Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases. …

But what [Obama] actually stood for was sitting in the third row and wearing the Communist star. The media didn’t even believe that Obama’s mentor getting a front row seat to the opening of his presidential center while wearing the symbol of a movement responsible for the mass murder of millions mattered.

Bill Ayers was pretty clear about what Obama represented. “The people who tried to say that Obama palled around with terrorists, that he had Palestinian friends, that he had a black nationalist minister, none of that s___ worked,” Ayers told the one reporter who stopped him to chat.

Some of us – actually, many of us – were quite aware of what Obama stood for even back in 2008. The media and the left (but I repeat myself) were devoted to covering it up. But apparently there’s no need to cover it up any more.

Those of us of a certain age can remember the 60s quite well:

The Weathermen were a murderous Marxist terrorist organization dedicated to bringing down the United States. After they realized that planting bombs wouldn’t work, they turned to politics.

And the radicals accomplished with politics what they never managed to do with explosives.

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men,” Prairie Fire, a book co-authored by Ayers, Dohrn and other radicals declared. “Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.”

Barack Obama may have seated his two terrorist mentors in the front rows, but he made no direct reference to them, except for having “found my community here, friendships that would last a lifetime.”

Ah, but remember that Obama claimed back during his first campaign that Ayers was someone he hardly knew, just “a guy” who lived “in the neighborhood.” I wrote this post about the Obama-Ayers connection in 2008 prior to Obama’s first election, and I was hardly alone. But the media was engaged in covering it up, and they succeeded.

So here we are. Ayers is 81 years old now, and retired. But he has managed to have an outsized influence on politics by going into academia and focusing on the field of teaching teachers to teach. That’s how he has shaped the beliefs of several generations of students. He must be very very proud:

Ayers is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. His interests include teaching for social justice, urban educational reform, narrative and interpretive research, children in trouble with the law, and related issues. …

Ayers was elected vice president for curriculum studies by the American Educational Research Association in 2008.[48] William H. Schubert, a fellow professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote that his election was “a testimony of [Ayers’s] stature and [the] high esteem he holds in the field of education locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally”. Writer Sol Stern, a conservative opponent of progressive education policies, has criticized Ayers as having a virulent “hatred of America”, and said, “Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer.” …

In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: “I am a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist … [Laughs] Maybe I’m the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs]

Funny stuff.

The post Back to the future: Ayers and other 60s leftist radicals appeared first on The New Neo.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the most prominent and powerful foreign policy hawk in Congress, died suddenly Saturday following reported chest pains and cardiac arrest. He was 71.

For more than two decades, Graham championed the peace through American strength abroad, advocating for military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq — and Iran.

Graham had a lot of enemies, including some on the right, and he had a lot of friends. He even had some enemies turned friends, such as President Trump, who grew close to him. Many tributes poured in, and of course much online hatred as well, in the manner of our present age.

I didn’t always agree with Graham, although I often did. I think his finest hour – certainly his most intense hour – was at the Kavanaugh hearings:

Recently, Graham had been busy flying to Ukraine, working on bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, and promoting the SAVE Act. I also just learned, from this article, that he hadn’t taken advantage of his position to amass enormous wealth, comparatively speaking:

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham ranked among the bottom half of Congress’ big earners despite more than three decades in office and a top role leading the GOP.

Graham, 71, died Saturday night with a net worth of nearly $1.5 million, leaving the senator, who had a modest upbringing in South Carolina, ranked at 294th in wealth among the 535 voting members of Congress, according to data from the Quiver Quantitative tracker. …

Despite a 31-year career in Congress that catapulted Graham to the center of power in the Senate, the South Carolina native has never strayed too far from his humble roots.

Graham grew up in a blue-collar family in the small town of Central, where his parents ran a restaurant and pool hall known as the Sanitary Cafe. A young Graham lived in the room right behind the family business.

The late senator previously credited his working-class upbringing — in which he helped his parents run their restaurant — with pushing him to be the first person in his family to go to college.

But while he was attending the University of South Carolina, both his parents died of illness just 15 months apart from each other, leaving Graham to legally adopt his then-13-year-old sister and get her through her education.

