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

NAZISM:

When the Firewall Falls: What was once the world’s most welcoming country for refugees has become one of the strictest — an about face that could set the example for other democracies. (Kaiser Bauch, Jul 10, 2026, LEO)

For a long time, the political reaction to growing migration-related tensions looked like the archetypal European cordon sanitaire tale. In Sweden, the object of this cordon sanitaire — the term for parties deemed by the mainstream too extremist to be considered as part of a political coalition — was the Sweden Democrats.

Founded in 1988, the party’s roots were genuinely far-right, as it had connections with neo-Nazi circles. For a long time it was completely ignored by the rest of the Swedish political class, which was also not that hard to do, since in the first two decades of its existence the party did not garner strong electoral results.

The whole subject of immigration was treated as taboo, with those raising its negatives being predictably accused of racism. Furthermore, it being avoided was justified as not giving the Sweden Democrats “ammo” for potential electoral gains.

Yet, as is almost a rule in such cases, it had the opposite effect. The party came to be seen as one unafraid to tell it like it is, while the elites were seen as sweeping the issue under the rug.

In 2010, the Sweden Democrats got enough votes to enter parliament, and in 2018 they scored 17.5%, becoming the third-largest party. As the mainstream parties, including the Social Democrats, were forced to acknowledge the failures of Sweden’s immigration policy, the criticism of the Sweden Democrats — who had also systematically worked to break with their extremist roots —for pointing those failures out no longer made much sense.

In 2019, Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch announced her willingness to negotiate with the SD, as did Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson. The culmination came with the Tidö Agreement after the 2022 election. Four leaders of parties on the right conferred at Tidö Castle and signed a 62-page contract that established the current government and a fundamental shift in crime and migration policy.

Warehousing natives was disastrous too.

Israel/Palestine

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

How Israel Lost Americans (Michelle Goldberg, 7/08/26, The New York Times)


It’s been obvious for some time that Americans are souring on Israel, but a Gallup poll that came out on Friday marks a turning point. For the first time in the poll’s 25-year history, it found, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. The shift wasn’t just among Democrats, whose opinion of Israel has been in free fall in recent years. According to Gallup, only 30 percent of independents now sympathize with Israel; 41 percent sympathize with the Palestinians. Among adults under 35, support for Israel has fallen to a record low of 23 percent. With numbers like this, bipartisan backing for Israel, long a constant in American politics, will in time become unsustainable.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing of villages.

As Ariel Sharon understood, becoming the oppressor was always going to be fatal to Israel’s position in the West, nevermind the damage to the state itself and the soul of the people.

Long War

LITERALLY ADAPTATION:

Europe May Never Be Cool, but It Can Be Air Conditioned: The continent’s political class needs to get over its aversion to life-saving technology. (J.D. Tuccille, 7.6.2026, reason)

“I’m horrified by the people who tell me you can put air conditioning everywhere. You think it will avoid forest fires?” France’s Minister of Ecological Transition Monique Barbut huffed in June, even as temperatures soared and the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 1,300 deaths in Europe just since June 21 because of high temperatures. After conceding the need for emergency leniency to permit the use of cooling technology, she complained, “It is not adaptation to climate change.”

Anglospherics One Economy to Rule Them All

BACK TO THE THIRD WAY:

Labour can be a party of growth – but not like this: Andy Burnham should focus less on how wealth is shared and start asking why it isn’t being created (Roger Partridge, 30 June 2026, CapX)

If growth cannot be commanded from above, the cure for Britain’s cost-of-living crisis is not to pull energy, water and transport back under public control. A centre that cannot create growth should surrender the levers, not seize more of them. The road Burnham should follow leads somewhere British Labour has spent forty years refusing to look: to a Labour government that began with the failure of central control and did not stop halfway.

One of the most sweeping market reforms in the democratic world was not the work of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. In 1984, New Zealand elected a Labour government facing a run on the currency and an economy strangled by controls that successive governments had built to protect workers. Its finance minister, Roger Douglas, started from Burnham’s premise and took it further: if the state could not direct growth, it had to stop pretending it could. So, Labour let the market back in, stripping out regulation, opening the country to trade, cutting subsidies and eventually selling the state’s trading arms. It did not betray Labour’s ends; it pursued them by means that could deliver them.

Unfortunately, the left–like the right–has turned on its most successful leaders: Blair and Clinton. Their central insight was that using capitalist means you could achieve socialist ends, creating ever more wealth to redistribute. Wealth creation itself has become anathema.

Republican Liberty

CREATED:

Who Is God in the Declaration?: He’s far more than the Supreme Secular Rationalist. (Matthew Spalding, April 27, 2026, Modern Age)

God appears several times in the Declaration. Indeed, the first character introduced in the Declaration’s narrative, before “the present King of Great Britain,” is God. We noted earlier that God exercises legislative power (the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God), executive power (as Creator and divine Providence), and judicial power (Supreme Judge of the world) without being a tyrant. All that is true and makes an important point about the danger of unified power in human hands. But this is a view that considers God in primarily human, political terms.

A more sublime view becomes clear when we consider the appearances of God as they develop throughout the whole document. God first appears by virtue of man’s unaided reason—a traditional understanding of the Laws of Nature—in the form of the general revelation of the natural order. This is the God who makes laws for all things, including men and all peoples. Then God appears as the Creator, not just of nature in general but of man in particular. This is the God whose work “we hold” to be self-evident, and who endows man with certain unalienable rights. God then appears as the Supreme Judge of the world, specifically the judge of man—the only rational being on earth. This God is all-knowing and sees the deepest intentions of each person. And God appears finally as divine Providence. This God doesn’t merely create the world and then leave it alone but continues to intervene in the affairs of men and sometimes changes the course of human events.

