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

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

The DSA Platform Would Destroy American Democracy: The socialist group’s vision of a federal government without three equal branches providing checks and balances would facilitate the whims of a would-be authoritarian. Sound familiar? (Bill Scher, July 28, 2026, Washington Monthly)


To call the DSA platform antithetical to the U.S Constitution is not hyperbole, or an insult to the platform’s authors. The DSA preamble states plainly that the end goal is to “draft a new constitution” to “create a democratic socialist republic.” Such a new U.S. constitution, the DSA envisions, would “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” which would be unicameral after abolishing the Senate.

That last bit about the Senate may sound appealing. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait called it DSA’s “best idea” since the Senate’s structure gives disproportionate power to voters in less populated states in ratios likely unimagined by the Founders. But it can’t be viewed in isolation from the broader DSA program, which is an obliteration of the Constitution’s system of checks-and-balances among three equal branches of government.

In the DSA view, the Constitution’s diffusion of power is “anti-democratic” and an inherent obstacle to a “democratic society of the working class.” America’s “political and economic system [is] built on private ownership and profit at all costs,” and DSA warns that “as capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism.”

But what DSA fails to recognize is that the Constitution’s diffusion of power is what has prevented Donald Trump and his MAGA minions from permanently installing right-wing authoritarianism.

Which is why the Trumpists hate the Constitution too.

Energy

RENEWABLES ARE INDEPENDENCE:

A great idea that everyone hates (Matthew Yglesias, Jul 28, 2026, Slow Boring)

The good news is that there is a very straightforward and well-understood idea that would have a meaningful short-term impact on prices without killing incentives for new investment.

The bad news is that nobody in their right mind even talks about this idea because it’s universally understood to be politically toxic and something everyone would hate.

I’m not here to dispute that diagnosis, just to say that failing to even talk about it is impoverishing the discourse — I keep encountering efforts to essentially recreate it with extra bells and whistles, and I don’t think that anyone coming up with these “new” ideas is taking seriously enough the question of why we don’t just do the straightforward thing.

So what’s the straightforward thing? It’s simple: We could charge household electricity users the spot price of electricity.

Tax externalities.

Israel/Palestine

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL: A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger: Gadi Eisenkot, whose view of war is shaped by the loss of his son, is, in manner and character, the anti-Bibi. (David Remnick, July 27, 2026, The New Yorker)

The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.

Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.

This presents a problem for Netanyahu. Despite growing up in an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem, and being the Ashkenazi son of a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Netanyahu has long positioned himself, and his Likud Party, as the security-minded champion of the working class, the pious, the voiceless, and the Mizrahim, who came to Israel from Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim countries. Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some “soft right” voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona. In many traditional Likud strongholds, the journalist Hilo Glazer wrote in Haaretz, Eisenkot is described by his supporters as dialina, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.” […]

He is just short of dull and makes a virtue of it. Last year, he founded a party called Yashar—the name meaning straight, upright, just. At the lectern, he briskly ticks through his themes and campaign promises, among them a pledge to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.” This sort of phrase is rarely heard from Netanyahu, much less from two of his most racist and reactionary ministers: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance. Both are unapologetic in their support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

Health

…AND CHEAPER…:

The path to artificial superintelligence (MIT Technology Review Insights, July 27, 2026)

Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy.

Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate patient care without a human making the decisions.

“The intelligence is already there. What is missing is the connective tissue that turns four strangers into one team,” explains Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift by Cisco.

This “connective tissue” comes from adding a semantic layer—what Outshift calls the “Internet of Cognition”—that enables agents across domains to work together and, critically, “think” together through shared intent, context, and reasoning.

Long War

FAILURE TO DENAZIFY WAS TRAGIC:

Reagan was right about Daniel Ortega all along (Jon Miltimore, July 25, 2026, Restoring America)

Ortega, the son of a shoemaker, first came to power in 1979 after dropping out of law school to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist revolutionary movement. He became an unapologetic disciple not just of Karl Marx but also of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who brought terror as well as revolution to Russia.


