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

Israel/Palestine

THE MORAL COST OF THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS IS INFINITE:

Why are we ignoring the slaughter in Sudan?: There is no excuse for indifference when we pay such close attention to other wars (William Fear, 13 April, 2024, The Critic)

Since the war kicked off in April of last year, the RSF’s conduct in Sudan has been nothing short of horrifying. They have subjected the civilian population to countless massacres, rapes and pillages. In one sense, the RSF is fighting a military conflict against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), but in another, they are enacting a fanatical ethnic cleansing campaign against the Masalit people of Sudan. A UN report estimated that last year in the city of El Geneina alone, between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed by the RSF, and that the RSF appeared to be specifically targeting people of Masalit ethnicity. According to a report from Conflict Observatory, there is evidence the RSF forced Red Crescent aid workers to dispose of the dead. The piles of bodies are visible from orbit.

To make matters worse, the RSF appears to be on the front foot. Heavy fighting is going on in Khartoum between the RSF and the SAF. Although the capital isn’t yet under full RSF control, the government has evacuated to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea. The British Embassy in Khartoum has long since closed. The RSF has gained a foothold in the south-west of Sudan, and has a particularly strong presence in Darfur.

Of course, the SAF is by no means a morally superior force to the RSF. The SAF are also indicted for war crimes and have been jointly responsible for massacres with the RSF before the conflict began. The key difference, of course, is that the only one side in this conflict is actively and currently enacting an ethnic cleansing campaign in Darfur — and it’s the RSF.

The RSF’s progress on the battlefield has been in part due to their use of imported materiel, such as MANPADS (Man-portable air defence systems) to interrupt the SAF’s air superiority. With ground-to-air attack capability, the RSF can manoeuvre more easily and safely, with diminished fear of attack by air. Last year, the RSF successfully downed a highly prized SAF MIG-29 jet over Khartoum using a MANPADS. It isn’t entirely clear how the RSF is sourcing these weapons, but the US Treasury has issued a statement claiming Wagner Group acted as the supplier. Of course, such weapons may be being procured by multiple routes. Given the credible reports of materiel being provided courtesy of the UAE, it’s possible some of the alleged weaponry being offloaded at Amdjarass are MANPADS.

What does the UAE get in return from the RSF? Here, it’s important to remember the RSF has control of many of Sudan’s gold mines. In exchange for the arms it receives from the UAE, the RSF channels the spoils of its gold mines through the UAE, using various holding companies. […]

Aside from expressions of diplomatic “concern”, the United States’ response to the reports of the UAE funding the RSF — given the RSF’s ethnic cleansing campaign — has been decidedly limp. The reason why is geopolitical. The US maintains a strong relationship with the UAE, which is valued by both parties. The two nations have common regional interests, and cooperate for military and intelligence purposes. The prospect of losing such a strong foreign-policy partner in the Middle East would be a disaster in the eyes of the United States. The fact that a close ally is in league with a genocidal paramilitary group in Sudan is simply an inconvenient fact to the United States. The dead Masalit piled high in El Geneina, it seems, are an unfortunate casualty of diplomacy.

Conservative Thought Long War

iDENTITARIANISM IS JUST ANOTHER ISM:

The Origins of Conservatism’s ‘Gnostic’ Meme (Joshua Tait, 4/12/24, The Bulwark)

His moment came in 1951, when Voegelin was invited to the University of Chicago to give a set of lectures under the auspices of a conservative program that had produced influential books by Leo Strauss, George F. Kennan, Daniel J. Boorstin and others. Voegelin’s lectures were gathered into a book, The New Science of Politics. It was through this book that American conservatives were introduced to the concept of Gnosticism in its political and ideological application.

VOEGELIN’S GRAND HISTORY begins with the priestly kings of antiquity who united the secular and spiritual order under their rule. Over time, the unity of their authority developed cracks, many of which resulted from the growth of Christian belief in an omnipotent God who is ontologically separate from His Creation. Society became more secular as the created world was de-divinized, but the spiritual energies were not scoured from the Western imagination—they were merely sublimated. This is where Gnosticism comes into play: For Voegelin, it names the true motivation of anyone who advocates any substantive change to the political order. It is the attempt to bring “our knowledge of transcendence”—our inchoate sense of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eschaton, the endpoint of history—into secular reality through politics.