After earning his law degree, Graham joined the Air Force …

I saw Graham in person once, and I was extremely impressed, but not by what you’d imagine. It was at a large outdoor gathering during the 2015-2016 primary season, and he was running for president. He dropped out early in the game, but this was before that. There was a big crowd but not an enormous one, it was a beautiful day, and there were about ten speakers – all of them GOP candidates for the presidency. When it came Graham’s turn he spoke for about fifteen minutes.

I of course knew who he was, but he surprised me by being incredibly humorous. I mean really zany quips, one after the other, all of them sounding like ad libs, all of them incredibly witty. I hadn’t ever seen that side of him, and he was in rare form. Afterwards I somehow found myself speaking to a volunteer for his campaign, and I asked if this was unusual. She said he was constantly cracking them up with his humor.

RIP Lindsey Graham.

The post RIP Lindsey Graham appeared first on The New Neo.

pic.twitter.com/gQzOXBJHJz

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 10, 2026

Note the sign-off. After all the more formal jargon, we have this:

F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the hearts.

Solidarity forever,
Graham Platner

I think one of his motives with the sign-off was to embarrass the Democrat politicians who initially supported him and then abandoned him. Then again, he could have done a lot worse there at the end, this being Platner.

So we have those two big progressive causes – anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian. What does “up the hearts” mean? It seems to be a reference to the Portland (Maine), soccer team, the Portland Hearts of Pine. And “Solidarity Forever” is an old labor movement song:

The iconic labor song “Solidarity Forever” turns 109 years old today. Written in defiance of early 20th-century oppression, it railed against the forces that “would lash us into serfdom” with the abiding counsel that the “union makes us strong.”

Will Platner manage to keep himself in the spotlight somehow? I think he’d certainly like to.

The post Platner officially drops out and proves what a class act he is appeared first on The New Neo.

Enjoy:

RIP Bonnie Tyler.

Speaking of kinky male heroes, it reminds me of the dilemma facing the Democrat Party, one that Graham Platner’s candidacy spotlighted. Some people wonder why Platner was chosen in the first place to run for office, and pushed by certain factions who thought he’d be a good candidate. I think the answer isn’t obscure: he was their designated working-class hero. At least, he could be presented that way. Because it’s all about casting. And sometimes an actor has to be replaced while the play is still in production.

Democrats have lost many members of a demographic that used to be a goodly portion of their base: white, male, working class. They don’t need those votes in deep blue states or cities, and are free to run rich Communists with a foreign background such as Mamdani. But in purple ones and in nationwide elections it’s a riskier proposition, although it can still happen (see Michigan and El-Sayed; but Michigan has a particularly large Muslim voting bloc). But Democratss would very much like to have those white working-class men voting for them everywhere.

Thus, you had the nomination of the abominable Tim Walz as Harris’s VP. It was an effort that failed because Walz was a leftist’s idea of a masculine guy, but he fell very short of that and just came across as weird (a descriptor he used for J. D. Vance but that fit Walz far better).

Vance, by the way, really did start out as a white working-class guy – or even more poor than that – but rose higher by dint of brains and hard work.

Initially Platner must have seemed like a good solution to the problem. Male, “oyster farmer,” young, tattooed, veteran, Maine native, possessed of a rugged quality. A leftist who didn’t look like a leftist. For a while he polled quite well against Susan Collins, who is old and female and has been in office for a gazillion years. But Platner had a past, and the past wasn’t all that long ago.

Who chose Platner? Like most of these working-class heroes and foreign academic Communists, he was chosen by people whose specialty it is to find them and back them:

Welp… pic.twitter.com/e3TgHWaf9T

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 10, 2026

It’s about one of these “finders,” Daniel Moraff. The Times article said, “He looks for a particular type: military veterans with blue-collar jobs and no electoral experience but an interest in politics and (typically) labor unions.”

Next in line in Maine for the role seems to be Troy Jackson. The difference is that he really is from a working-class background and really was a logger, although he lacks a history of military service. He also has been a Maine politician for about twenty-five years and was the president of the Maine Senate. However, he’s got the usual political baggage, in his case that he was originally an abortion-opposing and same-sex-marriage-opposing Republican and switched both his party and his positions. There’s also this:

Jackson initially maintained a close political alliance with Platner, with the two frequently appearing at campaign rallies together and running in a ranked-choice voting alliance during the 2026 primary cycle. However, after multiple scandals involving Platner, including allegations that he raped a former girlfriend, Jackson has distanced himself from Platner.

