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)

Long War

Dragon Has No Teeth

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

China Looks Strong. Life Here Tells a Different Story. (Helen Gao, 11/13/25, NY Times)

Behind the orderliness of everyday life, a quiet desperation simmers. On social media and in private conversations, there is a common refrain: worry over joblessness, wage cuts and making ends meet. […]

These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States. That sentiment is likely to grow. The latest five-year plan — the government’s blueprint of economic priorities — that was released last month makes clear it plans to double down on prioritizing national power over the common good.

In April, as the tariff war with the United States intensified, a People’s Daily editorial argued that Beijing can resist American bullying thanks to systemic advantages such as China’s ability to centralize resources and pour them into accomplishing national goals. The backlash on the Chinese internet was swift. While the government boasts, a viral social media post pointed out, everyday struggles like finding work, putting food on the table and educating children are “fraught with difficulty.” Winning the trade war with the United States means “preparing to sacrifice some of the people,” the author wrote. Censors soon blocked the post and others like it.

Years ago, Chinese people would have cheered a People’s Daily editorial like that out of the reflexive nationalism that the government has instilled for decades. That patriotism is nearly drowned out today by those who vent over the problems they face.


Youth unemployment is so high that last year the government changed its calculation methodology in a way that produced a lower number. Even the new figure remains alarmingly high. An estimated 200 million people get by in precarious careers in a gig economy. Consumers, many of whom have seen their net worth shrink in an intractable housing market crash, are cutting back on spending, trapping the economy in a deflationary spiral.

The sense of economic insecurity is leading people to forego marriage and starting families, worsening a national decline in population. Popular frustration also is sharpening the divide between the haves and the have-nots — hardening public resentment against those who are perceived as parlaying economic or political connections into opportunity while most people face dwindling prospects. And mental health problems are believed to be rising, as evidenced by a spate of indiscriminate stabbing sprees and other violent attacks in the past couple of years.

It seems clear that Beijing can no longer count on knee-jerk patriotism to underwrite its increasingly assertive stance abroad. In September, when the Chinese Communist Party staged a lavish military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, many people wondered aloud why that money wasn’t instead spent on addressing the difficulties of ordinary people.

The government recently began cracking down on social media content it considered “excessively pessimistic” — a clear sign it is concerned about this public unease undercutting its agenda. But suppressing criticism instead of addressing its causes will only deepen the disconnect with the people and strain the balancing act that the state has tried to strike between its foreign policy priorities and the domestic support it craves.

Identitarianism

WHY IT’S ALWAYS MAGA:

‘They’re not wolves – they’re sheep’: the psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone-actor mass killers: From Port Arthur to Hoddle Street, Paul E Mullen has had a front-row seat to the men behind some of the worst public massacres. He says it’s possible to ‘disrupt the script’ for future violence (Walter Marsh, 8 Nov 2025, The Guardian)

Things changed, Mullen says, after a shooting in Austin, Texas in August 1966, when a 25-year-old male student climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a University of Texas building and opened fire, killing 15 and injuring another 30.

“He was in every major newspaper in America, on the front page the next day with his photograph and his name, and he was covered worldwide over the next few days – they later made a film,” he says, referring to 1975’s The Deadly Tower, starring Kurt Russell as the red bandana-clad gunman.

“It was the Texas university tower massacre that created the script, which has now grown and grown and grown,” Mullen reflects. “And the first imitator of the Texas killer was only five weeks [later].”

ike the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fuelled by a mix of resentment and a sense of weakness, drawn to the promise of infamy, publicity, and a noteworthy death enjoyed by previous mass killers. Some even dress like their predecessors, from Russell’s red bandana to the all-black attire of the teenage Columbine school shooters.

“They gather grievances, grievances, grievances,” Mullen says, echoing the common complaints he has heard across his career. “‘People mistreated me’; ‘I was cheated’; ‘they’re not fair’; ‘no one likes me’. All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back.

“The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance. But it’s much worse, because you never did anything. And this, in a sense, is your final reply.”

