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)

Press

MUCH ADO:

The NYT and the ‘Shadow Papers’: Thoughts on the reporting (Jack Goldsmith, Apr 20, 2026, Executive Function)

[I] simply want to flag what I view as unfortunately tendentious reporting about the memoranda, especially but not exclusively about the Chief Justice.

Without any support in the documents, Kantor and Liptak say the Chief Justice seemed “angry” and “irritated” in the memos and they portray him as an almost bad-faith actor.

I also do not think “the papers show” that the Chief Justice “acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.” It was the Chief Justice’s responsibility to write the initial memo with his views and his prerogative to note disagreements with others. But he had no power to “bulldoze” anyone into voting any particular way—especially Justice Kennedy, “the court’s ideological fulcrum,” who cast the deciding fifth vote for a reason not offered by the Chief Justice.

Kantor and Liptak frame the order as part of a larger personal battle between the Chief Justice and President Obama, even though the Chief Justice wrote two opinions that saved Obamacare and also voted to uphold a different Obama EPA initiative. (Kantor and Liptak note that the Chief Justice voted to uphold one of the Obamacare cases but say “that was approved by Congress.” But of course the Chief Justice thought the CPP was not authorized by Congress.)

Kantor and Liptak say the Chief Justice “and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings” without mentioning the very consequential rulings against Trump on the shadow docket (such as this, this, and this), or the fact that every interim order Trump has won came to the Court preselected by the solicitor general based on likelihood of success.

They mention that the Chief Justice’s legal analysis for the order rested in part on the major questions doctrine that “in the years since . . . has played an increasingly important role in the court’s work.” Since their central message is that the conservative majority led by the Chief Justice is unprincipled and outcome-driven, they might have mentioned that two months ago he wrote an opinion for three conservative justices that invoked major questions to strike down President Trump’s signature tariff policy. (Three liberal justices joined the tariff invalidation but did not rely on the major questions doctrine.)

I also have a hard time understanding why Kantor and Liptak called out and went into biographical detail about the law clerks who worked on and initialed the memos for the Chief Justice and Justice Alito but failed to mention or say anything about the law clerk who apparently initialed the Breyer memo.

Baseball

YOUR LYIN’ EYES:

How the ‘Moneyball’ Oakland A’s Reinvented Baseball and Beyond: The team showed the sport—and plenty of other businesses—a new way to build a successful team (Jared Diamond, April 16, 2026, WSJ)

Yet for as long as America’s love affair with baseball has lasted, the sport’s practitioners knew shockingly little about how the game was truly played for most of that time. Teams built their rosters while relying on rudimentary statistics like batting average and runs batted in for hitters and win-loss record for pitchers. They deployed strategies like the sacrifice bunt and stolen base with remarkable frequency despite lacking real evidence to justify such usage.

These were simple concepts to understand, but unbeknown to almost everybody for generations, they might have been flawed. Batting average counts every type of hit as equal, even though home runs are clearly worth more than singles. A starter’s record fails to take into account the quality of the teammates around him. Bunting means willingly giving up one of your 27 outs, the most precious resource that exists in the game.

The problem was that until recently, nobody realized that everything they thought they understood about baseball might be wrong.

Analytics removes emotion.

Anglospherics Conservative Thought

WORTH THE EFFORT:

Conservative Credo (Barbara J. Elliott, April 14th, 2026, Imaginative Conservative)

Because man is fallible by nature, the conservative seeks to limit the damage that can be done through the abuse of power by limiting its concentration.

The conservative fosters the fullness of human potential by protecting the freedom and dignity of each person, acknowledging that responsibility comes with freedom. Rights and duties are always linked.

For the conservative, each man and woman is equal in dignity and equal before the law, but gloriously individual and unequal in talents, aptitudes, and outcomes. The conservative celebrates the uniqueness of individuals and does not level to eliminate differences.

It’s how we avoided the damage Reason did to the Continent.

All Comedy is Conservative

PUNCHING UPWARDS IS NEVER PROBLEMATIC:

Druski, Whiteface, and the Ethics of the Bit (Steve Gimbel and Tom Wilk, 4/19/26, 3Quarks)

. The moral question is not whether Druski crossed an identity line. He did. The question is what that crossing meant: how costly the joke was, what history it invoked, and whether he had the standing to make it. Humor is always morally risky. Jokes can wound, demean, reinforce ugly stereotypes, and normalize bad ways of seeing other people. But the ethics of humor does not depend only on the content of a joke. Who tells it matters. Context and history matter.

A useful way to think about this is through what in our book In on the Joke we called joke capital. Jokes have moral costs. Some are cheap and mild; others are expensive because they are cruel, degrading, or entangled with histories of domination. A joke teller’s social position, relationship to the target, and place within that history all affect whether they have the standing to cover those costs. This is why we give people more leeway when they joke about their own communities than when outsiders do. Shared membership does not make every joke acceptable, but it changes how the joke is heard.

Deflation

…AND CHEAPER…:

Homes Today Vs. 1956 – What’s The Difference? (NICOLE MURRAY, 4/14/26, The Mortgage Note)

To start, American homes today are larger. Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, recently told The Mortgage Note that new single-family homes are twice as big in terms of square footage compared to 1956.

“Believe it or not, it costs roughly the same per square foot,” Horpedahl said.

Beyond that, Horpedahl says it’s all about the amenities. For example, in 1956, only 50% of new homes were equipped with a garage. In 2024, 96% were. The percentage of homes with central air systems and appliances has dramatically increased as well.

Contra the Left/Right, our affluence is staggering.