“I admire Marx, I respect Marx, as I also admire and respect Lenin,” Ortega told the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s.

Like the Bolsheviks, Ortega had little hesitation about expropriating private property, helping himself to the luxurious mansion of a wealthy banker. Throughout the 1980s, Ortega implemented a familiar socialist playbook: nationalizing industries, redistributing wealth, and radically reallocating land, all while enjoying the spoils of what capitalists had built.

President Ronald Reagan famously dismissed Ortega as a “dictator in designer glasses.” Yet many argued Ortega was a reformer disinterested in personal power.

The desire to accommodate remnants of prior regimes–particularly the army and judges–is admirable, but disastrous.

One Economy to Rule Them All

THE DELUSIONS OF THE PROGRESSIVES:

Scottish tax hike for high earners backfires with loss of £22m: A top rate of 48p for incomes above £125,140, intended as a ‘progressive’ move to raise money for public services, has instead reduced revenues, expert analysis shows (Daniel Sanderson, July 25 2026, Times UK)

Dan Neidle, a tax policy expert who was part of the Scottish government’s recently axed tax advisory group, said its decision to impose a 48p top rate had instead reduced revenues.

All comedy is conservative.

Long War

THE ENDARKENMENT:

The Illusion of Madame Récamier (Adam Sandonato, July 21st, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)

In other words, during the course of the Enlightenment, man truly became the measure of all things. By being reduced to his mere physicality, he became both an object of social control through seemingly innocuous behavioral standards—such as we find in Chesterfield—and an object open to radical distortion and experimentation—such as we find in Sade and Shelley. In the quest to rationalize the body, and therefore separate it from its metaphysical dimension, eighteenth-century society did not eliminate the darker impulses, the passions, and the brokenness inherent in man’s fallen state. Instead, it pushed them to the fringes, consigned to the sick imaginings of Sade’s Juliette and of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Here we arrive at the chief issue with the Enlightenment: the idea that the persistent application of reason can cure all of the ills of mankind. In Földényi’s words,

The belief in the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena—similar to the sun—is the great inheritance of the Enlightenment. Thinking, of course, ever since humans have existed, has always tried to disperse the darkness. Earlier individuals did not cherish the illusion that here on earth they would be able to liquidate every shadow and every darkness. During the Enlightenment, however, the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things—with no dark corners remaining anywhere unilluminated by the light of reason—became resolute.[11]

As a critic and philosopher of art, Földényi is preoccupied with the “duality” between light and darkness, much like a composer is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between tension and release. What Földényi sees in the Enlightenment is man’s attempt to assert his autonomy over light and darkness, with the express purpose of eliminating the latter through the use of rational control.

One Economy to Rule Them All

BORROWING MILEI’S CHAINSAW:

‘I’m over the moon’: New York’s small business owners rejoice as Mamdani cuts red tape: Initiatives including cutting permits just to serve ice-cream amount to a sweeping program of deregulation (Christopher Mathias, 25 Jul 2026, The Guardian)


Red Scare? The democratic socialist mayor of New York City spent this week talking about red tape.

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America – posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti.

“New York’s small business owners have said it over and over: endless paperwork and the uncertainty of dealing with City government has made getting their stores up and running too difficult,” Mamdani wrote on X, announcing a package of 50 policy changes aimed at easing the financial burden of fines, fees and regulations on mom-and-pop shops across the five boroughs.

Economics trumps ideology.

End of History

YES, BECAUSE EQUALITY!:

Andy Burnham is fighting the wrong enemy (Mani Basharzad, 20 July 2026, CapX)

Looking back, it is easy to see why. Inflation reached 25% in 1975. Britain was suffering a brain drain, with highly skilled engineers and academics leaving the country. Why would they stay when the top rate of income tax stood at 83%? Then there was the 1976 IMF bailout, followed by the Winter of Discontent. In 1979 alone, 29.5 million working days were lost to strikes. Unemployment reached 2 million. The dead went unburied, and hospitals were reduced to emergency treatment only.

When the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, says he wants to ‘undo Thatcher’s economic legacy’, is that the Britain he wants to return to?

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