Voegelin experienced the rise of both Nazism and Bolshevism, and he came to see Gnosticism at the motive core of both movements. “The totalitarianism of our time,” he wrote, “must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology.” But Voegelin was interested in more than endpoints. He saw Gnosticism in a variety of dynamic and emerging ideologies including liberalism, progressivism, positivism, scientism, and still other outlooks and systems. Few could escape his novel, encompassing metaphysical critique.

If Gnosticism involves self-deception—no advocates of the ideological systems Voegelin targeted would accept it as a characterization of their true political motives—it also runs afoul of a self-defeating contradiction, Voegelin argued: Its gnosis, the special knowledge upon which these movements are based, is ultimately false. In his view, Gnostics see their program as an end state that they insist upon in defiance of reality. When Gnostics triumph politically, they only manage to build a dreamworld— fundamentally flawed social arrangements that create a “very complex pneumopathological state of mind”—which he elsewhere defines as the “condition of a thinker who, in his revolt against the world as it has been created by God, arbitrarily omits an element of reality in order to create the fantasy of a new world—among anyone unfortunate enough to live under them, including the Gnostics themselves.

The Summers of Theory (Peter E. Gordon, 4/09/24, Boston Review)

On the one hand, “theory” carried a hint of privilege, the cultivation of exquisite skills in reading and interpretation that were accessible only to an elite. On the other hand, it implied the hopeful idea of an emancipatory practice, since presumably anyone who wished to “do theory” did so because it promised, someday and somehow, to link up with the moral and political business of transforming the world.

Identitarianism

LONG COVID IN HAVANA:

What Cass review says about surge in children seeking gender services (Andrew Gregory, Tobi Thomas and Amelia Gentleman, 10 Apr 2024, The Guardian)

A systematic review highlighted by the Cass report found that use of social media was associated with body image concerns. Numerous other studies cited by the report implicate smartphone and social media use in mental distress and suicidality among young people, particularly girls.

All showed a clear dose-response relationship: the more hours spent online, the greater the effect.


The report suggests that although the impact of societal influences on a child’s gender expression remains unclear, it’s clear that the influences of a child’s peers are “very powerful during adolescence”.

Although the report does not specifically state that girls are affected by social and cultural influences, such as peer pressure, more than boys, and so too their gender expression, other evidence has suggested this is the case.

Several studies have implied that girls are more affected by peer pressure than boys, and are more likely to develop a negative body image during adolescence.

Another societal influence that the report references as possibly having an impact on a young person’s gender expression includes information on gender dysmorphia and gender expression found online.

More specifically, a focus group of gender-questioning young people and their parents who spoke to the review said that they often found online information “that describes normal adolescent discomfort as a possible sign of being trans and that particular influencers have had a substantial impact on their child’s beliefs and understanding of their gender”.

One gender-questioning young person is quoted in the report affirming this view, saying a “lot of trans people make YouTube videos, which I think is a major informational source for a lot of people, and that’s mainly where I get my information from, not so much professional services”.

We don’t pretend that their anorexia is merely a lifestyle choice.

NHS pauses transgender clinic appointments for minors after review: ‘Extreme caution’ (Ryan Foley 11 April 2024, Christianity Today)

Chaired by Dr. Hilary Cass, the retired former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the report lays out the recommendations from the NHS England Policy Working Group as to practices medical professionals should follow when ministering to youth with gender dysphoria in the future.

Participants in the NHS England Policy Working Group include endocrinologists, psychologists, individuals who have experienced gender dysphoria, a child psychiatrist, an academic ethicist as well as several NHS employees.

The review was commissioned following the exponential increase in the number of youth seeking treatment for gender dysphoria over the past decade-plus, as well as concerns about the long-term impacts of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on trans-identified children.

“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass wrote in an introduction to the report.

Better late than never.

Israel/Palestine

CONSIDER THE CONTRADICTIONS FORCED:

Hamas’s dark calculus: Pressure is mounting among Israel’s allies for a long-term settlement (HAMISH MCDONALD 10 APRIL 2024, Inside Story)

It took Israeli authorities some time realise that the death tallies and horrific video images made up the narrative mostly being seen by the outside world. Israel’s own media, with a few exceptions like the liberal newspaper Haaretz, concentrated on the violence against Israelis in the October attack, showing little of the carnage inside Gaza. After some weeks, Israeli embassies and lobby groups abroad began showing video and other evidence, emphasising child murder and sexual assault, to counter sympathy for the Gazans.