Sex

BIOLOGY IS A STUBBORN THING:

Revealed: How Male and Female Brain Cells Differ in Gene Activity: Variations in gene expression could help to explain why brain-disease risks differ according to sex. (Miryam Naddaf, 4/17/26, Nature)

[T]he study also identified 3,382 genes that showed sex-biased expression in at least one of the six brain regions. A closer look at these genes revealed a set of 133 genes with consistent sex differences in their average expression levels across all cell types and all regions studied. “That’s very much a ground zero for the molecular effects of sex,” says study co-author Armin Raznahan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist also at the National Institute of Mental Health.

End of History

MORALITY CAN NOT BE DERIVED RATIONALLY:

Most of the world thinks differently to us: Universalism is based on irrational ideas about human nature (Daniel Dieppe, 17 April, 2026, The Critic)

The reality is that we can trace the philosophical cause of our weird Western thinking to Christianity. The fundamental equality of all human beings stems from the belief that all are “made in the image of God”. Welcoming the stranger is encapsulated in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Our intrinsic sense of guilt is a word-for-word reading of the fall and the Christian doctrine of original sin from Genesis 3. As the historian Tom Holland concluded in Dominion:The Making of the Western Mind, we “are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”

Identitarianism

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?:

There’s a moral vacuum at the core of JD Vance (Gerard Baker, April 16 2026, Times uk)

Everyone makes moral compromises but they are manageable because there is at least some essential identity, an irreducible core that is something more than the sum of our appetites and ambitions. But the uniquely strange trajectory of Vance’s career strongly suggests there is no identity there, only the appetites and ambitions to be served by whichever principles work best.

This is a man who has changed almost everything about himself to accommodate new realities. From his name (he was once James David Bowman) to his faith (he was once an evangelical Protestant) to his political allegiance (he once pondered fearfully whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler”). And he is still constantly changing his mind (in that New York Times story it was said that while he was at first against the war, he then argued for a limited war and then for an all-out war, all in the space of a fortnight). When you look, in other words, for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from a succession of useful transactions.

His entire life has been driven by the need to be loved by his newest father figure.

Identitarianism Immigration

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS ARE ALWAYS AND ONLY RACIST:

Reopen the Golden Door: Repeal The Immigration and Nationality Act: immigration restrictionism is the Slave Power of the 21st century (Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis, 17 Apr 2026, Liberal Currents)

The moral turpitude (itself a term of art deployed against migrants, but more appropriate for the entire system), by itself, should be a damning case against the idea of restricting immigration. The human suffering it generates should condemn it alone. But beyond that, the economic case is damning, and the lost wealth represents human suffering in its own right.

Economists such as Michael Clemens have persuasively demonstrated that immigration restrictionism is one of the largest drags on the global economy in existence. Even a five percent increase in worker mobility would have the same economic impact as a global regime of universal free trade; removing all immigration barriers could double the size of the global economy. But how? Simply put—workers are more productive in wealthy economies. This flows back into tax revenue, into labor supply, into aggregate demand. The reality is that immigration creates more demand—more jobs to fill that demand—than it supplants.

But ultimately, the case against the immigration regime is moral. On a fundamental level, the freedom to work and live in a place of one’s choice is a human right. It is an intrinsic violation of liberal democratic principles to use state violence to infringe this right. This is even more salient when one considers the element of desert. What did you do to deserve the immense quality of life from being born in a wealthy developed country as opposed to a poor developing country? Why does being born in San Diego versus Tijuana, or Brownsville versus Matamoros, mean that you have a right to a certain quality of life that your Mexican counterpart does not? What gives Americans the right to point a gun at them and say, “turn around, or die?” Carens (1987) stated it bluntly—citizenship in a wealthy developed country functions as effectively feudal peerage. It, like slavery, is a moral stain on the American body politic, and like slavery, it corrupts that body politic in tangible, visible ways.

Kukathas (2021) lays out the real-world impact of “the border.” The border is not just the Rio Grande, or the international waterline. It is nationwide, constant surveillance and enforcement. From employment, to education, to even marriage—marriages between citizens and non-citizens are heavily scrutinized—“the border” represents a constant, ever-present demand that any given person prove their right to be here at any given time. This administration asserting that everyone must carry immigration papers on their person at all times, or risk deportation—the “papers please” regime—is simply a logical extension of this. And indeed, it could be said that Trump is the first president to take immigration law to its logical conclusion—as we have seen in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis. One looks to the Anthony Burns case (1854) to see the parallel—Slave Power enforced against an escaped Black man while abolitionists lined the streets. In both cases, the law demands compliance, and the will of the people is rendered inert.

One must realize that a legal framework that requires a fascist to fully realize is itself fascist.

And it corrupts our society in many other ways. Immigration enforcement is a category of law that supersedes nearly every institutional check. Immigrants in detention get limited or no due process. Employers, landlords, and educational institutions must enforce immigration law via the I-9 and E-Verify. And now, ICE has a Stasi-like tip line to report “illegals”. It has degraded the constitutional framework, directly fueling the expansion of the imperial presidency, the destruction of asylum law, the practice of indefinite detention without trial, and the use of military assets to facilitate deportation, all without due process.

And not only did immigration restriction warp American politics around it—it was and is the entire driving force for American fascist politics. And today it is now being used to justify the breaking of American institutions.

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Press

MUCH ADO:

Baseball

YOUR LYIN’ EYES:

Anglospherics Conservative Thought

WORTH THE EFFORT:

All Comedy is Conservative

PUNCHING UPWARDS IS NEVER PROBLEMATIC:

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