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)

Law/Crime

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Charges Dropped in Reflecting Pool Case as Prosecutors Say Work Was ‘Botched’ (Madaleine Rubin and David A. Fahrenthold, July 31, 2026, NY Times)


Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2.

Puritan Nation

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

The True History of New England’s Stone Walls: Why we love them, and why I build them (Matt Seaton, July 19, 2026, The Atlantic)

[T]oday, we live with a solid remnant of that astonishing feat of human labor—the quarter-million miles of stone walls that an 1871 survey measured in the American Northeast. Where those walls still stand, we cherish them as charismatic markers of the Yankee landscape. Contoured lines of stacked stones running across fields help organize the vista. Their geometry implies a reassuring sense of something permanent—and permanently right—about a deeply American scene, along with white clapboard houses, red barns, rolling hills, goldenrod.

I first became properly acquainted with stone walls after my wife inherited her parents’ Vermont home, in 2010. A ramshackle line of piled rocks ran between the garden and the meadow. One section had gotten pulled aside and left in a heap, and there the stones had lain for several decades, slowly gathering humus and turning into something resembling a small burial mound—until I came along and decided to disinter the stuff and pile it back up. My work was rudimentary, but I was enraptured.

Other modest efforts followed, and then came the coronavirus pandemic. In need of something to counteract the alienation of desk-bound remote work, I turned to the collapsed and spreading 70-foot vestige of a wall that bounded the beginning of the meadow. I attended a day course at the Stone Trust, an educational foundation in southern Vermont, where I learned the principles of building to a line, “battening” (the English style of tapering a wall inward toward its apex), and reinforcing with through-stones and copestones; my building became more proficient.

Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.

Identitarianism

THE CONSPIRACY IS PANDEMIC…:

Fauci’s COVID‑origins hearing shows how conspiracy theories became political weapons (Art Jipson, July 30, 2026, The Conversation)

In the years since the pandemic, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and others have accused Fauci of many things, but the central conspiracy accusation is that Fauci helped enable the COVID-19 pandemic through U.S.-funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China, and then participated in a coordinated government-scientific cover-up, misleading Congress to conceal that connection and suppress the laboratory-leak explanation. Paul, a Republican, has repeatedly called for Fauci’s prosecution. […]

Conspiracy thinking is rarely isolated. For example, a person who comes to believe that public health officials are secretly manipulating information may be more receptive to claims that vaccines contain hidden dangers. Someone who distrusts pharmaceutical companies may be more receptive to claims that the pandemic was engineered for profit. Someone who believes powerful elites routinely operate in secret may be more receptive to broader conspiracy narratives such as QAnon.

These beliefs can reinforce one another, creating a broader worldview in which institutions, experts and government officials are presumed to be acting deceptively. […]

Claims were generated in online communities, repeated by political figures and amplified by media personalities, who injected these talking points back into supporters’ social media feeds. The repetition made the claims feel increasingly familiar – and familiarity can be mistaken for evidence. […]

The most consequential feature of conspiracy theories may be their ability to move from one group to another.

A claim can begin in an obscure online community and spread through social media to become a political weapon.

The Fauci hearing demonstrates the culmination of that process. These claims have moved into the formal machinery of government, where they are being amplified by elected officials and federal agencies. A theory’s credibility can increase simply because someone with greater institutional authority has repeated it.

…but people refuse the vaccine: not being terrified of things that humans don’t control.

Uncategorized

BEER AND TREMBLING:

Country Music, Sin, and Grace: Sing Me More Songs About Jesus (Terence Sweeney, July 30, 2026, Church Life Journal)

To close, I would like to take up some holy writ from Kris Kristofferson. In his song “Sunday Morning Coming Down”—sung by Johnny Cash—the singer tells us about waking up Sunday morning depressed and hungover. He groans, “The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.” In short, he ain’t doing too well. But he is not just hungover. He suffers from the sense that “there ain’t nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound . . . of Sunday morning comin’ down.” Soren Kierkegaard would say that the singer knows he is in despair, which puts him in a better position than those of us (including some in church pews) who do not know how far we are from God. The singer describes seeing a boy playing in the street, a father and a child, and smelling frying chicken, all of which “took me back to something that I lost somehow along the way.” What has he lost? What anyone in despair has lost. He has lost Sunday. He has lost being in relation to God and to others. Even if he looks for solutions in getting stoned, he does so in a prayer: “I’m wishin’ Lord that I was stoned.”

Identitarianism

IDEOLOGY CAN NEVER WITHSTAND REALITY:

Orwell Vindicated: Under Totalitarian Trump, Reality Itself Is A Communist Plot (Paul Krugman, July 30 | 2026, National Memo)

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its two million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality.

Robotics/AI

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Powerful AI models are being given away for free. It was inevitable.: They aren’t a security threat — they’re what competition looks like. (Bill Gurley, July 20, 2026, Washington Post)

There is a name for what those challengers did. Economist Michael E. Porter called it cost leadership and placed it among a handful of fundamental business strategies. Cost leadership, he argued, is the surest route to a market position a rival cannot easily attack. Walmart, Dell, Southwest — none of them won by building the fanciest product. They won by delivering a comparable one at a structurally lower cost, and letting price do the rest. Open-source software is the purest form of software cost leadership ever devised.

The classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo would not have found any of this surprising. In a competitive market, they observed, price is driven toward the cost of producing one more unit. For most goods, such as steel, wheat or labor, that floor is stubbornly high. For software, it is almost nothing: Once the first copy exists, the millionth costs essentially zero to make. A price that falls toward zero is therefore not a market failing. It is a market working exactly as the classical economists said it would.

Music

RAISE YOUR HOPEFUL VOICE:

He Sang About Loneliness. He Built Belonging (Samuel J. Abrams, July 30, 2026, AEIdeas)

Durkheim had a word for the feeling that runs through Once and much of Hansard’s music: anomie. It is what happens when people lose the relationships and rituals that tell them where they belong. In the film, the two protagonists have remarkable talent, but they lack people who can hear it and recognize it. They meet and truly see each other—albeit for a fleeting moment in time. The standout song, “Falling Slowly,” is remembered as a love song, but it is really about trust. Two strangers make something beautiful because each is willing to be vulnerable in front of the other.

That kind of encounter feels rarer today as we are increasingly isolated and disconnected from each other. AEI’s Survey Center on American Life found that the share of Americans with no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2021. Those numbers describe far more than isolation; they reveal that so many lives are lived in places where people do not feel known.

Hansard’s answer to loneliness was never a theory. In 2010, just before Christmas, volunteers collecting for Dublin’s Simon Community asked him to sing. He said no, went home, felt bad about it, grabbed his guitar, and came back. The volunteers had already left, but he played anyway. Other musicians joined him. He returned the next Christmas, then the next. 15 years later, thousands gather outside the Gaiety Theatre on Christmas Eve because one person came back.

That may be the most important thing Hansard ever created. Not an album or an Oscar-winning song, but a place people knew they could return to.

Israel/Palestine

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Loving the stranger: this week’s parashah, Ekev (Rabbanit Joanne Greenaway, 7/30/26, The Jewish Chronicle)

Among all these commandments, one has a particular force: “You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Rashi draws our attention to the reason the Torah gives. We know what it feels like to be strangers because that was once our own experience. Having known vulnerability ourselves, we should never look down on others. Our history is not simply something to remember; it is meant to shape our character. The memory of being strangers should make us more compassionate today.

The Jewish story begins with slavery and displacement. Sadly, it did not end there. In more recent history, British Jewish life was profoundly shaped by refugees escaping Nazi persecution. Nearly 300,000 Jews found refuge in Britain. They arrived carrying immense loss, but also determination and hope. Their contribution has become an integral part of our community.

That legacy can still be seen in the work of World Jewish Relief. Many people know the organisation for its efforts to rescue Jews before and after the Holocaust. Today, it is Britain’s leading Jewish charity supporting refugees of all backgrounds to rebuild their lives through employment, training and practical support. Its reputation rests on both its expertise and the dignity with which it treats every person.

Perhaps that is what makes its work so deeply rooted in Jewish values.

Founding

AMERICA RUNS ON DUNKIN:

The Baptist First Amendment (Matthew Young, Ad Fontes)

In the wake of such decisions, many conservatives and Christians—particularly among Reformed protestants—have questioned the view of the establishment clause, preferring some form of Christian nationalist or establishmentarian regime instead. Yet these reactions surrender the First Amendment too quickly. For what has been lost in the modernist interpretation of the First Amendment is the religious origins of the establishment clause. Contra Justice Black, the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not spring from Enlightenment rationalism or the ideal of a secular public sphere freed from religious influence. Instead, they represented the triumph of a particular and distinctly Protestant (and, to be specific, Baptist) account of the liberty of conscience that rejected religious coercion while still envisioning an expansive role for religion, in which Christianity could shape public life and policy.

Few things written on the First Amendment have been as deeply obfuscating as Hugo Black’s decision to rely on Thomas Jefferson’s beliefs to define the meaning of the First Amendment. While Jefferson may have played a limited role in the fight for religious freedom, there is little reason to give his interpretation primacy. Despite dominating Black’s reading of the law, Jefferson was in France while the Amendment was debated, with his role in promoting the Amendment largely confined to occasional correspondence with James Madison. Moreover, as a rationalist and republican, Jefferson’s hostility toward religious influence in politics was uncharacteristic of the other framers—including most of those who supported the First Amendment. The Amendment was established thanks to an uneasy alliance between Enlightenment deists and the deeply religious—what Sidney Mead famously called the “rationalist-pietist alliance.” The pious—like the Baptist pastors Isaac Backus and John Leland— who supported the Amendment saw it as narrowly forbidding religious coercion, rather than barring religious influence in the public sphere. Jefferson’s view was marginal: despite his apparent attempts to court the Baptists who had allied to secure the Amendment (including his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists on the “wall of separation”), contemporary evidence shows that few, if any, supported Jefferson’s view.


In choosing to elevate Jefferson over, say, Backus, Justice Black sided with those Enlightenment deists and 20th-century liberals for whom the separation of church and state came to represent a sort of contempt for the very religious faith— and religious influence in politics—that birthed it.

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