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

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.

Film/TV

AN AWESOME CINEMA:

The Business of Hollywood Is Horror (and Faith-Based) (Joseph Holmes, October 7, 2025, Religion & Liberty)

You see, movies have always relied to some degree on “awe,” and the further filmmakers leaned into awing their audience, the more successful they became. This is why, throughout film history, short films gave way to features, which gave way to epics, which gave way to blockbusters, which gave way to the mega-blockbusters. But this “awe effect” comes with a big price tag. We have to see Spider-Man swing, Superman fly, and Batman punch people throughout the film or we feel unsatisfied. And this costs a lot of money to do over and over again.

But this isn’t true of horror and faith-based films, where the biggest awe factor is the thing we don’t see. In faith-based films, that’s God. You can have a faith-based film that deals simply with ordinary people doing normal things, but as they get closer to God or God acts dramatically in their lives, fans of the genre feel the same elation as they do when seeing the Millennium Falcon shoot into hyperspace. Likewise, in horror films, we are often there to see the monster. But we also expect—and want—to not see the monster most of the time, because a lot of the entertainment is in the fear of anticipation that the monster’s hiddenness brings. So again, it’s much cheaper to make a monster in a horror film because we don’t expect to see it throughout most of the movie.

The other thing that gives faith-based films and horror films an advantage is that they resist the erosion of monoculture, as both genres lean heavily on religious narratives and religious communities that involve people meeting every week and listening to the same stories together. Haidt notes this in The Anxious Generation as well. Religious services bind people together under a shared system of values and experiences. This creates a common culture of tastes and values that movies can then appeal to. As secular culture continues to subdivide into smaller and smaller subcultures, religious communities will stand out as the biggest and least divided of the subcultures, making it easier for studios to identify and reach out to.

Books Conservative Thought Identitarianism Russia

COMPLETE WITH THEIR OWN CHEETO NAPOLEON:

‘Animal Farm’ Never Gets Old: Orwell’s classic turns 80. (Cathy Young, Sep 26, 2025, The Bulwark)

The Soviet parallels in the novel, in which animals on a farm run by the drunk and abusive Mr. Jones band together to drive out their two-legged oppressors and set out to build a haven of freedom and equality for all beasts, are very explicit—right down to specific characters, events, and symbols. Napoleon, the crafty boar who eventually becomes Animal Farm’s totalitarian dictator with a personality cult, clearly represents Stalin; his rival Snowball, who co-leads the revolution but gets outmaneuvered, forced into exile, and branded a traitor—and blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm—is Trotsky with trotters. (Early on, there’s also a Marx-Lenin mashup: Old Major, the wise boar who inspires the revolt before dying and has his skull reverentially displayed on a post, much like Lenin’s mummified body in the mausoleum in Red Square.) The farm’s flag—a white hoof and horn on a green field—echoes the red flag with the hammer and sickle. Like the early Soviet revolutionaries, the animals throw themselves into enthusiastic labor to make their experiment work, and normal practices turn into political projects: “the Egg Production Committee for the hens,” “the Clean Tails League for the cows,” and “the Whiter Wool Movement for the sheep.”

Soon, the resemblances turn much darker. In an episode that clearly echoes the Holodomor, the mostly man-made famine Stalin used to break the back of peasant resistance to collectivization (and crush Ukrainian nationalism), hens who resist orders to surrender their eggs for trading are starved into submission. Later, the purges and show trials begin. As the assembled animals watch in horror, four pigs who had criticized Napoleon earlier are dragged before him by his pack of trained hounds, confess to treasonous collaboration with Snowball, and are at once dispatched by the same dogs. […]

But in 2025, Americans may be reading this novel with somewhat different eyes than in times gone by, when strongman rule, cult-like worship of leaders, and reality-denying propaganda were things that happened somewhere else. Today, it’s hard to read Orwell’s mordant description of the extravagant panegyrics to Napoleon (“two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!’”) and not think of the examples we are witnessing daily—from the downright idolatrous sensibility common among Trump’s base to administration officials falling all over each other to heap praise on Trump at a cabinet meeting, or a member of Congress telling reporters Trump is “never wrong,” or press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushing, “Cracker Barrel is a great American company, and they made a great decision to Trust in Trump!” Likewise, when Orwell wryly notes that the animals “had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better,” one can’t help thinking of Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner who wouldn’t deliver that message.

