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!

The post The phenomenon of late fame appeared first on The New Neo.

In the meantime, I think I’m just going to post something that has nothing to do with politics, and then go take a walk.]

Walk like an Egyptian and run like a ballerina:

The greatest practitioner of the ballet run was Galina Ulanova, whose ballet heyday with the Kirov and then the Bolshoi was during the 1940s and 1950s. She was the child of two ballet dancers and felt she never had a choice about ballet, but she certainly made the best of it. She was unique as a dancer and as an actress, earning praise such as these statements:

Sergei Eisenstein: “Ulanova — cannot be grouped together with, compared to other dancers. In terms of what is most cherished, By the very nature of her secret…She belongs to a different dimension.” …

Margot Fonteyn: “I cannot even begin to talk about Ulanova’s dancing, it is so marvelous, I am left speechless. It is magic. Now we know what we lack.”

But it is this comment by dance critic Arnold Haskell with which I most agree:

My memories of Ulanova are, to me, a part of life itself, bringing a total enrichment of experience. To me, hers are not theatrical miracles but triumphs of human spirit. Where Pavlova was supremely conscious of her audience and could play upon its emotions as upon an instrument, Ulanova is remote in a world of her own, which we are privileged to penetrate. She is so completely identified with the character she impersonates that nothing outside exists.

But it’s running we’re talking about here. Ulanova originated the role of Juliet in the Prokofiev ballet, and it featured this famous run. Here Ulanova is running to Friar Lawrence’s cell in desperation. I believe she’s in her forties in this clip:

The post Running in ballet appeared first on The New Neo.

He was now breathing on his own, with his family and primary medical provider at his side, the spokesman said.

The illness is tied to a condition stemming from Giuliani’s experience as mayor during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Goodman added.

“On September 11th, Mayor Giuliani ran toward the towers to help those in need, which led to a restrictive airway disease diagnosis,” the spokesman said.

“This disease adds complications to any emerging respiratory issue, and the [pneumonia] virus quickly overwhelmed his body, requiring mechanical ventilation to maintain his blood pressure.”

The years since 2020 have been rough for the ex-mayor. His assertions about fraud in the 2020 elections, and a number of statements he made about election workers in Georgia, landed him in legal and financial trouble and also got him disbarred:

He has pleaded not guilty to state criminal charges against him related to the election subversion [editorializing; CNN] scheme in Arizona. Prosecutors dropped a similiar [spelling; CNN] case against Giuliani and others in Georgia last year. The two former Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, also obtained a $148 million defamation judgment against him for false allegations he made about them after the 2020 election.

He was disbarred in July 2024 in New York over his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.

I doubt that what’s been happening politically in New York City right now has added to Giuliani’s well-being.

Trump weighed in:

President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Giuliani is a “True Warrior and the Best Mayor in the History of New York City.”

“What a tragedy that he was treated so badly by the Radical Left Lunatics, Democrats ALL — AND HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING! They cheated on the Elections, fabricated hundreds of stories, did anything possible to destroy our Nation, and now, look at Rudy. So sad!” Trump said in a post Sunday.

Right about everything? No. But right about a lot of important things over the years I wish him well.

The post Rudy Giuliani is very ill with pneumonia appeared first on The New Neo.

But in all I’ve read on this, I haven’t seen anyone emphasize what’s so especially disingenuous about Carlson’s apology. As Churchill might say, he’s re-ratting. Remember this? It wasn’t so very long ago that the story came out, either; just three years (2023, prior to the 2024 election in which Tucker campaigned for Trump):

The latest filings in the case suggest Mr Carlson expressed his dislike of the outgoing US president two days before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to derail lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election win.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he wrote in a text sent on 4 January 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately,” he added.

Mr Carlson, the top-rated host on the conservative network, also appeared to denigrate the Trump presidency in these private messages, despite lauding his achievements on air.

“That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Fancy, fancy, FANCY that. And all that time, Tucker had been pretending to like Trump – and then later in 2024 he campaigned for him.

Have people forgotten this? I’m puzzled; why are so many taking his apology seriously? I can understand why the left would, because it suits their purposes. But the right? I remember the revelation of Tucker’s hatred for Trump while at Fox because it surprised me at the time, and I filed it away as “Tucker Carlson is not ever ever to be trusted.” We discovered then that all that time he’d been pretending to be for Trump he really wasn’t.

Then again, which was the actual pretense? Was he just pretending to like Trump while at Fox, or were the emails the pretense and he was just pretending to hate him when he wrote them? And then later, during the 2024 election, what was Tucker pretending? Was he just supporting Trump then in order to get supposed influence over Vance or Trump? Or had he changed his mind once more and liked Trump again?

