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)

2026

Identitarianism

AMERICA IS CONSERVATIVE, NOT TRUMPIST:

Why Democrats are suddenly winning back the left — and the “double-haters”: Plus, the share of Americans calling themselves Republicans just hit a decade low. (G. Elliott Morris, Apr 05, 2026, Strength in Numbers)

The Democrats’ consolidation of left-wing liberalism is one piece of a broader backlash to Trumpism that shows up in the polling data right now. Another notable finding this week is from a new CNN/SSRS survey that found that about one-quarter of the public holds an unfavorable view of both parties. These are the so-called “double haters.” This group prefers Democrats on the 2025 generic ballot by 31 points.

This is a big deal for two reasons. First, that’s a massive shift; Double haters broke for Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. Now they’re swinging hard the other way.

Like Franklin’s polling, the CNN report also finds that Democrats’ gains are driven largely by opposition to the GOP, not enthusiasm for Democrats themselves. When asked what they dislike about Democrats, 22% of double haters called the party “do-nothing” and 11% said they aren’t standing up enough to Trump and the GOP, while 10% said they’re too liberal.

Soccer

DEVELOP TALENT, DON’T PAY FOR IT:

Lille were close to bankruptcy. This is how they became Europe’s most profitable club (Tom Burrows, April 4, 2026, The Athletc)

In addition to that, Schirmer says the previous ownership had run a strategy where they would buy relatively costly players to try to challenge for the league. They also found Lille had a high number of fees still to pay on transfers.

“If you run a football club, your ideal world is that you have more receivables than payables (on transfers),” Schirmer says. “But what we saw in 2020 was a huge number of payables for all these expensive players they had brought. So you had external debts and you had payables. And then to round up the picture, you had a significant salary bill. It just wasn’t sustainable.” […]

Lille’s new owners also set about revamping the club’s academy, one that has produced Eden Hazard, Benjamin Pavard and Yohan Cabaye. In the years before their takeover, very few players had graduated from the academy to the first team.

Schirmer says it was key to their vision as it helped forge a strong identity, developing players who had an attachment to the club and city, as well as a production line of talent.

She says the academy at the club’s Domaine de Luchin training centre, 20 miles east of Lille and close to the Belgian border, is home to players from the age of 15. Lille have around 70 children there, with 35 living on site and attending the private school.

In the younger age groups, there are around 50 children — from under-eights to under-11s — who train at partner clubs. For the under-11s to under-15s, also around 50 children, Lille work with a public school that offers a sports focus. The children go to school there while training with the club. They have the same set-up for the girls’ teams.

Anglospherics Latin America

THE eND OF hISTORY IS A THREE-LEGGED STOOL:

Chile’s Hard Right Isn’t as Trumpy as It Wants to Seem: How to keep a consensus while pretending to break it. (Quico Toro, Apr 03, 2026, Persuasion)

Foreigners make a lot of lazy assumptions about Chile, but the stereotype of a country set on a hard right-wing path by a brutal dictator who brought prosperity along with repression is a partial truth at best. The truth is much more interesting. Per capita GDP grew only about 40 percent during Pinochet’s entire 17-year rule, and that includes two devastating recessions in 1975 and 1982. Chile’s real push into middle-income status came with democracy: GDP per capita (in constant 2010 dollars) more than doubled from around $6,400 in 1990 to over $14,000 by 2018, and poverty plummeted from 45 percent in 1987 to just 20 percent by 2000.


Chile’s development success story is the story of deepening consensus around institutions built on fundamentally sound liberal principles.

As important as saving Chile from Communism and institution capitalism were, Pinochet’s crowning act was returning to democracy once the threats were gone.

Technology

PLAY THE CLASSICS:

How the Turner Twins Are Mythbusting Modern Gear (Mike Knispel , March 16, 2026, Carryology)

The Turner Twins’ trajectory into the world of high-stakes exploration wasn’t born from a childhood obsession with Everest; it spawned from a near-tragedy.

At age 17, just prior to their 18th birthday, Hugo dove into the sea and hit a sandbank. He fractured his C7 vertebra. In a week where eight other people were admitted to the same hospital with similar injuries, Hugo was the only one to walk out. The proximity to permanent paralysis was a profound wake-up call.

“We had a midlife crisis at 17,” Ross explains. “Life got put in perspective.”


They needed to live and test their limits. They started by rowing the Atlantic to raise funds for Spinal Research, a UK-based charity they’ve worked with for years. But the real epiphany came on a London tube train years later, reading about the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They looked at the grayed photos of men in tweed on the ice and wondered: How did they survive?


They realized they possessed the ultimate scientific tool: a perfect control subject and a perfect variable. If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance—be it core temperature, calorie burn, or cognitive function—could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.

The “time travel” experiments were born.

Identitarianism

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Judge Rebukes Prosecutors as ICE Protest Cases Falter: “Not Ready for Prime Time” (The Intellectualist, Apr 03, 2026)

A series of federal prosecutions against immigration-enforcement protesters in Los Angeles has encountered setbacks in court, with some cases ending in acquittals or dismissals and others drawing scrutiny over the government’s evidence and the circumstances of the arrests. […]

Reporting from the Los Angeles Times described one of the most serious courtroom setbacks: a federal judge’s criticism of prosecutors after late disclosure of evidence in the Escobar-Gutierrez case, followed by a reported dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be brought again. During the proceedings, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. told prosecutors, “You’ve got to be ready for prime time and you’re not,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

In arguing for dismissal, a federal public defender echoed that criticism, describing the episode as “amateur hour at the U.S. attorney’s office,” also according to the Los Angeles Times.

