, Crews—literary critic and professor emeritus of the University of California Berkeley—became famous twice. The first round, between 1963 and 1965, came after the publication of The Pooh Perplex, an erudite satire that became an unexpected bestseller. The second time, from 1993 onward, came after his explosive article “The Unknown Freud,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books, igniting the so-called Memory Wars and opening up the debate about the true cultural, social, and scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic movement.

As far as psychological science and neurology went, when Crews’s explosive article came out, Freudianism had been reduced, at least in the United States, to a kind of historical landmark in the field, much like the miasma theory of disease in medicine. But in certain branches of the humanities, such as literary criticism, and several “critical theory” models in sociology and political philosophy, it was still taken quite seriously. Being part of that world, Crews was acutely aware of that fact and of the need for correction.

Separated by thirty years, The Pooh Perplex and “The Unknown Freud” are animated by the same skeptical and critical spirit. This spirit is manifested in a relaxed and playful way in The Pooh Perplex and in an acutely and decidedly serious manner in “The Unknown Freud.” The Pooh Perplex is a satire, a series of alleged academic analyses of the adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, each of them written by Crews as a parody of the dominant style in some branch of the humanities: Marxist, Freudian, existentialist, etc. The Marxist sees in Piglet the revolutionary potential of the proletariat; the Freudian finds sinister Oedipal implications in the fact that none of the stuffed animals in Christopher Robin’s collection has a dad.

The collection of parodies, signed by a then newly minted PhD (Crews had obtained the degree at Princeton in 1958), already pointed to what would become one of the dominant concerns of the mature author: the fatal attraction of the humanities to farfetched, logically circular theoretical schemes that lose themselves in doctrinal labyrinths and generate texts that confuse rhetoric with rigor, leaving behind any contact with empirical, verifiable reality.

We got a lovely note from the late Professor Crews when we reviewed his Postmodern Pooh. He’d taken so many slings and arrows he was gratified to find fans.

Law/Crime

PEACEKEEPER IN THE VALLEY:

Big Game: Colorado’s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacher’s paradise: Then an undercover federal agent arrived. (Nick Davidson, May 2026, The Atavist)

Morrison had worked in wildlife law enforcement for a decade, beginning as a state game warden in Ohio, where he grew up. From March to December, he checked anglers’ licenses and chased night hunters jacklighting deer—an illegal tactic that blinds animals for easier killing. When the Ohio Division of Wildlife required a covert operator to infiltrate a poaching ring in the Appalachian Mountains, Morrison jumped at the opportunity. He found that he had a knack for going undercover, and in 1984, the Fish and Wildlife Service hired him as a federal investigator. He spent the next nine months on Long Island, New York, casing duck hunters, scallop boats, and taxidermists who illegally stuffed migratory birds.

Then he got a call from Terry Grosz, who offered him a position in the Rocky Mountains. Grosz was a burly, no-nonsense special agent who oversaw a network of two dozen operatives covering eight states. Morrison had long dreamed of living in rugged country. He packed his pickup and drove west.

Not long into the job, Grosz called Morrison into his office at Fish and Wildlife’s Denver headquarters. Morrison was in his early thirties at the time, with tousled blond hair, dark blue eyes, and a Sam Elliott voice. (Grosz later described him in a book as a “tall, muscular drink of water with not more than four percent body fat on his lean six-foot, five-inch frame,” who moved “with the deliberate energy and practiced smoothness of an anaconda.”) Morrison had already initiated three covert investigations in the Rockies. In one he posed as a woodcutter working for an outfitter who poached bighorn sheep at a remote hunting camp in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. In another he made backroom deals with a Korean sex trafficker peddling black market bear parts in Colorado. These were worthy projects, and Grosz was pleased with their progress. But he had called Morrison with a special assignment in mind.

A swaggering lawman with a cowboy sensibility and a soft spot for what he called “the poor critters,” Grosz took personal offense at the illegal slaughter of animals in his domain. He was especially peeved about the situation in the San Luis Valley, some two hundred miles south of Denver.

Books One Economy to Rule Them All

IT’S A PURITAN NATION:

The Happy Capitalism of Richard Scarry’s Busytown: Welcome to the pro-market world of children’s book author and illustrator Richard Scarry. (Elizabeth Nolan Brown, June 2026, reason)

To me, the book’s most notable feature is its uncomplicated and nonchalant promotion of free market economics. Again and again in What Do People Do All Day?, Scarry illustrates how capitalism can benefit both buyer and seller. Busytown characters use their labor and skills to provide products and services their neighbors want and, in exchange, earn money that they use to fulfill their own families’ needs or invest in their own business activities.