And Populism and Identitarianism are nothing but te politics of resentment.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

APPLIED DARWINISM:

When Christians Follow Nietzsche: Enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s ideal of human excellence and vitality has given rise to calls for manly Christian warriors to flex their superiority. (John Ehrett, November 7, 2025, Plough)

Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is implicitly grounded in the argument that there is a human goodness that is not the Goodness that is God. Just how is this other-than-divine goodness exemplified?

Nietzsche offers one answer: within the ideal human body, the material manifestation of human perfection. The creative instincts of his Übermensch require a fit vessel, a genetically superior specimen. There is a reason Rand’s heroes were always so aestheticized. While Nietzsche himself resisted racialized interpretations of his thought, his intellectual heirs have not been so restrained. In recent years, few have pushed Nietzsche’s logic to its terminus as boldly as the Yale-trained political philosopher Costin Alamariu, better known as the pseudonymous online provocateur Bronze Age Pervert. For Alamariu, genetic-supremacist politics is not merely an extension of Nietzsche’s thought; it is the dark core of Western philosophy itself. As Alamariu would have it, philosophy begins not in wonder but in eugenics.

This reality, Alamariu argues, was violently suppressed by generations of Greek philosophers, from Plato on, who feared the consequences of revealing the fact of biological political determinism to the masses. This means that the entire tradition of Western thought, the whole “Platonic-Socratic tradition,” was based on a lie, “born in an act of rhetorical obfuscation and conservative cowardice.”

Is this true to Nietzsche’s vision? It’s hard to see why not. Alamariu consciously identifies himself as Nietzsche’s successor, stressing that he is “trying to explain some of the implications of the work of Nietzsche for a world in which he is still the only prophet, and will remain so for some centuries.” And indeed, in Alamariu’s work, the logic of vitalism comes to full flower. For all its veneration of superior human specimens, vitalism ultimately subverts any sense of human exceptionalism, leaving – quite properly – only nature. Where Nietzsche left off, Alamariu simply finishes the job: Ecce simio. Behold the ape.

To address just one aspect of this excellent essay, it seems awfully queer that these guys who believe so fiercely in Darwinism are also such enthusiasts for cosmetic surgery and performance enhancing drugs.

Identitarianism

MAGA IS UNAMERICAN:

The Founders Would Abhor Trump’s Domestic Deployments: And the notion that courts can’t review his National Guard decisions is baseless. (Philip Allen Lacovara, Nov 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

The Founders would be appalled. They fought a revolution against a king who sent his troops against them to enforce his laws. That experience was fresh in their minds when they adopted a Constitution that says that Congress alone has the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

The president argues that it is appropriate for him to use the military “to execute the laws.” He also contends that the courts have no authority even to consider the legitimacy of his decision to summon National Guard troops and send them into American cities for what he deems law enforcement.

Neither position has constitutional support.

Identitarianism

WHY ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY FAILURE WHEN I CAN BLAME A “THEM”?:

The New Medievals: The bones of our conspiracies haven’t changed, though their details are different. (Claire Lehmann, 10/27/25, The Dispatch))

We crave narratives that make the world legible, particularly in times of instability or flux. In psychological experiments conducted by Adam Galinsky and Jennifer Whitson in 2008, it was found that people who were made to feel powerless began to see patterns that were not there. Participants were asked to recall a moment in their lives when they felt powerless; afterward, they were shown random visual “static” images or sequences of stock data and asked to identify patterns. Those who had been primed to feel powerless were far more likely to report seeing shapes, trends, or connections that didn’t exist. “Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions,” the authors wrote. Another 2020 study found that a sense of a lack of agency also predicted belief in Jewish conspiracy.

The conspiracist’s worldview transforms chaos into drama and tragedy into design. It restores meaning to a confusing world by insisting that every disaster, every death, every downturn must have a reason.

Academia Identitarianism Sex

MAGA JUST WANTS SOMEONE TO BLAME FOR THEIR OWN FAILURES:

The ‘Boy Crisis’ Is Overblown (Jessica Grose, 7/23/25, NY Times)


Let’s start with what Peterson says about the “radically left” political leanings of female teachers. In 2021, the Heritage Foundation, hardly a liberal bastion, found that “a nationally representative survey of K-12 teachers does not support the idea that America’s public schoolteachers are radical activists.” And further, “Teachers may very well be allies, not opponents, in the pushback against the application of critical race theory and other divisive ideologies in the classroom.”

