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)

Anglospherics

Identitarianism

THERE IS NO VIABLE ALTERNATIVE TO LIBERALISM:

Postliberalism’s Hungary Gambit Failed (Thomas D. Howes, 4/22/26, Civitas Outlook)

In the debates about postliberalism since Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed appeared in 2017, postliberals and their friends (e.g., Kevin Roberts) would that conservatives needed to stop fearing the use of power; some of their close friends in the new right would even echo Carl Schmitt, saying that in politics you need to reward friends and punish enemies; they would ask rhetorically “do you not know what time it is?”; others would dismiss proceduralism as an obstacle to promoting the common good. Among postliberal intellectuals, Adrian Vermeule opposed Madisonian, called for a more powerful and bureaucracy, and said we would be better off; Gladden Pappin bragged about the organizations that were formed to Trump loyalists to fill government positions; Christopher Rufo said these kinds of efforts, which included DOGE (a brainchild of Curtis Yarvin), were an “,” an effort to install a new elite, which echoed the arguments of Patrick Deneen’s book Regime Change. What they learned from Viktor Orbán was that you could decrease the separation of powers and weaken the checks and balances of a government by filling strategic positions with loyalists.

Postliberals also pushed a dubious economic agenda. Power should be used, they argued, to shape the economy; was all the rage, and various forms of right-wing dirigiste strategies were suggested, including 1930s-style corporatism, as it was by Orbán’s employee, Gladden Pappin. Viktor Orbán not only resisted mass immigration (as his replacement, Peter Magyar, does), but he also, they argued, saved Hungarians from the “globalists” who were hollowing out industry with their doctrine of free trade.

So, when Dreher admits Orbán’s loss was about the economy and corruption, postliberal’s conservative critics rightly gasp. Those are precisely the things we warned about—using political power to create advantages for your political party, stifling political speech, rejecting proceduralism for partisan advantage, and misguided economic policies that make countries poorer. The argument was primarily about corruption and poor economic policy. One might argue that more autocratic control is not intrinsically corrupt, but opponents of postliberalism always saw corruption as one of its consequences; and even then, Orban’s autocratic tendencies, his attempts to tip the scales to secure more power for himself and his party, were certainly a good part of what Magyar and his voters opposed.

Postliberals are a minority in American politics, but they punch well above their weight. They are well organized, operate in lockstep, and are loyal to one another—they behave in many ways like the leftists who for decades carried out a strategy of a “long march through the institutions.” Like Joseph de Maistre, one of their intellectual forebears, they believe that social revolutions succeed from the top down, through strategically placed elites. The more transparent their unpopular project, the less successful it will be. They are willing to talk in popular fora about their movement as a populist one, about a fight against the “globalists” and mass immigration, when it is far more about acquiring power for a much less popular social project—this is especially the case for the integralist faction (e.g., Vermeule and Pappin). They want to remove limits on the executive branch’s power, fill the government with loyalists, and form a compliant court, all for someone who shares their comprehensive vision (e.g., Vance).

The fall of the Orbán government not only cut off a huge amount of postliberal funding, but it also exposed their project to further scrutiny. They are leaving Hungary embarrassed and rejected by the Hungarian people. This also leaves them with no political power. Any near-future prospect they have is tied to J.D. Vance, whose power in turn depends on Donald Trump. We have seen many of Vance’s friends already thrown under the bus by Trump, particularly Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. It is unclear whether Trump even likes Vance or will endorse him. The 2028 primaries are a long way away in Trump time.

Donald is going to force JD out and replace him with Marco.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Trump, his ‘low IQ’ slur, and the right’s race obsession (Michael Mathes, with Raphaelle Peltier in New York, 4/22/26, AFP)

“Trump’s characterization of people of color as ‘low IQ’ is a racist dog whistle with a long history in the US,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, told AFP.

During the periods of colonialism and 19th century slavery, “white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color and, thus, divinely appointed for leadership.”

Trump’s recent repeated use of the expression dovetails with the American far-right’s apparent obsession with genetics and phrenology, a pseudoscience of cranium size and shape as a supposed marker of intelligence.

Israel/Palestine

DEPARTING THE ANGLOSPHERE:

What Went Wrong in Israel? A Genocide Scholar Examines ‘What Zionism Became’: In his new book, Omer Bartov tracks how a liberatory strand of Zionism transformed into an extremist ideology that he sees as responsible for genocide in Gaza (Aaron Gell, 4/21/26, The Guardian)

Much of What Went Wrong? focuses on what Bartov frames as the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights. Had Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, pushed for either approach, Bartov argues, the nascent state might well have grown into the kind of liberal democracy it has, however speciously, long proclaimed itself to be.

Despite his condemnation of present-day Israeli society, Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy.