The high death toll and the destruction of more than two-thirds of dwellings in Gaza was meanwhile achieving the objectives stated explicitly by Mashal and other Hamas figures. They had seen the Palestinian cause slipping away, the West Bank being steadily annexed by Jewish settlements with little effective protest by Western powers pledged since 1993 to a two-state solution.

Under Donald Trump, the US embassy had been moved from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem: he was not holding out for a two-state settlement. Trump had also brokered the Abraham accords, which brought Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states closer to Israel: support for Palestinians seemed to be weakening among these Sunni powers.

Hamas set out to shatter this trend.

The Abraham Accords are nothing more than an attempt to normalize the suppression of Muslim self-determination.

Identitarianism

THE WAR AGAINST NATURE:

The Post-Materialist Man (Leo Nunes, 4/08/24, Voegelin View)


We see post-materialism behind a great variety of phenomena, and it isn’t evident if they are ideologically connected at all. It is clearly seen on the liberal left and their defense of trangenderism, but also in the cult of the body and plastic surgeries, that permeates the culture and society at large. This cult, which at first seems to be an expression of the old materialism, reveals its true face when we examine it more closely: the human body, considered in its actual state, is not that relevant for this cult; only its potential is celebrated. It is like a marble stone that needs to be carved, the clay that serves the potter’s craft. The driving force of this cult is not the body itself, but its modification. As there are no limits to this modification process, the body is seen as pure potentiality. The pure indeterminacy of the body corresponds to an absolute capacity for determination on the part of the agent who acts over it, and this agent, in its turn, is not seen as a corporeal being, but as the post-materialist demiurge.

Anglospherics Conservative Thought

THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

A Reagan-Haunted America: a review of Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles by Donald Devine (Richard M. Reinsch II, Law & Liberty)

Devine quotes Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (2014) to undergird the thesis that the “morally equal individual” became the centerpiece in Western culture and tradition because the God of the Bible placed the individual as “the deciding moral agent,” who could lean “toward freedom or toward tradition in concrete situations.” But this created both a profound conservatism and a revolutionary emphasis because the person “was free to reject the family and traditions” available to them or that had formed them. Christianity itself finds its power in metaphysical unity, but it’s a unity that combined the concrete diversity of Greek rationality and Jewish tradition, as found in the embodiment of the Divine Person who did not create a kingdom for this world, nor guarantee temporal perfection, but did provide the means and end for man to find peace, among other gifts.

Here, then, is the tension of the West, the quest for divine perfection within an imperfect world and the humbling news that even in our best efforts, we fail. Most humbling of all, even when we’re sure that we’re right in our pursuit of the good, we will still fail ourselves and others in incalculable ways. But the awareness of transcendence and of our weaknesses produces “the dynamism that gave the West its creative and dominating culture.” Such fusionism, Devine observes, pieces together disparate episodes: “from the caves of Lascaux,” to Athens and Jerusalem, Augustine and the Romans, Europe and Aquinas, and on to John Locke and the American Founders, “to its dislodgment by progressivism in the early twentieth century.” Of course, this dilemma, as Meyer also learned from Voegelin, frequently leads to the desire to surmount it through ideology, to purify our politics through an overarching scientific or religious ideology.

The recovery in American political thought from New Deal Progressivism began, Devine thinks, in Hayek’s 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom, a book read closely by Reagan and Meyer. In Hayek’s later work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973) he announces that “the most widely held ideas” of the twentieth century—a planned economy, liberation from “repressive and conventional morals,” and “permissive education”—will come to be seen as “superstitions” based on a wrongful faith in science and what it can provide us. The view of tradition as senseless and meaningless, Hayek thinks, will be rejected because we will understand that tradition lays down “foundations on which our capacity for rational thought rests.” Devine notes that Hayek sought in tradition and morality the “foundations” of “a free society.” Law and custom together, working with free markets, could achieve a new voluntary society, one also decentralized, that could bring new life to the West.