But what about the fact that the majority of American teachers are now women? The teaching force in the United States has been majority female for over 100 years. Reeves notes that the current teaching force is 23 percent male — which is roughly what it was between 1920 and 1940. The number of male teachers ticked up a bit after World War II, but peaked at around 30 percent.

It’s not like our public schools are bereft of male leadership, either. While women make up the majority of elementary school principals, men dominate middle school and high school administrations. Only a quarter of superintendents, who are in charge of multiple public schools or districts, are women.


What’s more, the evidence that students do better with same-gender teachers is mixed at best. For example, a 2021 study using seven years of data looked at students in Indiana from grades three through eight and found that “female teachers are better at increasing both male and female students’ achievement than their male counterparts in elementary and middle schools,” and “contrary to popular speculation, boys do not exhibit higher academic achievement when they are assigned to male teachers.” (The biggest positive effect was for girls when they had female math teachers.)

All that said, the research that really surprised me was a meta analysis from 2014 by Daniel and Susan D. Voyer that showed that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914.

Identitarianism

NOT NAZIS!…JUST FOLLOWERS OF NAZISM…:

How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality (David French, Jan. 26, 2025, NY Times)

No one was more aware than the founders that the American experiment contradicts our base natures. A century before Schmitt was born, they understood that reality intimately.

Our government is constructed with the understanding that, as James Madison famously put it in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Constitution tries to ameliorate the will to power as best it can — as Madison said in the same essay, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” — but the founders also knew that even our elaborate system of checks and balances is insufficient. To make our system work, virtue is a necessity.

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” John Adams wrote in his 1798 Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Adams’s New England metaphor is perfect (his readers would absolutely know what a whale would do to a net): Pluralism requires both law and ethics to function, and without ethics the law will fail.

We forget how much the founders — for all their faults — were focused not just on the forms of American government, but also on personal virtue. One of my favorite books from last year was “The Pursuit of Happiness” by Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center.

The book describes how the founders envisioned the pursuit of happiness not as the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, but rather as “the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, listed temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility as indispensable elements of virtue.

You can immediately see the contrast with Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics. Virtue ethics certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but it still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our foes. The virtues Franklin listed are not simply the way you love your own political tribe; they are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.

Demonstrate these virtues, and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even when they lose a political battle. When your enemies show the same virtues, you can still enjoy a good life even when you lose. That’s the social compact of pluralism. In a decent society, no defeat is ultimate defeat, and no victory is ultimate victory. And in all circumstances, your fundamental human rights must be preserved.

Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.

The friend-enemy distinction explains why so many Republicans are particularly furious at anti-Trump dissenters — especially when those dissenters hold conservative values. In the friend-enemy distinction, ideology is secondary to loyalty.

Russia

THE LINCOLN BRIGADES MAY HAVE BEEN JUST DUPES…:

Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm (George Orwell, March 1947)

In the early stages of the war foreigners were on the whole unaware of the inner struggles between the various political parties supporting the Government. Through a series of accidents I joined not the International Brigade like the majority of foreigners, but the POUM militia—i.e. the Spanish Trotskyists.

So in the middle of 1937, when the Communists gained control (or partial control) of the Spanish Government and began to hunt down the Trotskyists, we both found ourselves amongst the victims. We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, and not even to have been arrested once. Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared.

These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. In Spain as well as in Russia the nature of the accusations (namely, conspiracy with the Fascists) was the same and as far as Spain was concerned I had every reason to believe that the accusations were false. To experience all this was a valuable object lesson: it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.

My wife and I both saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy. Yet on our return to England we found numerous sensible and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic accounts of conspiracy, treachery and sabotage which the press reported from the Moscow trials.

And so I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.

…but the fact is they were serving Stalin, not the Spanish people.

