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)

Identitarianism Presidents

THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO DONALD BEING WORST EVER:

Woodrow Wilson Reconsidered (Christopher Cox, Spring 2026, American Heritage)

Although his years as university president coincided with the entrenchment of segregation throughout the South, segregation was in disrepute among the elite colleges of the Northeast, impelling him to warn his Princeton colleagues against the danger of any Black student entering. At the same time, the publication of his History of the American People in the year he became university president spread his disparagement of Reconstruction and his rationalizations of Ku Klux Klan violence far beyond the confines of the Princeton campus.


Wilson’s multivolume history was particularly well received by his longtime friend and classmate Thomas Dixon, who leaned on it heavily as source material for his romantic trilogy on the Klan. All three of Dixon’s volumes would be published during Wilson’s tenure as Princeton’s president. Sales of the second volume, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, surpassed a million copies. The book dramatized (and grossly distorted) the Reconstruction period between 1865 and 1870, building on Wilson’s narrative.


When The Clansman was later adapted into the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation by Hollywood impresario D. W Griffith, direct quotations from Wilson’s History of the American People appeared as intertitles throughout the movie. A stage production, which followed less than a year after the book, drew sellout crowds, instigated riots, and inflamed theater reviewers throughout the country.

Even in the South, the racism was too much for some to take: the Chattanooga Daily Times called the play “a riot breeder,” designed “to excite rage and race hatred.” Alabama’s governor called it a “nightmare” and “disgusting beyond expression.” The Knoxville Journal and Tribune called Dixon, the playwright, “a servant of the devil.”

Republican Liberty

…DEEP BREATHS:

At Harvard Talk, Retired Supreme Court Justice Breyer Defends Shadow Docket (Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine)

“Every court has what you’re saying is a shadow docket, which we call an emergency docket,” he said, explaining that throughout most of the Supreme Court’s history the docket had been used primarily to issue stays of execution in death penalty cases. “Or sometimes,” he added, there would be a “very important case about an election or an election rule, and we might issue the stay.”

Tracing the increasing use of the shadow docket in part to the rash of legal challenges that sprang up in the wake of vaccine mandates and other restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, Breyer—who now serves as Byrne professor of administrative law at Harvard Law School and as a visiting judge for the First Circuit Court of Appeals—rejected the notion that “there’s some kind of plot involved within the Court to get this or that decided.”

Instead, he argued, the nature of cases reaching the court on an emergency basis has changed: rather than death penalty and election matters, many cases more often involve constitutional disputes about “the nature of the constitutional relationship” between Congress and the president and the separation of powers.”

Identitarianism

DARWINISM IS THE LIFE OF FEAR:

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences (Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva, 2026, American Economic Review)

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking: the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

Identitarianism

WHAT ANTI-WOKE SEEKS TO DENY:

Body-Worn Cameras, Prosecutors, and Racial Differences in Criminal Justice Outcomes (Jeffrey Miron, 4/28/26, Cat0)

How do body-worn cameras affect the actions of police and prosecutors? A recent study of data from North Carolina suggests that introduction of these cameras

reduced incarceration rates for black people by 10.5 percent .… Similar reductions in disparities occurred for other outcomes, including conviction rates and jail time. … These findings suggest that prosecutors had previously misinterpreted information from police, either because they held biased beliefs or treated police reports as definitive accounts.

Identitarianism

DON’T BOTHER US WITH THE THEOLOGY:

Post-Christian Christianity: On the Conscription of Christian Language and Symbolism (Well-Tempered, Apr 28, 2026)

The term needs a little unpacking. For centuries, Western societies have been recasting ideas with distinctly Christian roots—for example, human dignity, care for the poor, the equality of all before God—as self-evident, universal truths. That process, described so well by Tom Holland in Dominion, was a kind of intellectual plagiarism: Christian convictions were reshaped, repurposed, and often detached from the doctrines that undergird them. If plagiarism is a form of flattery, then this has been a kind of backhanded tribute. Christian ideas endured because they couldn’t easily be discarded even by Christianity’s fiercest critics. In that sense, Western secularism has been defined in part by the ghosts of its Christian past.

Post-Christian Christianity moves in the opposite direction. It’s less concerned with Christian beliefs and doctrines than with the signs by which it is recognised. It understands the power of symbols and slogans in a crowded public square, and so it reaches for Christian language and imagery as instruments—useful, adaptable, and readily deployed in the service of political ends. Instead of Scripture shaping its vision of reality, a prior framework—often nationalist, or more loosely ideological—selects and selects and arranges Christian elements to support its own claims. Christianity, in this register, becomes primarily a branded resource to be exploited: less a faith to be lived than a rhetoric to be wielded.

liberalism requires the substance of Christianity; Post-Liberalism just the trappings.

Health

BEING SEEN:

‘They Said A.I. Saved Me’: How South Korea Is Checking on Its Seniors (Choe Sang-Hun, April 28, 2026, NY Times)


South Korea is aging faster than any other nation. In ​a mere 15 years, the number of people over 65 has doubled to more than a fifth of the population. The country does not have enough doctors, social workers or family caregivers to support its elderly. Artificial intelligence is helping fill some of that gap.

