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)

Culture

Film/TV

THE ONE STORY:

Where the Frontier Meets the Galaxy: The Western Genre and the Moral Imagination of Star Wars (Cole Burgett, 1/21/26, Christ and Pop Culture)

But more than set dressing, it’s the moral architecture of the Western that gives Star Wars its discernable spine. The best Westerns understand that wide open spaces don’t make life simpler. On the frontier, there’s nowhere to hide who you really are. A man’s character isn’t protected by institutions or excuses. Instead, it’s revealed whenever trouble rides into town. A rancher who refuses to bend to corruption, a gunman who finally hangs up his weapon, a sheriff who stands his ground when the rest of the town scatters—these traits define them more than the outcome of any gunfight or duel ever could.

Likewise, Star Wars is filled with moral clarity born from the same crucible. Han Solo stands right where the Western and the space opera overlap. He begins the classic wandering gun-hand, cut from the same cloth as L’Amour’s Lance Kilkenny or Hondo Lane, self-reliant, suspicious, interested only in profit. He’ll draw his blaster in a heartbeat. He shoots first. He’s the man who insists he “ain’t in this for your revolution.” But like so many of L’Amour’s protagonists, Han is not morally static. Western heroes often start self-serving but become protectors when faced with injustice that threatens people they’ve come to care about. Han’s arc sees him become something even more recognizably Western: a good man forged in a bad land.

Books Identitarianism

AN ALIEN ATE MY HOMEWORK:

Erich von Däniken and the modern paranoid style: His archeological esoterica fuelled the development of modern conspiracy theory (James Snell, 1/18/26, The Critic)

Some readers will remember Däniken. They may still, if they look hard enough, find his ageing paperbacks in cardboard boxes in their attic — foremost among them his bestseller Chariots of the Gods? To those for whom Däniken’s name does not ring any bells, I heartily recommend this book. If you read it, you’ll begin to see Däniken’s influence everywhere — in much popular discussion of his favoured subject (archaeology) and broader, more widely across the modern internet and social media.

What Däniken sold was a suite of theories and a series of bold, grand narratives about the human past. The history of the ancient world, he said, was wrong and false. It had to be rewritten. Instead of the archaeological evidence we have and the conclusions drawn by scholars, Däniken argued that instead, there were two clear things academics and gatekeepers ignored: evidence of aliens, and evidence of what was almost supernatural.

Däniken posited that all ancient societies were linked by something beyond human understanding. Their mysteries and achievements, like the pyramids of Giza, were the product of cooperation with, or rule by, godlike beings that came from the stars.

If someone/something else is not in control of your life you have to accept personal responsibility for what you’ve made of it. the root of all conspiracies is the attempt to avoid this accountability.

Music

DEMOTICS ARE US:

Weep, Shudder, Die: Can Opera Talk? (Dana Gioia, December 16, 2025, Church Life Journal)

The term “folk opera” refers to the European genre of sung theater that borrows musical material of a specific region or people—melodies, modal scales, or dance rhythms—to create operas of popular appeal that reflect national identity. Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), for example, used Czech dance rhythms and melodic patterns that his regional audience recognized as their own. Gustav Holst’s opera, The Wandering Scholar (1934), likewise based its style on English folk music, though it never quotes any actual folk tunes. Gershwin used the term both to claim operatic status for Porgy and Bess and to acknowledge the work’s debt to African American music. A musicologist might debate how accurate the term “folk opera” is in this case. The pointed Gershwin/Heyward lyrics have a Tin Pan Alley polish that hardly feels folkloric. But it helps to know where the composer stood. The question matters because Porgy has inspired many subsequent works of American musical theater whose popular sources have complicated their identity.

The problem is older than Porgy. When Joplin published the score of Treemonisha, he subtitled it an “Opera in Three Acts,” although the work resembled operetta far more than traditional opera. Joplin understood that opera had greater prestige. The genre of a musical work establishes specific expectations for the audience, performers, and critics. Joplin wanted Treemonisha regarded as a serious work of art, not as a musical entertainment.

The concept of genre is important because it suggests what formal elements a composer and librettist might bring to new works. In American opera that question becomes complicated when creators want to incorporate elements from popular music and theater. It confuses the frame of reference. Porgy has spoken dialogue; it also has self-contained songs. Both of those features associate it with the Broadway musical. Traditional opera generally sets the entire libretto to music. How far can a composer depart from the conventional model of opera before the audience changes its perspective on the work? Must every word be sung for the work to be serious?

Critics tend to deny any work with substantial dialogue the title of opera. Real operas should have continuous music to guide the drama without relying on dialogue to move the plot. Depending on the context, a piece with spoken dialogue is labelled an operetta, musical, Singspiel, or zarzuela—all less exalted categories than opera. The criteria seem clear, but, in practice, they are applied inconsistently. Many classic musical works escape the downgrade.