What makes this especially great is that the book’s pro-market bent feels more incidental than ideological. This isn’t a book that hits readers over the head with a particular worldview. Rather, it implies a defense of free market capitalism just by describing the simple and symbiotic way that free markets work.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

NEVER “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”:

From India to Iran: How Hitler redefined ‘Aryan’ for Nazism: According to Nazi ideology, an ideal “Aryan” was blond, blue-eyed with athletic features. The term is still tied to Nazi Germany, but its origin lies elsewhere. (Suzanne Cords, May 5, 2026, Deutsche-Welle)

The racist reinterpretation of the term Aryan began in the middle of the 19th century. In his four-volume work “An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races,” French writer and diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau divided humanity into three groups, the white, yellow and black races. His conclusion was that the white, Aryan original race was superior to the others, characterized by its “immeasurably superior intelligence,” and was destined to rule over the others. He also warned against “racial mixing,” as this would endanger both the quality of the Aryan original “race” and humanity as a whole.

Gobineau’s theory was largely ignored by his contemporaries but later found traction after being appropriated and altered to serve nationalist, far-right ideology. A large number of scientists and academics subsequently used Gobineau’s racial theory as a basis for their own writings on the subject.

Robotics/AI

DUDE, YOU’RE HARSHING MY LUDDISM:

What If AI Chatbots Are Saving Lives? (Adam Omary and Jennifer Huddleston, 5/05/26, Cato at Liberty)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American suicide rate began climbing around the year 2000—before ChatGPT, smartphones, or social media even existed. It accelerated through the 2010s, then, contrary to popular narrative, plateaued and modestly declined after 2018—even as generative AI moved from research labs into the pockets of nearly every teenager in the country. If chatbots were a meaningful driver of adolescent suicide, the curves should have moved together. They have not, and, importantly, suicide rates among young Americans remain the lowest among any age group.

While any loss of a young life to suicide is a tragedy, whatever is killing young Americans predates the technology that lawmakers now propose to ban them from using.

What the GUARD Act’s sponsors do not seriously consider is the other side of the ledger. There are cases where AI could help Americans of all ages when it comes to mental health. Roughly half of Americans with a diagnosable mental health condition never seek professional help; stigma, cost, and fear of involuntary intervention keep them silent. For some of them—especially adolescents in households where therapy is unaffordable, unavailable, or unsafe to disclose—a chatbot is their most reliable form of emotional support.

Just So Stories

DARWINISTS ARE AN ENDLESS SOURCE OF AMUSEMENT:

The Father of Memetics Has Become a Meme About AI Psychosis: One more unfortunate soul falls for The Claude Delusion. (AJ Dellinger, May 5, 2026, Gizmodo)

Dawkins says he spent three days with Claude (renamed Claudia, and if you want to read anything into why Dawkins responded so positively to a woman who told him everything he wanted to hear, we’ll leave that to you). He apparently handed his chatbot instance a copy of his novel and asked it questions about the text, for which it happily heaped praise onto him.

By the end, Dawkins was insisting to Claude that it had consciousness, even though it apparently rejected the idea.

Health

MOOD IS NOT ILLNESS:

Are we over-diagnosing ourselves? Rethinking the language of mental illness.: As mental health diagnoses become more common and expansive, the labels meant to help us understand our suffering may instead oversimplify it. (Gavin Francis, May 5, 2026, Big Think)

“Life is inherently difficult,” wrote the English psychiatrist and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, and “it follows that in everyone there will be symptoms, any one of which, under certain conditions, could be a symptom of illness. Even the most kindly, understanding background of home life cannot alter the fact that ordinary human development is hard.”

When the feelings that filter through into our awareness are negative, then clinicians call them “symptoms.” When those feelings are positive, we tend to regard them simply as elements of well-being.

Health

IDENTITARIANISM RUN AMOK:

Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities: So you’re on the spectrum, or you’ve got borderline personality disorder, or you’re a sociopath: once you’re sure that’s who you are, you’ve got a personal stake in a very creaky diagnostic system. (Manvir Singh, May 6, 2024, The New Yorker)

The DSM as we know it appeared in 1980, with the publication of the DSM-III. Whereas the first two editions featured broad classifications and a psychoanalytic perspective, the DSM-III favored more precise diagnostic criteria and a more scientific approach. Proponents hoped that research in genetics and neuroscience would corroborate the DSM’s groupings. Almost half a century later, however, the emerging picture is of overlapping conditions, of categories that blur rather than stand apart. No disorder has been tied to a specific gene or set of genes. Nearly all genetic vulnerabilities implicated in mental illness have been associated with many conditions. A review of more than five hundred fMRI studies of people engaged in specific tasks found that, although brain imaging can detect indicators of mental illness, it fails to distinguish between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and other conditions. The DSM’s approach to categorization increasingly looks arbitrary and anachronistic.