And now what is Carlson pretending? One thing I don’t think he’s pretending now is his hatred of Jews and Israel. I think it’s very sincere. His brother Buckley is quite his equal in that, as well:

But here I am, writing about Carlson again. Why? First of all, I think that he’s a fascinating case. And secondly, although I also think he has less influence on the right than his traffic would indicate, and that he’s following trends as much as he’s creating them, I think it works in both directions and that he does indeed have some influence in spreading the hyper-Buchananesque word and that his message does find traction, especially with young men.

I’ve written several previous pieces on Tucker’s transformation (see this list). But I want to add one more event that might have fostered it: the death of his father in March of 2025. Dick Carlson was a strong and colorful figure with a life of achievement, but among other things he was a “Christian Zionist,” a group that Tucker said in November of 2025 that he “dislikes more than anybody” and which he called “a heresy” It may be that, with his father’s death, Tucker finally felt free to more fully reveal his sentiments about Christian Zionists and Israel and Jews.

The post Tucker Carlson’s apology for having supported Trump appeared first on The New Neo.

Next we have a photo that Trump playfully labeled “Two kings”:

TWO KINGS. ? pic.twitter.com/iPVUxc4i4H

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 28, 2026

Trump has a way of turning criticisms into humor in a clever jujutsu – although I doubt Democrats see it that way.

King Charles also gave Trump an appropriate gift:

King Charles III presented President Trump with the bell from a World War II-era British submarine — dubbed the HMS Trump — at the White House state dinner Tuesday, where the two leaders bonded over highs and lows of the centuries-long US-UK relationship.

The shiny brass bell bearing Trump’s name and 1944, the year the submarine left a UK shipyard, was part of a vessel that played “a critical role during the war in the Pacific,” according to the king.

“May it stand as a testimony to our nations’ shared history and shining future,” Charles said, describing the offering as his “personal gift.”

It would certainly be nice if Britain moved closer to the US, but it certainly hasn’t been happening in recent years.

I don’t envy Charles and Camilla, having to be photographed standing next to the tall Trump and statuesque Melania:

Trump actually looks surprisingly good in formal attire. But Charles has that sash, after all.

The post King Charles visits and some interesting things happen appeared first on The New Neo.

It’s not an accident that three of the four are Muslims, either born or partly raised abroad, and thought to be good-looking. For the first two their violence is winked at by their admirers (or in the case of Mangione, admired), and for the second their utterly stupid and destructive ideas are considered smart or at least trendy.

Hasan Piker is the most recent; all of a sudden I see his name and photo in a lot of places. Apparently Democrats are having an argument about whether to engage and embrace him or denounce him. In some ways, the Piker dilemma on the left is a bit like the Tucker dilemma on the right.

Like Mamdani (for whom he campaigned), Piker is 34 years old. Mamdani was born of Indian parents in Uganda and raised Muslim, coming to this country at the age of seven and raised in a wealthy family. Piker was born in New Brunswick, NJ, but grew up in Istanbul. There is no information on why he was born here but grew up there, but his mother had relatives in New Brunswick and it’s certainly possible that they were visiting the relatives and that Hasan was a so-called “anchor baby.” Not only do the two men share having grown up in significant wealth and yet becoming Communists, but each has an academic father (in Piker’s case, also a businessman) and an artistic mother – Mamdani’s mother being a successful film director and Piker’s being a professor of art and architectural history. Piker’s maternal uncle is the leftist TV commentator Cenk Uygur, who gave him his start in the communications field.

Piker is featured here in a fawningly giggly interview with the NY Times (the women in the middle is from the Times; the other woman is apparently a writer for The New Yorker):

A couple of comments at the video:

Nepo baby from a rich, oligarch Turkish family wants poor people to steal, but not from him.

Remember to buy his $90 plain white T-shirts from his online store.

We need to get this man’s address out. I bet he’s got some cool shit.

Piker also spoke up when United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered. This video is from even before Mangione was identified, but Piker presciently notes that the murderer (who is wearing a mask) is “hot” and is already being lauded and Thompson’s murder applauded. Piker himself walks a fine line, mentioning at the outset that the act is criminal, but then mocking and reviling Thompson and gleefully discussing how many people think Thompson deserved it (I’ve cued up about 10 minutes; it’s really quite a glimpse into the mind of today’s young leftists, as is the comment section):

I find this phenomenon very chilling – leftist chic. Nihilist chic.

And come to think of it, perhaps the first example – at least that I can recall – was Che Guevara, another good-looking rich kid playing with Communist fire (in his case not just with “mere words”) and sporting that oh-so-stylish black beret.

The post The latest leftist media fascination: Hasan Piker appeared first on The New Neo.

U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the Navy to attack any Iranian boats mining the Strait of Hormuz. His decree, issued on Truth Social, also claims the U.S. is currently demining the strategic waterway. His announcement comes hours after the U.S. boarded another Iranian-linked vessel in the Indian Ocean and a day after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) fired on at least three ships and seized two of them in the Strait.