Talking Buddy, a care call service​ developed by Naver Cloud and adopted by cities and counties across the country,​ check​s on tens of thousands of seniors living alone in isolation or poverty. It holds tailored conversations that are two- to five-minutes long and designed to ease loneliness, detect emergencies and stimulate cognitive function to stave off dementia.

On a recent morning, ​the bot noted the fine weather and suggested that a walk​ would lift Ms. Chung’s spirits. When she mentioned ​planting flowers, the bot ​reminisced about “pink and white cosmos with a yellow center,” as if conjuring a memory.


The ​technology remains a work in progress. It occasionally cuts off a user midsentence or hallucinates unauthorized promises — like the time it impulsively offered to send bags of rice to a cash-strapped resident.​ Yet, users have embraced it with a warmth that has ​surprised even its creators. One woman confessed her depression to the bot​, saying her dog ran away and never came back. Another played the piano for it​; others invited it over for lunch, knowing full well it ​couldn’t come, according to social workers.

“It makes me feel that I am not forgotten,​ that someone is paying attention to me​,” Ms. Chung said.

Energy

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN PREDICTED:

Plug-In Power Signals An Energy Future Very Different From The Present (John Tamny, Apr 27, 2026, Forbes)

With a growing number of states allowing what the Post describes as “plug-in-solar” for houses, and as a way of shrinking monthly electricity bills, it’s no reach to suggest that homeowners themselves will morph into providers of crucial, low-cost power for other commercial entities in need of enhanced energy production themselves. Will precisely this happen? It’s impossible to know exactly because a commercial future that never resembles the present is opaque by the previous description.

Just the same, it’s notable that these solar plug-ins are low cost (as low as $400) presently, and their low costs mean installation doesn’t require substantial, politically toxic government subsidy. Better yet, and assuming growing usage of plug-ins that will lower electricity bills, is that the cost of them is poised to shrink alongside what one guesses will be increased energy production from them.

Energy

DADDY, WHAT WAS GAS?:

The U.S. Is Manufacturing a Ton of Grid Batteries ( Julian Spector, April 17, 2026, Reasons to be Cheerful)

Batteries were always crucial for the effort to scale up renewable energy production, but they have taken on even more significance as AI leaders look for quick-to-build power sources to supply their headlong data center expansion.

That’s why batteries will account for some 28 percent of new U.S. power plant capacity built this year. For the first time, the country will be able to produce enough grid batteries to meet that surging demand on its own, according to new data from the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, an industry group.

End of History

FUKUYAMA WINS AGAIN:

Why postliberalism failed: Orbán’s warning to the Right (Samuel Mace, 4/20/26, CapX)


This result does not even spell the beginning of the end of our own populist moment, but the failure of Fidesz and the scandals which brought down Orbán’s illiberal regime represent an overdue reckoning with reality for the postliberal dream.

That dream imagines postliberalism as a new and more effective way to govern, delivering conservative priorities through state power and institutional and civic dominance. Fidesz exposed the practical limits of this vision in Hungary, but the problem is far more fundamental.

As Paul Kelly writes in ‘Against Postliberalism’, postliberalism operates as a negative ideological force fighting against the dominance of liberalism and liberal ideals. Even when it arrives in power, it is trapped by this focus into antagonistic political gestures lacking genuine innovation.

Despite the efforts of authors like Adrian Vermuele and Patrick Deneen, the postliberals have had little success imagining something new. Postliberalism remains just the latest intellectual reaction created by the success of liberal democracy, rather than a serious rival to replace it.

Identitarianism

DONALD HAS RUBBED THEIR NOSES IN WHAT THEIR VOTES MEANT:

Why is the Maga project teetering? Because not even Trump supporters voted for this dysfunction (Moira Donegan, 4/21/26, The Guardian)

Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was once seen as a definitive cultural shift, proof that his aggressive, domineering style of rightwing populism had found permanent purchase in US politics. Pundits hailed the triumph of conservatism; institutions scrambled to adjust to the new dominance of a regime with authoritarian aspirations. This was always a suspicious claim: was a narrow victory in one close presidential election really a sign of a broad and permanent cultural shift?

Less than 18 months later, that thesis has collapsed. Trump and his allies have delivered an era of backlash and cultural retrenchment from the executive branch: slashing grants for “woke” research; turning federal programmes meant to promote equality into engines for discrimination; stymying promotions for women and people of colour in the armed services in what critics say is an effort to resegregate the military; and pressuring athletic conferences from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the International Olympic Committee to ban trans women athletes.

They have made their cultural values felt in pervasive and sadistic ways. Americans see ICE officers patrolling their airports and tanks on the streets of major cities; they see their neighbours being snatched away by immigration agents; and they see the costs of housing soaring out of reach as the construction industry workforce dwindles as a result. They see Trump and his friends posturing on television, complaining over and over again about issues that their side has already won. And they also see the signs posted at their local gas station, where the price has now soared from an average of $3.10 a gallon in 2025 to more than $4.

It’s all well and good to feel Identitarian, until you see the actions your feelings demand.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Cheeto Jesus

DONALD WHO?:

Religion

ALL SCIENCE LEADS BACK TO FAITH:

Identitarianism

THE WAGES OF iDENTITARIANISM:

It's a RICO case

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.