On Israel, Jackson adheres to the requisite Democrat Party line:

“Anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. It has to end, and we as Americans have the power to end it.” Jackson added that he will “never vote in favor of US taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel” as a senator.

The article says that’s the first time he’s spoken much publicly about Israel, and it happened yesterday. Funny thing, that – he’s hopping on the bandwagon in an attempt to replace Platner. Jackson is also backed by Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders. The same article helpfully lists the other contenders for the nomination as well, and mentions their attitudes on the Israel question. They exhibit different degrees of anti-Israel sentiment. But only one candidate seems to be supportive of the country, and that’s Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state of Maine.

One more thing about Troy Jackson – this allegation has emerged:

A progressive advocacy group on Tuesday accused former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson of striking a female colleague with a bottle he threw during a state Senate caucus dispute years ago, complicating his emergence as the leading Democrat contender to replace Graham Platner on the November ballot against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. …

In a post on X, the group said Jackson, “in a heated disagreement, struck a female colleague with a bottle he threw at her” during a caucus meeting when he served as Senate president, and it described the episode as “a widespread open secret” in Maine politics that was “not an isolated incident.”

The group conceded that people close to Jackson were denying the account.

The Democrats have until July 27 to make a decision. It will be the Party regulars of Maine who will choose Platner’s successor. They have an interesting task ahead – how to thread the needle.

[NOTE: If anyone’s interested in how it is that Platner can be on total disability from the service, here’s an article about that.]

The post The Democrats are holding out for a hero in Maine appeared first on The New Neo.

The Democrats must have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse – or a threat he couldn’t defy. Or both.

First, the threat

He argued the real threat was never the allegations themselves, but what the political establishment plans to do with them. Cut off his fundraising. Cut off his voter data. Starve the campaign of everything it needs simply to function. He made his read on their real preference painfully clear.

“They would rather see Susan Collins win than have me be the next senator from Maine,” he said.

No, I don’t think so. They would rather have a different candidate than you, one they think has a better chance of winning. They knew the GOP had the goods on you and was going to wait till after the point of no return, July 13, to reveal it. So they finessed the GOP and revealed it themselves in order to force you out. Believe me, they want to win. This isn’t about you.

He added, about his victory in the primary:

“We went toe-to-toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the history of the world, and we won,” Platner said.

“We beat them on June 9th in overwhelming numbers.”

But to the best of my recollection, his main (Maine?) opponent, Janet Mills, had dropped out by then. His rise was also promoted by major backers such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, hardly outside of an “entrenched political system.”

Let’s see; what else?:

“And I just want to make it clear this is all false,” Platner said.

“The things that have been claimed did not happen; it’s not real.”

He described the past few days as an ordeal no regular person should have to survive, a normal guy suddenly thrust into a spotlight he says he never wanted. He accused the media and the political establishment of skipping the investigation entirely and jumping straight to a verdict.

“I learned about this through press inquiries with no time to truly respond, no time for investigations before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury and executioner,” he said.

“Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of things, not the end.”

I don’t know whether he’s innocent or guilty, but I do know that apparently Politico saw emails in which his accuser made the Platner rape allegations to friends very close to the time the rape supposedly occurred. Back then, he was not a political figure at all, but merely her ex-boyfriend.

Now the Democrats get to do what they do best: undo the will of the people and replace one candidate with another, in the nick of time. I wonder what Biden might say to all of this.

Who might be the new nominee? Here’s a report on the process:

Earlier Wednesday evening, the state party said it had decided to hold a nominating convention to pick a replacement candidate and plans to “announce the full timeline,” as well as details and requirements for contenders. It promised transparency.

The possible candidates:

[Troy] Jackson, who was a Platner ally before calling on him to step aside Monday, swiftly launched his Senate bid after Platner suspended his campaign. …

A logger with long ties to organized labor, he’s quickly attracted attention from many of the oysterman’s progressive supporters. Our Revolution, a progressive organization founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has already thrown its support behind Jackson.