The rewriting of slogans, the insidious conspiracies invoked to explain anything that goes wrong, the propaganda chief convincing the other animals that things they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen or happened very differently: The parallels are all over the place.

While the normals keep the aspidistra flying…

Culture

PUPPETMASTER “PAS DE DEUX”:

Planet Puppet: A weekend at the ventriloquist convention (Mina Tavakoli, n+1)

Men and women behind me were grunting, lowing like cattle. We were all grunting, lowing like cattle. This was Vent 101, a workshop designed to coach red dotters through the basic tactics of the art. Together, we were unveiling the core of the ventriloquial mystery by practicing the letter B with our teeth clamped together.

The general act of learning ventriloquism is tedious, because the puppet is an instrument, and only one half of the theater routine. It is an ancient art, a maze of gestures and shadow gestures, biblical if not Delphic in provenance. I can only describe it as cousinish to learning the violin and getting very good at whistling at the same time. Nimble fingers tweak at little pinches and squeeze-boxes stuck inside the cavities of the ventriloquial dolls, regardless of whether they’re the standard, wooden manikin type (called “hard puppets”) or the squishier, usually more zoological ones (our “soft sculptures”), while the tongue operates flawlessly under confinement. These little hummingbird motions, behind their cage of clenched, unmoving teeth, continue the joke inherent in the word ventriloquist, from the Latin venter (“belly”); loqui (“to speak”); “belly-breathing,” or the illusion of voice from elsewhere.

There is no real “throwing” of the voice, alas; the ear’s deficits are made up for by the eye, which focuses on the puppet’s moving jaw, forming the suggestion that whatever’s being said by you is said by your companion. The most problematic letters of the alphabet — there are five of them — inspire too much frottage between lips, which explains why puppets often have jeery, whiny, heavily accented, broken, or otherwise goofy voices: these are coping mechanisms, rerouted into hallmarks of the form.

Take the letter p, an annoying plosive. Under the standard ventriloquial straitjacketry of (1) a relaxed jaw, (2) slightly open but stiffened lips, and (3) a closed set of teeth, a phrase like “I like to hike” is shockingly easy to pronounce, whereas “I prefer puppetry” is humbling. To dodge the automatic, upper-to-lower-lip kiss involved in expressing the letter p, ventriloquists hump the back of the tongue against the soft palate and vault air right through the back. In practice, this sounds much like the letter t. The ventriloquist thinks p, says their muffled t, and does this ad nauseam until the letter is strong and clear. (“I trefer tuttetry.”)

Tonight’s tutelage was hosted by a man named Dan. His road-to-ventriloquial-Damascus moment was in 1965, care of a life-changing encounter at a Phoenix amusement park with Curly Q, a dummy belonging to the visiting Miss America pageant winner of that year. “I just about collapsed when I saw him. I was 5 years old,” he told us proudly. “But what about you all? Why vent? What’s your reason? And can you all hear me OK?”

Some wanted to do it because they’d joined a church ministry; many wanted to be able to tell stories to their grandchildren. One man raised his hand and announced that he’d always dreamt of a career in stand-up comedy, but felt too nervous to stand solitary onstage. Dan nodded understandingly. “When I’m up there without my puppet, I feel kind of exposed. And when I have one of my characters with me, I can relax a little bit more, and I can feel like I’m sharing the failure with somebody else if that’s what happens. I don’t take the full burden.”

We moved through the hard letters noisily. A few of the more gifted and seasoned in the back of the room were capable of showing me an elegant, dummy-free trick called “bifurcating,” where a ventriloquist speaks with lip movements that completely mismatch the sentence spoken. This has the terrific effect of looking like a flesh-and-blood human speaking with a laggy network connection, or someone being dubbed in a foreign-language film in real time.

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