I’ve been curious about this “seized two ships” business. My question is: says who? Well, to start with, says Iran:

Nour News, affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) opened fire on the first ship, which it called the Epaminodes, after it had “ignored the warnings of the Iranian armed forces”.

A second ship, named Euphoria, was then stopped after being “fired upon”, followed by the targeting of a third vessel, the MSC-Francesca, according to BBC Verify. …

IRGC Naval Command said both it and the Panama-flagged MSC-Francesca had been seized after endangering maritime security “by operating without the necessary permits and tampering with navigation systems”.

The two vessels will have their cargo and documents examined, it added in an announcement reported by Iranian state television. …

Four other vessels in the convoy have since crossed the strait, according to maritime data from Linerlytica. They appear to have turned off their transponders, which share a ship’s location, during the passage. …

Greece’s Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis later said he could not confirm that the Epaminondas had been detained.

He told CNN: “I can confirm that there was an attack against the Greek cargo ship, but I cannot confirm that this has been seized by the Iranians.”

Clear as mud.

And what of Iran’s Supreme Leader? This report might be credible, although it’s based on a NY Times story:

Mojtaba Khamenei remains seriously wounded, isolated and running the country under an unprecedented security umbrella.

Doctors at his side, senior officials at a distance
Access to the younger Khamenei is described as “extremely difficult and limited.” He is surrounded by a dedicated medical team that, unusually, also includes Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon by training, and the health minister. Commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and senior government officials are avoiding visiting him in person for fear that Israel could track their movements and eliminate the leader at his hiding place.

Khamenei’s physical condition is described as serious but stable. According to official Iranian sources who spoke to The New York Times, his leg has been operated on three times and he is awaiting a prosthesis. His hand was also operated on and is gradually regaining function. He is suffering from severe burns to his face and lips, making it difficult for him to speak. He is expected to undergo a series of plastic surgeries in the future. But despite the injuries, four senior Iranian officials said he is “mentally alert and involved in what is happening.”

Khamenei has refused to appear in video clips or audio recordings so as not to be seen by the public as “weak or vulnerable.” Communication with the leader is being conducted in an underground-style system: messages are passed only in handwritten form, signed and sealed in envelopes, through a chain of couriers traveling by car and motorcycle along side roads to the hideout. His instructions are returned the same way.

I think most of the other current leaders are laying pretty low, as well, after what happened to their predecessors.

The post Meanwhile, in Iran appeared first on The New Neo.

The Golden State’s Supreme Court blessed this position when, on April 15, it denied the conservative lawyer’s petition for review of the state bar’s yearslong disciplinary jihad against him and ordered him stripped of his license to practice law.

What was the nefarious behavior that this former Supreme Court clerk, university law school dean, and public interest litigator allegedly engaged in? Effectively, in the eyes of the bar and California’s highest court, his thoughtcrime, punishable with professional destruction, was “lawyering for MAGA.”

The whole article is worth reading. Eastman has been disbarred for giving legal advice on the 2020 election with which the left disagrees, but which certainly was based on solid grounds. The left doesn’t think the right is entitled to legal representation, however – or at the very least wants to make it extremely costly and to thus deter lawyers from taking those cases. This would destroy the entire basis for the adversarial legal system, of course. I hope that SCOTUS ultimately rules against this form of lawfare, which reached its height (so far) in something called “The 65 Project.”

I’ve written about Eastman many times before; you can see a list of the post links here. The term “travesty of justice” applies. I’ve also written about The 65 Project, which was set up by leftist lawyers to disbar any lawyer on the right who worked on challenges to the 2020 election: see this post, in which I quote Alan Dershowitz thusly :

Our system of justice is based on the John Adams standard: he too was attacked for defending the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, but his representation of these accused killers now serves as a symbol of the 6th Amendment right to counsel. That symbol has now been endangered by The 65 Project and others who are participating in its McCarthyite chilling of lawyers who have been asked to represent Trump and those associated with him.

In that post, I closed with this:

For decades, the left screeched about McCarthyism. They got a lot of mileage out of that, but in reality their main objection seems to have been that they were the targets rather than the ones behind the threats.

NOTE: Another post I wrote on The 65 Project can be found here.

The post California’s highest court has allowed the Eastman disbarment appeared first on The New Neo.

First, an interesting bit of background from Wiki:

Lindbergh’s father, a U.S. congressman from 1907 to 1917, was one of the few congressmen to oppose the entry of the U.S. into World War I.

I’m going to assume that his father had some influence on the formation of Lindbergh’s viewpoint about entering foreign wars

After the tragic kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh’s first child in in 1932, Lindbergh and his wife moved to Europe to try to recover. They visited Germany during the 1930s:

In July 1936, shortly before the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, American journalist William L. Shirer recorded in his diary: “The Lindberghs are here [in Berlin], and the Nazis, led by Göring, are making a great play for them.”