But already, some votes from his 20-year history in the legislature are resurfacing, such as his 2009 state Senate vote against a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, giving Platner’s base a bit of pause. He later called that the “worst vote I ever took.” His closeness to Platner during the primary may also give pause to some Democrats as they choose their next nominee. …

[Dan] Kleban also announced his bid Wednesday. The 49-year-old founder of Maine Beer Company had dropped out of the Democratic Senate primary earlier this year and threw his weight behind establishment-backed Gov. Janet Mills. …

[Nirav] Shah, a former public health official, is “evaluating” whether he will mount a Senate bid, he told POLITICO Tuesday afternoon. But he was already positioning himself as a candidate before Platner’s announcement. …

Shah oversaw the state’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He mounted his first run for public office earlier this year, finishing second in Maine’s gubernatorial primary. He said in an interview that he is “very, very much aligned” with Platner’s politics. …

[Shenna] Bellows, who also ran unsuccessfully for governor, has been fielding calls about a potential run, according to a person familiar with her campaign, granted anonymity to speak about private conversations. The person pointed to her ideological alignment with Platner on progressive issues and compelling biography — she grew up poor in rural Maine and flipped a GOP-held state Senate district — providing an early glimpse of part of her pitch if she decides to enter the race.

There are a bunch of others, most of whom are previous Platner supporters.

The post Platner says buh-bye appeared first on The New Neo.

Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

That’s not all they want, but it’s a start. It also gives you a hint about why they call themselves democratic socialists: they use what they call “democracy” as a tool. First it’s just the ordinary “democracy” we have today – that is, a republican form of government with checks and balances. The most “democratic” organ of the legislature is the House, because the Senate gives power to states as entities rather than by population numbers. Leftists are angry that in the Senate low-population states like South Dakota (which tend to be red) count for as much as the populous blue enclaves of New York or California. They plan to remedy that flaw. And then they plan to make other branches of government subordinate to the House, which would reign supreme.

Of course, this is at present a dream. But look how far they’ve come in just a few short years.

Also, the whole thing would fall down if the House ends up taken over by the right. If these Democratic Socialists ever get sufficient in numbers, however, they plan to make that impossible any way they can. Whether or not elections are “rigged” or outright fraudulent in blue cities and states, if you don’t believe the left wants to do it and will do it if possible, you don’t understand their drive for power.

This triumph of “democracy” – “our democracy” – is the process part of it. The content is indeed things like the abolition of prisons (except perhaps for their political prisoners), open borders (the better to get more third-world denizens here), hatred of Israel and Jews (and probably for those Christians who aren’t with the DSA program) – and the destruction of Western Civilization.

You think I made that last part up? I did not; see this:

The socialist backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani who won Tuesday night’s primary election in New York’s 13th Congressional District founded a group in college that called for the total destruction of the West.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, a Democratic nominee for U.S. Congress who made career out of “community organizing,” wrote in her biography for an opinion piece in independent news outlet The Electronic Intifada that she “helped launch the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign Columbia University Apartheid Divest.”

“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” the group said in a now-deleted 2024 Instagram post.

In May 2024, eight years after she graduated from Columbia, Chevalier was back on campus advocating alongside the group she founded, known as CUAD, wearing a keffiyeh and a t-shirt emblazoned with the group’s name.

This isn’t ancient history for Chevalier.

More here:

She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid and Divest (CUAD), an organization that did not merely oppose the state of Israel but also celebrated terrorism outright. After the death of Yahya Sinwar, CUAD’s Substack published a glowing eulogy of the Hamas terrorist who masterminded the October 7 attack on Israelis. CUAD hailed him as a “hero of the revolution” guided by “pragmatic optimism.” The group called on its followers to “reflect on how we can make ourselves more like him.”

Avila Chevalier was also involved with the related group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which explicitly celebrated the October 7th terrorist attack as a “historic win.”

We cannot count on the people of New York to stop her from becoming a member of the House of Representatives. After all, she’s got a “D” after her name now as the official Democrat nominee in the 13th District:

She wants to abolish not just the police but the very concept of policing entirely. For good measure, she views interracial relationships with suspicion, thought COVID-19 originated in France, and thinks white people are not hygienic.

In an interview with The New York Editorial Board from earlier this month, Avila Chevalier declined to walk back her most controversial statements. She refused to say, for instance, that murderers belong in prison.