Music

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The shadow of the thorn tree: Christian culture must combine tradition and modernity (Sebastian Milbank, 3 April, 2026, The Critic)

These thoughts were brought to me powerfully by one of my favourite songs — “The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash. It’s a remarkable song, with a remarkable backstory. Released only a year before his death, in 2002 when Cash was an old man, it was the fruit of an improbable musical resurrection. After years in the musical wilderness, music producer Rick Rubin, known for his work with rappers and heavy metal bands, formed an improbable partnership with Cash, who produced much of his best work in the twilight of his life and career. Rubin, a secular Jew with an eclectic spirituality, got on remarkably well with the evangelically Christian Cash, and the pair would “take communion” together every day, with Cash describing the eucharist over the phone to Rubin.

The song itself is suffused with the words of Job, Acts and Revelation, but its origins, strangely, were in a vision. Cash dreamed that he was in Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth, who turned and said to him “Johnny Cash, you’re a thorn tree in a whirlwind”.

Cash is a late flowering of a very old tradition: the popular musical and religious imagination of the English-speaking peoples, and it’s nowhere more evident than in that song. From “terror in each sip and in each sup”, to “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”, the poetry of the King James Bible vibrates through his music. At once sinister and joyful, sublime and homespun, it’s a song about the end of the world and it is impossible not to feel a chill as Cash sings of “measured hundredweight and penny pound/When the man comes around”.

I love it because it is a 21st century song plugged directly into the crackling electricity of the soul of English religiosity.

Soccer

YNWA, BRO:

An American Who Became a Football Fan (DAVID CAMPBELL, 5/02/26, Country Squire)

I grew up in the era of the Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty of the seventies, when Coach Chuck Noll, Quarterback Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and the Steel Curtain Defence led by Mean Joe Greene ruled the roost. They were the American equivalent of Liverpool FC during those same decades—the Liverpool of Shankly and Paisley, of Keegan and Dalglish, Rush and Souness.

Now here is the surprising thing: for all my travels throughout England, my love for Premier League football was discovered not in a Liverpool pub or a London stadium, but in a sports bar in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, a faithful congregation of Liverpool supporters gathered to cheer their team at unholy hours, watching matches beamed across the Atlantic. The brethren took me in and patiently explained the intricacies of the game: the positions and responsibilities of the goalkeeper, the defence, the midfield, and the attack (and yes, a striker and a forward can be the same thing, but do not assume they always are). They taught me it is called a pitch, not a field; a match, not a game; a kit, not a uniform. They reviewed the laws of the game and the endless complexity of tactics—a lifetime’s study, I am discovering.

Holidays

GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:

The Spirit of Passover and the American Story: Liberation and new beginnings are themes of the Jewish holiday that can help us to revitalize our sense for the prospects and future of our country. (Sam B. Girgus, Apr 03, 2026, The Bulwark)

Mary Antin was one such person, and her story merits reflection. After leaving czarist Russia as a teenager, Antin came to America, which she later characterized as “The Promised Land,” a new Jerusalem, thereby recalling the sensibility and vision of the founding Puritans. She wrote of her “faith in America” as a “healing ointment.” She claimed that “I am the youngest of America’s children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage.” She writes, “Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.”

Ours, too, is the shining future, even if it doesn’t seem so bright right now. Ride with us and we will do our best to help you hold on to your belief in the American project.


Antin is a representative figure of the historic Jewish passion for reopening and renewing the American story; freedom from the violence of the pogroms of her childhood was an important part of her adopted country’s great promise. Such freedom is a core part of the American idea, and it has a natural symbolic connection to the Passover narrative of liberation.

The best part of Passover is always when a kid or guest realizes how American it is.

Sex

TALKING IT OUT:

A Win for Christian Counselors and Religious Liberty (Jonathon Van Maren, April 2, 2026, First Things)

Colorado’s 2019 “Minor Conversion Therapy Law” defined “conversion therapy” as “attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” It banned treatments, including talk therapy or counseling, that could help minors resolve their gender dysphoria and align their identity with their biological sex.

These laws have been sold by conflating coercive practices with helping gender-confused children—many of whom will have been deliberately confused by LGBTQ public school curricula—become comfortable with their own bodies. Colorado’s law essentially sought to lock children into the path toward “transition”—a staggering Orwellian irony, since “transition” is itself just another form of “conversion.” This is precisely why LGBTQ activists shifted from using the phrase “gender transition” to “gender-affirming therapy”: to enable them to claim that there was not actually a “conversion” from one gender to another being perpetrated.

Thus, according to LGBTQ activists and their political allies, to oppose the attempt to convert someone from one gender to another through social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex change surgeries is “conversion therapy.” In order to clear up any confusion that this inversion might cause, Colorado’s law specifically listed an exception to its “conversion therapy” ban: “Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.” A child could be counseled into gender transition, but it was illegal to counsel a child out of gender transition.

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