This 1936 visit was the first of several that Lindbergh made at the request of the U.S. military establishment between 1936 and 1938, with the goal of evaluating German aviation.

Lindbergh was aware of Kristallnacht when it happened:

“I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans”, he wrote. “It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult ‘Jewish problem’, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” Lindbergh had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938–39. He had provisionally found a house in Wannsee, but after Nazi friends discouraged him from leasing it because it had been formerly owned by Jews, it was recommended that he contact Albert Speer, who said he would build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted. On the advice of his close friend Alexis Carrel, he cancelled the trip. ….

So it seems he continued to be German-friendly, and although he disapproved of the Nazis’ violence against Jews his main problem with it seemed to have been that it was disorderly and beneath his high opinion of Germans. The Jews themselves were undoubtedly a problem, however.

More:

In 1938, the U.S. Air Attaché in Berlin invited Lindbergh to inspect the rising power of Nazi Germany’s Air Force. Impressed by German technology and the apparently large number of aircraft at their disposal and influenced by the staggering number of deaths from World War I, he opposed U.S. entry into the impending European conflict. In September 1938, he stated to the French cabinet that the Luftwaffe possessed 8,000 aircraft and could produce 1,500 per month. Although this was seven times the actual number determined by the Deuxième Bureau, it influenced France into trying to avoid conflict with Nazi Germany through the Munich Agreement. At the urging of U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, Lindbergh wrote a secret memo to the British warning that a military response by Britain and France to Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement would be disastrous; he claimed that France was militarily weak and Britain over-reliant on its navy. He urgently recommended that they strengthen their air power to force Hitler to redirect his aggression against “Asiatic Communism”.

Following Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Lindbergh opposed sending aid to countries under threat … He equated assistance with war profiteering: “To those who argue that we could make a profit and build up our own industry by selling munitions abroad, I reply that we in America have not yet reached a point where we wish to capitalize on the destruction and death of war”.

He reminds me somewhat of our current isolationists, and they even use the phrase that was used back then: “America First.”

In late 1940, Lindbergh became the spokesman of the isolationist America First Committee, soon speaking to overflow crowds at Madison Square Garden and Chicago’s Soldier Field, with millions listening by radio. He argued emphatically that America had no business attacking Germany. Lindbergh justified this stance in writings that were only published posthumously:

I was deeply concerned that the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.

He seems to have been so focused on the evil of the Soviets that he was blind to the evils of the Nazis. Was he merely naive? I think that was part of it, but still another part was his affinity for German culture and what he saw as German “order and intelligence.” Nor was he keen on Jews. But I think he was more a German sympathizer than an actual Nazi sympathizer, although he shared their emphasis on race.

One of Lindbergh’s worst acts was a speech he gave in September of 1941 (emphasis mine):

… for an America First rally at the Des Moines Coliseum that accused three groups of “pressing this country toward war; the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration”. He said that the British were propagandizing America because they could not defeat Nazi Germany without American aid and that the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to use a war to consolidate power. The three paragraphs Lindbergh devoted to accusing American Jews of war agitation formed what biographer A. Scott Berg called “the core of his thesis”. In the speech, Lindbergh said that Jewish Americans had outsized control over government and news media (even though Jews did not compose even 3% of newspaper publishers and were only a minority of foreign policy bureaucrats), employing recognizably antisemitic tropes. The speech received a strong public backlash as newspapers, politicians, and clergy throughout the country criticized America First and Lindbergh for his remarks’ antisemitism.

Sound familiar? It certainly does to me.

Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.”

Lindbergh also believed that Communism would destroy the West’s “racial strength.” However, after the war he was shocked by what was revealed to have occurred at Nazi concentration camps: “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?”

Once the US entered the war, Lindbergh did work for the Allied war effort. But he retained his admiration for Germany, later visiting often, having several long-term affairs with women there, and fathering children with those women.

There’s a great deal more about Lindbergh, but this is already so long that I’ll just end with this, which expands on the topic of his father’s influence:

Lindbergh was the son of a Progressive Republican congressman from Minnesota. His father, Charles August Lindbergh possessed Populist agrarian views prevalent in the Midwest and adamantly opposed the so-called “Money Trust,” an alleged de facto monopoly of powerful New York bankers, led by J.P. Morgan. The farmers the senior Lindbergh represented were wary of more cosmopolitan Americans, especially bankers from the east coast. They assumed bankers were to blame for the travails of Midwestern farmers and incorrectly assumed they were primarily Jewish. Many of Lindbergh Sr.’s constituents were xenophobic and often antisemitic. These were not uncommon themes throughout the country at the time.

Unfortunately, very similar attitudes have become more common again in our time.

The post Lindbergh and America First appeared first on The New Neo.