There are two ways in which the right is reacting to Chevalier and the other Democratic Socialists who won their primaries recently (it’s not only in NYC). The first way is to be happy, because this signals that the left has gone too far and will be rejected. The second – and I’m in this camp – is to take it as an extremely serious sign, and to believe that they will not fade away in some natural fashion. Too many people in the US now – too many voters – are ignorant of history, economics, and common sense. Too many live in a la-la land where ideas like abolishing the police are not seen as lunatic. Too many think socialism would be just peachy keen. Too many have succumbed to the poisonous virus of Jew-hatred, especially when couched in the language of anti-Zionism backed up by lies about apartheid and genocide.

Way too many.

NOTE:

I know that some of you objected last time I posted a Ruthless podcast video, because they use the f-word a lot. This session also contains language of that sort. Don’t listen if that bothers you too much; I don’t consider it any sort of deal-breaker, because their content is good. They have a lot to say about the Democratic Socialists, and I think it’s well worth listening to:

[ADDENDUM:

And although I think this is totally obvious and goes without saying, it’s still refreshing to hear someone like New York City DSA cochair Gustavo Gordillo be so honest about methods and goals:

“We’re using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals,” Gordillo boldly stated. “We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it’s useful, and push our own agenda from the inside.”

Here’s the kicker — the line that should have House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries losing sleep at night and/or wetting himself: “We see the Democratic establishment as an obstacle, not a home.”

As I said, this has been quite obvious for some time.

Also, the NY DSA is coming for Kathy Hochul, who is obviously not radical enough.]

The post Democratic Socialism: workers of the blue cities, unite! appeared first on The New Neo.

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson says he’s “out” of the Republican Party moving forward, arguing the GOP no longer reflects his views. …

“And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

He fancies himself a thought leader. And you know what? He most definitely does have followers and a huge digital audience. The question is about the composition and range of that audience. There is some evidence that a large number of them live abroad, particularly in Pakistan, and that many are of the bot persuasion. But I happen to think that a significant number are real live voting-age Americans, although I’ve read extremely variable estimates of their numbers

Whatever Tucker’s influence, I’d wager many of his followers left the GOP long ago.

I’ve written a great many posts on Carlson in the last year or two, ever since he left Fox and began his very visible political “turn.” I’ve described it in some depth, especially in this, which is the first part of a three-part series I wrote, and contains links to parts two and three of the series.

This political change of Carlson’s resulted in – among other things – his current emphasis on Israel and Jews as the source of most of the world’s problems. It’s an old story, but everything old is new again.

From his recent farewell to the GOP:

Carlson said, adding that the GOP has “betrayed” voters by prioritizing Israel’s national security over America’s.

I think this short clip is a good analysis of some of Carlson’s rhetorical tricks:

Carlson also says he “is unsure how he’ll vote moving forward” but that he’s not a Democrat.

But Tucker already has been supporting Democrats by allying with them in being obsessed with the unique evil he – and they – think Israel is. He also supports Democrats by having worked to split the right for several years now, first on Ukraine but especially after 10/7 and escalating much more after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. He would not have dared had Kirk been alive.

I also believe that Tucker knows pretty much what he’ll do “moving forward.” The question is not how he’ll vote; he’s just one vote, after all. It’s whom he will endorse, whom he’ll choose to interview and about what, and whether he’ll run for office himself. He doesn’t have to do the latter to split the party by endorsing some third-party candidate, either, which he might do.

Or maybe it’s Vance he’ll focus on and support, depending on whether Vance is truly allied with some of Tucker’s worst impulses or whether Vance is just pretending to be Tucker-adjacent the better to keep the party together for 2028. I don’t know which it is and I can’t read Vance’s mind.

The post Tucker Carlson announces something that was already clear: he’s not a Republican appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve watched many of Saad’s YouTube videos, and he’s a no-nonsense guy, a Jew who was raised in Lebanon and whose family was one of the last to leave. He’s been living in Canada although I think he’s in the US now. At any rate, here’s something about his book, from the description at Amazon:

In his new book, Suicidal Empathy, Saad unleashes a blistering critique of maladaptively irrational altruism that has gripped our culture. This mind parasite hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite, leading to a catastrophic miscalibration of moral priorities. The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline. Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.