And notice the parallel: how the human actors become more personal and particular (moving from “one people,” to a corporate “we” who holds truths, to the specific “Representatives of the united States of America,” to the particular “we” who are the signers) at the same time that the references to the deity become more personal and intimate. The theological references move from a general, distant, and unknown God to the creator and endower of man as a species, to a personal God who knows the lives and innermost thoughts of each man, to the benevolent God who intervenes to protect those who rely on divine providence.

Long War

CHILDREN OF HUME VS DESCARTES’S GET:

Revolutions Worlds Apart: Why America Chose Liberty and France Chose Terror: Both the American and French Revolutions promised “power to the people.” One delivered it; the other descended into bloodshed and chaos. Why? (Lawrence W. Reed, July 1, 2026, Daily Economy)

[I]n the decades leading up to 1776, the American colonies were steeped in the moral and religious currents of the Great Awakening, a Christian revival that emphasized self-examination, personal responsibility, and restraint.

Protestant values of self-improvement through hard work, private enterprise, and thrift helped shape early American development. In France, by contrast, the Revolution elevated men who sought power for the purpose of remaking society itself. That self-indulgent impulse to reshape others at any cost did not take root in early America as it did in France. The United States did not empower men with the apparatus of concentrated, legalized force and then expect them to behave modestly with it. Early America did not entertain the notion that society could be perfected through coercion.

Blessedly, after Hume, the Anglosphere could never be seduced by the false god, Reason.

End of History

THE NEXT PRESIDENT HAS SUCH A REAGANESQUE OPPORTUNITY:

The United States at 250: Renewal Is the Real American Tradition (Roy Swan, 07/03/26, NY Observer)

At 250 years old, the United States of America is the most ambitious brand ever conceived. Like every great institution, it lives or dies by how well it practices what it preaches.

Fifteen years ago, leadership scholars Doug Ready and Emily Truelove called the animating spirit of powerful brands “collective ambition” in a seminal Harvard Business Review article. They captured how great leaders inspire divided people to unify for the common good through a seven-element model that stands the test of time: purpose, vision, promise, values, targets, priorities and the daily behavior of the people who carry the name. What makes great companies great can make great nations greater. Alignment endures. Misalignment rots.

Two hundred and fifty years ago in Philadelphia, imperfect men drafted the blueprint for a more perfect Union. They named a promise: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They invoked Nature’s God. They committed to values worth dying for. They admitted the nation was imperfect on day one, yet expected it to achieve the perfection they could not deliver.

Perfecting is a verb, not an adjective. The Founders trusted us to keep building.

The tragedy of Joe Biden was that he did not have much quarrel with most of Trumpism: Identitarianism, protectionism, state capitalism, etc.

Our next president can renew the promise of the nation by undoing the damage.

Republican Liberty

AUTHORITY DEPENDS ON LIBERTY:

How Britain drove America to independence (Jack Blackburn, July 01 2026, Times uk)

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act and the story might have ended there, but the British government now had a point to prove. It passed the Declaratory Act, which made clear that parliament had the same authority in America as it did in Britain. As far as they were concerned, the principle of parliamentary authority was the cornerstone of the British constitution and needed defending. Meanwhile, revenue still needed to be drummed up. It was not long before these twin objectives reopened the wounds in the Anglo-American relationship.

Our rights as Englishmen required participatory governance and equal treatment under law.

End of History Founding Republican Liberty

FROM EVERY MOUNTAINSIDE:

The Revolution Continues: The American Revolution is still going on—not because we ourselves are wise and good but because it embodies an idea that reaches everybody and will never lose its force. (Bruce Catton, June 1976, American Heritage)


The bell is old and it is badly cracked and it has not been rung for years, nor will it ever be rung again. But although it is quite useless from a practical standpoint, it is perhaps the most prized possession we have. It carries words about proclaiming liberty to all the people, and when it spoke it set off long echoes that have never stopped reverberating. The Liberty Bell announced that the American people were in fact making a revolution and not just demonstrating for a redress of grievances, and few announcements in the history of the human race have been more momentous.

Anglospherics

CHILDREN OF THE REFORMATION:

Constitutional-Democratic Man (Thomas D. Howes, May 2026, Civitas)

One thing that stands out about the American founding generation, which makes it distinct from prior attempts at republican government, is the almost unprecedented literacy of its populace. Prior to the Reformation, the highest literacy rates in even the most advanced cultures were around 20 percent, but they were usually much lower. With the invention of the printing press and the educational reforms of Protestant reformers (teaching everyone to read the Bible), followed by the Counter-Reformation reforms of the Jesuits, the literacy rate in Western Europe rose to unprecedented levels in the 1500s. England and the American colonies were particularly affected by this trend, with literacy rates in the American colonies, in some places such as New England, perhaps the highest in the world or in all history at that point (though the Netherlands also had a very high literacy rate).

Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich emphasizes in his discussion of the “WEIRD” psychology of Westerners how literacy has changed the way our brains process information. He notes that literate people are more prone to perceive things analytically, breaking them down into smaller parts, and have better verbal memory. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan (followed by Neil Postman) saw specifically in the rise of book literacy a new kind of man, a “Literate Man.” For both McLuhan and Postman, the Literate Man was more prone to individualism, that is, to transcend his tribe and adopt a cosmopolitan vision.

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