No one refers to The Magic Flute as a Singspiel, even though it has a great deal of dialogue. Three factors elevate The Magic Flute to the status of opera. First, the score shows Mozart in the full maturity of his genius. Second, in addition to its low comedy, the work has a Masonic subplot with music of undeniable nobility. Third, The Magic Flute was Mozart’s last opera, and no one wants the divino maestro to have checked out writing an operetta. Likewise, Carl Orff’s Die Kluge (The Clever Girl) and Der Mond (The Moon), both of which have dialogue, earned the honorific by the brilliance of their music and the parable-like quality of their libretti. Based on two folk tales from the Brothers Grimm, the operas have a tough edge and dark vision that no one would associate with operetta or children’s theater.

There is a theoretical bias among critics that opera should be entirely sung

Books

…THAT DO BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS:

Why Moby-Dick nerds keep chasing the whale: I spent 25 hours with the superfans (John Masko, 10 Jan 2026, UnHerd)

Aside from exhaustion, the prevailing feeling as we filed out of the whaling museum, clutching our marine-themed goodie bags, was bewilderment. Moby-Dick is a bewildering book, all the more when read in a single sitting. This might be because Melville, with his penchant for turning characters into archetypes and ephemeral moments into eternal principles, is writing to persuade all peoples and all eras at once. He seems to speak directly across the ages to a reader in our own time who has asked him a question. We can imagine the young woman at a meet-the-author event with Melville’s ghost at some swell Manhattan venue: Why, she demands, would any sane person voluntarily risk his life to prowl the world’s oceans in a wooden vessel to find, kill, and disembowel huge man-eating monsters and melt their flesh down into lamp oil? And why would they further pledge their allegiance to an even bigger maniac who had resolved to subdue the world’s single deadliest sea monster or else die in the attempt?

Melville knew that even in 1850, such shots across the bow of cool-headed reason demanded a passionate defence. Even among readers living near Melville’s farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, located multiple days from New Bedford by stagecoach, and only recently connected by rail, the whaling life would have seemed utterly foreign. And so, his narrator sets out to make the irrational inevitable: to convince us that for a man of his time, or indeed of any time, there is no work more honourable or more beautiful than whaling. The most unsettling thing about Moby Dick may be that even after we witness the White Whale massacre and drown of all of Ishmael’s shipmates, we are still forced to admit that he has succeeded. That we (particularly we men) might never have the chance to live as fully or as deeply as Ishmael did.

Identitarianism Immigration

IT’S ALL WOGS ONCE WE LET THE SCOTS IN:

Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State (Greg Sargent, 12/15/25, New Republic)

Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”

“There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,” declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the United States, believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.”

More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere.

Christmas

REALITY ON 34TH STREET:

Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger.: Bob Rutan is legendary among the tight-knit fraternity of Macy’s Santa Clauses. Like many of these men, playing Santa changed Bob. Profoundly. His story is one of struggle and failure, heartbreak and grace and—yes—the magic of Christmas (David Gauvey Herbert, Dec 4, 2025, Esquire)

Bob learned the ropes. Don’t pester kids about eating vegetables. Go light on the rouge or risk looking like a drunk. Nix the loud “ho ho ho,” because the sound carried into the other cottages, destroying the illusion of Macy’s and the One True Santa. And if a patron gets aggressive—and they sometimes did—do not physically engage unless a child, or an elf, is in peril.

Based read in conjunction with Mick Herron’s Usual Santas

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.

Books Conservative Thought Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Two Classics: “Crime and Punishment” and “Columbo” (Dwight Longenecker, September 16th, 2025, Imaginative Conservative)

So Columbo, like Crime and Punishment, is a classic, and rightfully so because it too penetrates to the heart of a modern heresy and exposes it for the lie that it is. This is the Nietzschean idea of the ubermensch—the superman who can transcend ordinary law. Nietzsche formalized the idea later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov echoing proto-Nietzschean concepts: the utilitarian and Hegelian theories abroad in nineteenth-century Russia.

Columbo deflates the arrogance of his suspects; in the final scene each murderer is humbled. So Dostoevsky critiques the superman heresy by showing that Raskolnikov does not have the emotional fortitude to live with his irrevocable act. His final humiliation (and salvation) is to accept the unconditional love of Sonya and to pursue the path of repentance and reparation.

Anglospherics Film/TV Music

WE’RE A CONSERVATIVE CULTURE:

The Lonely Way Back Home (Benjamin Braddock, 4/23/25, IM1776)

The antecedent of the counterculture was a melange of conservatives nostalgic for pre-industrial community and urban radicals dreaming of post-industrial utopia. Both shared a deep skepticism toward centralized authority, technological determinism, and mass consumer culture.

It’s for this reason that authors such as John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac—two of Dylan’s major literary inspirations—are often perceived as “leftist” or “crypto-Bolshevik”, despite their work showing a deep affection for American traditions, ideals, institutions, and the American people. It’s clear from Sea of Cortez, East of Eden, or Travels with Charley: In Search of America that Steinbeck simply loved the country too much to want to see it radically changed, whether through communism or capitalism (fundamentally two sides of the same coin: industrial society). As for Kerouac, his 1957 roman à clef On the Road, which became a defining work of the Beat generation and has since endured as one of the most widely popular books among young men, even as it celebrated freedom and adventure, was fundamentally a work of American romanticism, not radical politics. Its protagonists sought transcendence within the American landscape rather than revolutionary transformation of American society.

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