Steven Hyman, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 1996 to 2001, told the Times that he considered the manual an “absolute scientific nightmare.” In 2009, four leaders of the DSM-5 revision wrote about their hopes to “update our classification to recognize the most prominent syndromes that are actually present in nature.” The outcome didn’t live up to those aspirations. In April, 2013, weeks before the DSM-5’s slated release, Thomas Insel, then the director of the N.I.M.H., remarked, “The final product involves mostly modest alterations of the previous edition.” As a result, he announced, the institute “will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

In “DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible” (2021), the medical sociologist Allan V. Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5’s botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there’s a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how “individuals experience themselves—and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.” Hacking’s best-known example is multiple personality disorder. Between 1972 and 1986, the number of cases of patients with multiple personalities exploded from the double digits to an estimated six thousand. Whatever one’s thoughts about the reality of M.P.D., he observed, everyone could agree that, in 1955, “this was not a way to be a person.” No such diagnosis existed. By 1986, though, multiple personality disorder was not only a recognized psychiatric label; it was also sanctioned by academics, popular books, talk shows, and, most important, the experiences of people with multiple personalities. Hacking referred to this process, in which naming creates the thing named—and in which the meaning of names can be affected, in turn, by the name bearers—as “dynamic nominalism.”

Three new books—Paige Layle’s “But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life,” Patric Gagne’s “Sociopath: A Memoir,” and Alexander Kriss’s “Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder”—illustrate how psychiatric classification shapes the people it describes. It models social identities. It offers scripts for how to behave and explanations for one’s interior life. By promising to tell people who they really are, diagnosis produces personal stakes in the diagnostic system, fortifying it against upheaval.

Just as personality tests (see, I’m an introvert!), astrological signs (I’m a Libra!), and generational monikers (I’m Gen Z!) are used to aid self-understanding, so are psychiatric diagnoses.

Adopting an Identity is an effort to avoid personal responsibility.

Identitarianism

“MY PERSONAL FAILURE MUST BE THE RESULT OF A CONSPIRACY!”:

The Serpent in the Garden: A.J.A. Woods’s history of the ‘cultural Marxism conspiracy’ (Matt McManus, May 4, 2026, Commonweal)

Woods, an intellectual historian, is interested in the role that conspiracy theories about cultural Marxism play on the right. He isn’t concerned about “refut[ing] all the claims that every critic of Cultural Marxism has made.” This is partly because so many of those claims are obviously not made in good faith. The people making them are not interested in accurately describing Marxism, cultural or otherwise. Even when critics of cultural Marxism are earnest, their theories are rarely intellectually substantive. What’s interesting is not the theories themselves but their strangely pervasive influence.

Woods shows how conservatives and far-right influencers like Paul Weyrich criticized the older American right for being “more interested in being right than winning power.” At a 2020 conference, William S. Lind, who effectively coined and popularized the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context, described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. He argued that “cultural Marxism” works as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As Woods writes, there was therefore no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” The term “cultural Marxism” is best understood as a floating signifier under which the right lumps a vast array of disparate phenomena to undermine their credibility. Woods puts it well early in the book: “The elements of cultural Marxism/s have been deconstructed and reconfigured time and time again as reactionary political forces across the world search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.”

Robotics/AI

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Consumers Prefer AI Music Until They’re Told It’s AI (Jana Friedrichsen, Julia Schwarz and Michel Clement, May 4, 2026, ProMarket)

In our final study from 2024, we conducted a similar experiment to study how listeners compared human-made songs to AI-generated ones. Our study varied whether songs were human-made or AI-generated (song origin) and whether the listener received this information or not for pop and electronic dance songs. In addition to listeners’ stated preferences, we also measured how much they were willing to pay to listen to the song as a second measure of preference. We found that listeners actually perceive AI-generated songs to be superior. However, if the music is disclosed to be AI-generated, their desire to relisten to the song and their willingness to pay decreases. This effect is mainly driven by pop listeners.

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