Identitarianism

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Building New Rafts: Trump’s Inheritance of the Legacy of the Left (Martin Jay, Salmagundi)

What, in addition to his seduction of a significant chunk of the working class, has Trump inherited from the playbook of the left in American political life? How has he and his right-wing populist movement refunctioned for their own purposes many of the traditional positions and attitudes that were once considered, grosso modo, “progressive?” What does this confusion of identities suggest for our conventional way of placing aggregated political formations along a linear spectrum? What does it portend for the future constellation of discrete positions that form, at least for a while, a shared platform or coherent ticket?

Painful as it is, we have to acknowledge the various ways in which the cards once dealt to a certain hand, and remained there for a long while, can later unexpectedly find their way into another. Let us begin with economic issues. At least ever since the Reagan administration, the bugaboo of the left has been neo-liberal globalization, which, broadly speaking, was accused of sacrificing domestic jobs in the pursuit of high corporate profits by investing abroad and profiting from cheap foreign labor. Neo-liberalism also meant fiscal austerity, the weakening of the welfare safety net, the undermining of unions, indiscriminate deregulation, the dissolution of barriers to free trade, and the marketization of as many social relations as possible. When the Democrats climbed, more or less, on board the neo-liberal express during the Clinton administration, it seemed as if both parties had placed their chips on a new international economic order run by plutocratic and technocratic elites beyond the control of democratic domestic politics. International organizations like the European Union, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund gained autonomy from national electorates.

For a long time, the left fulminated against the sins of neo-liberalism and the dangers of unaccountable globalization, whether under Republican or Democratic administrations.3 From Reagan through the second Bush presidency, its cries of distress were met with scorn by staunchly conservative defenders of the sanctity of markets, smaller government, deregulation, balanced federal budgets and other neo-liberal shibboleths. During the past ten years, however, a curious erosion of the line between camps occurred. Signs were already there during the Brexit debate, when progressive voices urged the UK to leave the EU because, as an article in the leftist periodical Jacobin put it, “it provides an opportunity for a radical break with neo-liberalism.”4 Even after Brexit succeeded, Perry Anderson, UCLA historian and the esteemed editor of the New Left Review, continued his denunciation of the undemocratic nature of the European Union.5 Perhaps the most resonant symbolic expression of the converging of positions occurred when Steve Bannon unexpectedly reached out in 2017 to Robert Kuttner, the left-liberal editor of The American Prospect, to discuss their common hostility to China and talk strategy about promoting economic nationalism.

Identitarianism

DEMAND MORE:

The Shutdown We Need: The fight should be for the Constitution (Robert Zubrin, Oct 10, 2025, The Cosmopolitan Globalist)

As a result of the election of Donald Trump, the rule of law has broken down in the United States. Thousands of convicted criminals who engaged in violence to support Trump’s efforts to prevent the certification of the 2020 election have been released. Those who prosecuted them have been fired and threatened with prosecution. Unidentified men, wearing masks and driving unmarked vehicles, are snatching immigrants—or alleged immigrants—off the streets and even from courts of law, then whisking them off without due process to hellhole prisons in foreign lands.

The FBI is raiding the homes of Trump’s critics, such as former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton. In some cases, his critics have faced outright terror tactics: Last February, for example, the January 6 thugs whom Trump released from jail threatened to bomb a conference in Washington, DC, where Bolton was speaking.

In the past several months, Trump has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of two major television networks because their coverage was unfavorable to him. He has called for the White House to take over the Federal Reserve system. In direct violation of his oath of office, Trump refuses to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress, such as the TikTok ban.

Trump is undertaking further actions outside of his legal powers, including capriciously imposing or ending massive tariffs (a power assigned under the US Constitution to Congress), and deploying to unwilling states, putatively for law enforcement, the National Guard (usurping the power of state governments), and even US Army and Marine forces (outright illegal). […]

In short, since retaking office, Trump has mounted an all-out assault on Constitutional government, the rule of law, freedom of speech, free enterprise, free trade, American science, and the defense of the Free World. Compared to these issues, Obamacare is irrelevant. America was a free country before Obamacare, it was a free country after Obamacare, and it can remain free with or without Obamacare. It cannot remain free without its Constitution.

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