Bartov acknowledged that the idea seems far-fetched as corpses are still being dug from the rubble of Gaza and Israel is prosecuting yet another bloody war. But what he sees as the nation’s preference for military confrontation over diplomacy depends entirely on American support, he pointed out, and that patronage is now being tested as never before. As a result of the Gaza genocide, a clear majority of Democratic voters now have a negative view of Israel. More recently, the ill-conceived US-Israeli aggression against Iran has significantly eroded GOP support. “Maga is becoming anti-Israel,” Bartov said, due to “Netanyahu completely leading Trump by the nose into a completely idiotic war”.

Despite some alarming strains of ethnic bias underlying the perception of wealthy and powerful Jewish interests manipulating the US government, pointing out antisemitism has lost effectiveness, in part because the influence of pro-Israel donors on US politics – and Israel’s campaign to convince the US to wage war on Iran – is undeniable. Additionally, the charge of antisemitism has grown hollow, Bartov said, due to its flagrant “weaponization” as “a tool to shut people up” as the state wreaks destruction on its neighbors. “Having claimed to be the definitive answer to antisemitism,” he writes in What Went Wrong?, “Israel is now the best excuse for antisemites everywhere, a nation whose addiction to violence and oppression, reliance on great powers and financial clout, and constant harping on the horrors of the Holocaust as an excuse for untethered violence against Palestinians are making even some of its erstwhile supporters shrink from it in discomfort, or horror and disgust.”

As a result, America’s indulgence of its longstanding Middle East ally may at last be reaching its limits. Should the United States withhold military support – as is advocated by growing numbers of Democratic policymakers – “Israel will have to go through a process of coming to terms with itself,” Bartov predicted. Under such circumstances, the country would have no choice but to pursue diplomacy. Ironically, that might be the so-called Jewish state’s best hope for a peaceful and prosperous future.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Identitarianism

YOU CAN’T BE BOTH CHRISTIAN AND MAGA:

Trump, Leo, and the Death of Integralism (Stephen Daisley, April 20, 2026, First Things)

Wait until the quixotic utopianism of the Catholic integralists encounters the final boss of postliberal politics: immigration. While many faithful American integralists will submit to the pope’s instruction, the Catholic Church’s pronouncements on immigration attack concepts as fundamental to Republican politics today as freedom and enterprise were in the Reagan and Bush years.

Even if some accommodation could be reached between Catholic social teaching and either Republican postliberalism or Democratic economic justice, such an arrangement would be agonizingly fragile in a polity where executive power can change every four years and legislative power every two. Orbán’s illiberal democracy, which he has spent the past sixteen years embedding in the institutions and culture of Hungarian national life, looks set to be dissolved by a successor keen to embrace all the European Union diktats Orbán’s ascendancy was predicated on opposing. On how a postliberal order can be developed into a society organized around material and spiritual virtue, integralism has few convincing answers. On how such an order would be maintained against the vicissitudes of democracy, it has no answers.

Integralists will not like hearing it, but there is already a means by which to live faithfully, extol the doctrines of the Church, and contribute to the forging of a common good society. Their old enemy, liberalism, properly understood, gives the Catholic holder of public office the freedom to live a life integrated to the eternal verities and ordered to virtue, while exercising temporal power under the law with ex officio neutrality, and promoting a culture conducive to religious devotion in which the faithful are secure from coercive state secularism. It is an imperfect model, it does not always deliver victory, and its concepts and mechanisms have been directed to un-Christian and anti-Christian ends and will be again. That is all the more reason to fight for the proper understanding and application of liberalism, and thus the right and ability of the faith to flourish in “enemy” territory, rather than taking the political Catholic tradition out of the mainstream and into the coercive, authoritarian fringe.

Anglospherics Conservative Thought

WORTH THE EFFORT:

Conservative Credo (Barbara J. Elliott, April 14th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)

Because man is fallible by nature, the conservative seeks to limit the damage that can be done through the abuse of power by limiting its concentration.

The conservative fosters the fullness of human potential by protecting the freedom and dignity of each person, acknowledging that responsibility comes with freedom. Rights and duties are always linked.

For the conservative, each man and woman is equal in dignity and equal before the law, but gloriously individual and unequal in talents, aptitudes, and outcomes. The conservative celebrates the uniqueness of individuals and does not level to eliminate differences.

It’s how we avoided the damage Reason did to the Continent.

End of History

MORALITY CAN NOT BE DERIVED RATIONALLY:

Most of the world thinks differently to us: Universalism is based on irrational ideas about human nature (Daniel Dieppe, 17 April, 2026, The Critic)

The reality is that we can trace the philosophical cause of our weird Western thinking to Christianity. The fundamental equality of all human beings stems from the belief that all are “made in the image of God”. Welcoming the stranger is encapsulated in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Our intrinsic sense of guilt is a word-for-word reading of the fall and the Christian doctrine of original sin from Genesis 3. As the historian Tom Holland concluded in Dominion:The Making of the Western Mind, we “are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

Identitarianism

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?:

There’s a moral vacuum at the core of JD Vance (Gerard Baker, April 16 2026, Times uk)

Everyone makes moral compromises but they are manageable because there is at least some essential identity, an irreducible core that is something more than the sum of our appetites and ambitions. But the uniquely strange trajectory of Vance’s career strongly suggests there is no identity there, only the appetites and ambitions to be served by whichever principles work best.