Saad is a professor, but he seems to be very realistic as well. His thesis makes me think of Robert Frost – yes, that Robert Frost. For example, this post of mine from 2019 contains the following thoughts from Frost:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed.

Frost was writing about socialism in 1936, whereas Saad is writing more generally. But the principle is much the same. Empathy – similar to Frost’s mercy – is part of human nature and definitely has its uses. But taken to an extreme, and misapplied, it is dangerous and can lead to either failure of an economic system or cultural suicide or literal deaths, as well as restraints on liberty in the name of kindness.

The post Suicidal empathy appeared first on The New Neo.

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif. …

Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why the appeal of his work endures.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

I was not a big Hockney fan, but his work seemed pleasant enough. However, having lots of friends and in-laws in Southern California, I was and I remain exceptionally familiar with those “sun-drenched suburban views” in real life.

But I must say that this quote from that article endears Hockney to me:

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

RIP.

The post David Hockney dies at 88 appeared first on The New Neo.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of history’s three greatest composers (along with Beethoven and Mozart), but his fame didn’t really blossom until the mid-19th century—75 or 80 years after his death. That fact contains both sadness (that he never enjoyed the fame he deserved) and joy (that his name rings out around the world and across the centuries). … I’ll share the stories of a handful of mid-20th century folk/pop musicians whose fame (in selected circles) was similarly deferred—along with some clips of their music.

That started me thinking about other arenas and other examples of late fame. I think the quintessential one is Van Gogh, who struggled tremendously in his life (from some unspecified and episodic mental illness, among other things like poverty) and sold very few paintings, although more than the one painting of legend:

We don’t know exactly how many paintings Van Gogh sold during this lifetime, but in any case, it was more than a couple. Vincent’s first commission was from his uncle Cor. He was an art dealer and wanted to help his nephew on his way, so he ordered 19 cityscapes of The Hague.

Vincent sold his first painting to the Parisian paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy, and his brother Theo successfully sold another work to a gallery in London. The Red Vineyard, which Vincent painted in 1888, was bought by Anna Boch, the sister of Vincent’s friend Eugène Boch.

Without the help of his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have been even worse off. But things were bad enough, and he killed himself at the age of thirty-seven in 1890. Now Van Gogh is one of the most popular artists ever, whose work fetches astronomical prices at auction.

But I think it’s somewhat of a myth that he was a complete failure in his lifetime. From his Wiki entry, I was surprised to see that he did have more recognition during his lifetime that I’d previously known, plus he was acknowledged with at least some praise and acknowledgement shortly after his death:

After Van Gogh’s first exhibitions in the late 1880s, his reputation grew steadily among artists, art critics, dealers and collectors. In 1887, André Antoine hung Van Gogh’s alongside works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, at the Théâtre Libre in Paris; some were acquired by Julien Tanguy. In 1889, his work was described in the journal Le Moderniste Illustré by Albert Aurier as characterised by “fire, intensity, sunshine”. Ten paintings were shown at the Société des Artistes Indépendants, in Brussels in January 1890. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was said to have been impressed by Van Gogh’s work.

After Van Gogh’s death, memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions, including six works at Les XX; in 1891, there was a retrospective exhibition in Brussels. In 1892, Octave Mirbeau wrote that Van Gogh’s suicide was an “infinitely sadder loss for art … even though the populace has not crowded to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived.”

Van Gogh’s fame and reputation started to build in the early years of the 20th century and he became quite famous in mid-century. So it did take a while for him to reach his present mega-fame.

Another example of a very different kind that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis, who’s not really what you’d call a household name even now. But he was disgraced in his lifetime and rehabilitated only after death:

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had thrice the mortality of midwives’ wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease, giving Semmelweis’s observations a theoretical and scientific explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur’s research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

Another extremely well-known example of the “late fame” genre is poet Emily Dickinson, reclusive and nearly unpublished in life but now considered one of the greatest American poets:

Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.Today her poems are widely regarded as groundbreaking with their use of short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry primarily deals with nature and mortality.

One thing all three – Van Gogh, Semmelweis, and Dickinson – had in common was that their work was unconventional for the times, trailblazing even. It took the passage of time for them to be appreciated. I’ll let Dickinson have the last word:

Success is counted sweetest,
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purpose Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

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