Reagan understood these principles, Devine notes, and attempted to place them at the center of his efforts at American revival. One note worth recalling comes from the book Reagan In His Own Hand (2001) where he elegantly voices his belief in the equal moral stature of citizens and why they shouldn’t be ordered around by bureaucrats:

But you I wonder about the people in those cars, who they are, what they do, what they are thinking about as they head for the warmth of home & family. Come to think of it I’ve met them—oh—maybe not those particular individuals but still I I feel I know them. Some of our social planners refer to them as “the masses” which only proves they dont [sic] know them. I’ve been privileged to meet people all over this land in the special kind of way you meet them when you are campaigning. They are not “the masses,” They are individuals. or as the elitists would have it—”the common man.” They are very uncommon. individuals who make this system work. Individuals each with his or her own hopes & dreams, plans & problems and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth.

These lines sound like an American populism that is worthy of admiration. Yet Reagan, unlike many of our contemporary populists on the Left and the Right, sought to join his belief in the folks with constitutional and free market revival, freedom, and prosperity by way of firm limits rooted in a constitutional framework.

The centrality of Man’s Fall to our culture insulated us from the utopian isms.

Republican Liberty

SOLA SCRIPTURA:


Reel in the Agencies (Patrick Pullis, Apr 05 2024, City Journal)

The Chevron deference principle implicated in Loper stems from a landmark Supreme Court decision in Chevron USA, Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984). The ruling empowered administrative agencies, absent direct congressional guidance, to interpret federal statutes, provided that courts did not deem their interpretation “unreasonable.” Subsequent decisions narrowed the scope of agencies’ power to interpret federal law, but bureaucrats still wield significant influence in the rulemaking process. […]

If the Court allows the NMFS rule to stand, agencies will be emboldened to interpret statutes without regard for the costs or regulatory burden their rules impose on private businesses. Such overreach typically bothers libertarian-minded conservatives, but should also worry progressives, who typically support the administrative state.

Imagine, for example, that Donald Trump wins the 2024 election and wants to use federal power to crack down on ESG-based investment funds for failing to act in accord with their fiduciary duties. If Loper is not struck down, the Court would effectively give the Securities and Exchange Commission the green light not only to regulate these funds more closely but also to require them to pay for the potentially high costs associated with those regulations. Those progressives who advocate upholding the rule in Loper would be wise to consider how it could be used against them when the executive is controlled by a Republican president.

To avoid such scenarios, the Supreme Court should strike down Loper.

The Executive is not the Legislative.

Identitarianism

DONALD IS JOE:

Marco Rubio Is Wrong About Industrial Policy (ERIC BOEHM, 4.4.2024, reason)

The article’s headline—which was likely applied by the Post’s editors and not Rubio himself, but nonetheless captures the spirit of the piece—promises to explain why the senator believes in industrial policy “done right.” At its heart, Rubio’s argument is no more complex than that: Industrial policy is good when he gets to be in charge and bad when someone else is running it.

End of History

LIVING AT THE eND OF hISTORY:

Dawkins and ‘cultural Christianity’: what does it all mean? (Heather Tomlinson, 05 April 2024, Christianity Today)

However it could be said that Dawkins hasn’t really contributed that much to the decline. The poor arguments of his ilk have in some people prompted a move towards faith, and caused other positive effects such as sharpening the Church’s intellectual capabilities. The deterioration of Christian belief in the UK has been gradual and a long time coming: writers CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, for example, predicted the trajectory many decades ago. Dawkins’ personal contribution has been minimal.

What is also new is a more widespread questioning of the dogma of progressivism – the relentless pursuit of improvement while sidelining or completely rejecting tradition, which in practice has often included Christian belief. This momentum is perceived as a good thing by most people today, unaware that it is a fairly new idea: previous generations were more respectful of their history. Attempts to re-engineer an imaginary “better world” often lead to unforeseen consequences, as Dawkins seems to be learning as he mourns the loss of Christian culture while rejecting the tenets that had created and sustained it.

Esme Partridge in Unherd slammed Dawkins comments as “naivety”. She argued his attitude is similar to another huge social change: his generation’s stance on the sexual revolution. They personally benefitted from the old morals, yet at the same time put the future availability of such positive effects in question by attacking their foundations.