This is a man who has changed almost everything about himself to accommodate new realities. From his name (he was once James David Bowman) to his faith (he was once an evangelical Protestant) to his political allegiance (he once pondered fearfully whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler”). And he is still constantly changing his mind (in that New York Times story it was said that while he was at first against the war, he then argued for a limited war and then for an all-out war, all in the space of a fortnight). When you look, in other words, for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from a succession of useful transactions.

His entire life has been driven by the need to be loved by his newest father figure.

Identitarianism Immigration

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS ARE ALWAYS AND ONLY RACIST:

Reopen the Golden Door: Repeal The Immigration and Nationality Act: immigration restrictionism is the Slave Power of the 21st century (Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis, 17 Apr 2026, Liberal Currents)

The moral turpitude (itself a term of art deployed against migrants, but more appropriate for the entire system), by itself, should be a damning case against the idea of restricting immigration. The human suffering it generates should condemn it alone. But beyond that, the economic case is damning, and the lost wealth represents human suffering in its own right.

Economists such as Michael Clemens have persuasively demonstrated that immigration restrictionism is one of the largest drags on the global economy in existence. Even a five percent increase in worker mobility would have the same economic impact as a global regime of universal free trade; removing all immigration barriers could double the size of the global economy. But how? Simply put—workers are more productive in wealthy economies. This flows back into tax revenue, into labor supply, into aggregate demand. The reality is that immigration creates more demand—more jobs to fill that demand—than it supplants.

But ultimately, the case against the immigration regime is moral. On a fundamental level, the freedom to work and live in a place of one’s choice is a human right. It is an intrinsic violation of liberal democratic principles to use state violence to infringe this right. This is even more salient when one considers the element of desert. What did you do to deserve the immense quality of life from being born in a wealthy developed country as opposed to a poor developing country? Why does being born in San Diego versus Tijuana, or Brownsville versus Matamoros, mean that you have a right to a certain quality of life that your Mexican counterpart does not? What gives Americans the right to point a gun at them and say, “turn around, or die?” Carens (1987) stated it bluntly—citizenship in a wealthy developed country functions as effectively feudal peerage. It, like slavery, is a moral stain on the American body politic, and like slavery, it corrupts that body politic in tangible, visible ways.

Kukathas (2021) lays out the real-world impact of “the border.” The border is not just the Rio Grande, or the international waterline. It is nationwide, constant surveillance and enforcement. From employment, to education, to even marriage—marriages between citizens and non-citizens are heavily scrutinized—“the border” represents a constant, ever-present demand that any given person prove their right to be here at any given time. This administration asserting that everyone must carry immigration papers on their person at all times, or risk deportation—the “papers please” regime—is simply a logical extension of this. And indeed, it could be said that Trump is the first president to take immigration law to its logical conclusion—as we have seen in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis. One looks to the Anthony Burns case (1854) to see the parallel—Slave Power enforced against an escaped Black man while abolitionists lined the streets. In both cases, the law demands compliance, and the will of the people is rendered inert.

One must realize that a legal framework that requires a fascist to fully realize is itself fascist.

And it corrupts our society in many other ways. Immigration enforcement is a category of law that supersedes nearly every institutional check. Immigrants in detention get limited or no due process. Employers, landlords, and educational institutions must enforce immigration law via the I-9 and E-Verify. And now, ICE has a Stasi-like tip line to report “illegals”. It has degraded the constitutional framework, directly fueling the expansion of the imperial presidency, the destruction of asylum law, the practice of indefinite detention without trial, and the use of military assets to facilitate deportation, all without due process.

And not only did immigration restriction warp American politics around it—it was and is the entire driving force for American fascist politics. And today it is now being used to justify the breaking of American institutions.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

THEY ARE DARWINIST BECAUSE OF, NOT DESPITE:

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s (Clarence Lusane, April 16, 2026, Fair Observer)

Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those Trump promoted for decades. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and developed friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.

Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom, with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC, had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, blacks and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the Global South.

Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Trump.

Identitarianism

MAGA IS UNAMERICAN:

The Grand Budapest Cartel (James M. Patterso,n April 15, 2026, Providence)

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism.

How is that possible? How did this happen?

The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Robotics/AI

THE MIND BOGGLES:

Sex

CAN’T WAIT TO HEAR HOW IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL TO TRANSITION…:

Music

DIRT MAID:

Just So Stories

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.