“Dawkins’s belief that it is possible to reap the cultural benefits of Christianity while publicly undermining its legitimacy is perhaps an expression of this generational mentality,” she wrote. This was also the attitude of Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu, who believed that liberal values would be upheld without Christianity. Partridge points out that this has been shown to be false too, as they have mutated into “anarchic systems of self-interest which undermine the virtues upon which liberalism was originally premised.”

She adds her voice to the calls for a renewal. “Like any organism, Christianity must recover its roots, or it will die — a fact of life which, as an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins ought to appreciate,” she said.

Everyone is culturally Christian. You can’t have a Clash of Civilizations when there is only one.

Identitarianism

“GUILT, FAILURE, AND SELF-DISGUST”:

How Steve Bannon guided the MAGA movement’s rebound from Jan. 6 (Isaac Arnsdorf, April 4, 2024, Washington Post)

[W]hen he watched Trump glide down a golden escalator to announce his campaign for president, in 2015, his first thought was, “That’s Hitler!” By that he meant someone who intuitively understood the aesthetics of power, as in Nazi propaganda films. He saw in Trump someone who could viscerally connect with the general angst that Bannon was roiling and make himself a vessel for Americans’ grievances and desires.


Bannon’s thinking on building a mass movement was shaped by Eric Hoffer, “the longshoreman philosopher,” so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, “The True Believer.” The book caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Hoffer argued that all mass movements — nationalist, communist, or religious — shared common characteristics and followed a discernible path. “The preliminary work of undermining existing institutions, of familiarizing the masses with the idea of change, and of creating a receptivity to a new faith, can be done only by men who are, first and foremost, talkers or writers and are recognized as such by all.” (How about a reality TV star?) But such leaders cannot alone create the conditions that give rise to mass movements. “He cannot conjure a movement out of the void,” Hoffer wrote. “There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before the movement and leader can make their appearance.”

Rather than focusing on movement leaders, Hoffer’s inquiry concerned the followers — how ordinary people became fanatics. Successful, well‐adjusted people did not become zealots. Sometimes they glommed onto mass movements to serve their own ambitions, but that came later. The true believers were seeking not self‐advancement but rather “self‐renunciation” — swapping out their individual identities, with all their personal disappointments, for “a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause.” The kinds of people who were most susceptible to becoming true believers were, in Hoffer’s idiom, poor, struggling artists, misfits, unusually selfish, or just plain bored. “When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for,” Hoffer wrote. “All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self‐surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.”

For Bannon, as he was building Breitbart’s audience, the ready supply of true believers came from disaffected young men. Bannon had first discovered this untapped resource in, of all places, Hong Kong, while working with a company that paid Chinese workers to play the video game World of Warcraft, earning virtual commodities that the company could flip to Western gamers for real money. The business collapsed, but not before introducing Bannon to an online subculture of young gamers and meme creators, whose energies he learned to draw out and redirect toward politics.

Breitbart’s traffic figures confirmed Bannon’s hunch that candidate Trump was catching fire in 2015, and Bannon positioned the site as the Trump campaign’s unofficial media partner in thrashing the Republican primary field. By the time Bannon officially took over Trump’s ragtag campaign, in the wake of a chaotic convention and spiraling Russia scandal, he supplied a closing message that, if not exactly lucid, did have a kind of coherence. The message was that Trump, the “blue‐collar billionaire,” was here to blow up the established political order that was plainly failing to serve the needs and interests of the common public, and would be a champion for the forgotten and left‐behind Americans. Bannon was not alone in seeing Hoffer’s influence on what he was doing: Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, dusted off “The True Believer” and shared it with her campaign staff, recognizing in those pages the description of a destructive energy that she concluded she was powerless to subdue.

In the White House, as Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon heralded the dawn of a “new political order,” but he lasted only seven months. Trump threw him out after white supremacists and neo‐Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, against removing a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and one of them drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a young woman. Trump was the one who defended the torch‐carrying mob as including “very fine people,” but Bannon, as the face of right‐wing nationalism inside the White House (and what a face it was), made a fitting scapegoat. Though the dismissal set Bannon, temporarily, at odds with Trump, it did not shake his commitment to their shared political project. Bannon moved back into the Breitbart Embassy to plot his comeback.

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