The Plot Against America First,
Part One: Charles Lindbergh

4,218 words

HBO has begun to air a new miniseries, The Plot Against America, an adaptation of the execrable eponymous Philip Roth novel. The series depicts an alternate reality, one in which aviation hero Charles Lindbergh ran for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1940 and defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The series, as will be detailed, is a polemical vehicle for its Jewish showrunner, just as the novel was for its Jewish author, to denigrate traditional (read: White) America as a hotbed of latent fascism and to attack Whites as unthinking savages simply waiting for an excuse to initiate a pogrom. The tired phrase underlying every scene of the sophomoric series is that “it could happen here.”

As is evidenced by the very existence of The Plot Against America, to this day there remains a Mark of the Beast seared upon the America First Committee and Lindbergh, its most powerful orator. Lindbergh became the personification of America First, of nationalist noninterventionism; as such, the forces of internationalism, the precursors of ascendant neoconservatism, devoted themselves to destroying him. They succeeded in forever casting a funeral pall over his name and discrediting the very idea of placing our nation first above all others. The defeat of Lindbergh was the defeat of American nationalism and the Old Right, the death knell for any American Right, continuing even now, almost eighty years later. [1] We can only imagine what could have been had America First won the day, had Lindbergh been heard, had we never embarked on the path to Hell.

The tragedy of America First illustrates a template most of us are familiar with, including a malevolent and slanderous press slithering under the banner of “democracy,” a compromised government insatiable for its own power, and the extreme lengths to which our Enemy will go to ruin us. The abuse that Lindbergh was subjected to presents rich discussion for the Dissident Right today; was Lindbergh’s public statement on the Jewish Question truly a political blunder in the hearts of the American people, or was it made so by Jewish media and governmental manipulation? Depending on that answer, we must have a serious conversation about how we can go about introducing the general public to Jewish power and its pernicious effects on our people. It is imperative that we begin to speak more openly about this, the most important issue of our time, if we are to survive. But how can we begin to do so? Only the fringes of the far Left and Right dare to assail Jewish power, as do some of our other enemies. It seems to me that the best thing that we can do to further our cause is to work on mainstream “conservatives”; one wedge we can use is to expose the fundamentally anti-Christian nature of Judaism. In this vein, I will in the near future release an exposé of Jewish hostility toward Christianity, as well as a theological refutation of Christian Zionism.

You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here.

The Plot Against America is yet further evidence that our ruling class maintains a vested interest in ensuring that we always remember World War Two as the Manichaean struggle of Good against Evil that it was sold as all of those years ago. Those who come close to exposing the truth about the grotesque atrocity that was imposed upon our people wrapped in the American flag pay a heavy price, as Lindbergh, General George Patton [2], and Senator Joseph McCarthy each discovered. More recently, the indispensable historian David Irving has had a Job-like experience. In Irving’s own words, for daring to write the truth, “I have had my home smashed into by thugs, my family terrorized, my name smeared, my printers firebombed, and myself arrested and deported by tiny, democratic Austria. . . at the behest of disaffected academics and influential citizens, in subsequent years, I was deported from Canada. . . and refused entry to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa, and other civilized countries around the world.” [3]

Why is it so important to perpetuate the fog of false patriotism that obscures the reality of the war? Perhaps it is because “the two wars between 1914 and 1945 may be seen as the Great Civil War of the West, the Thirty Years War of Western Civilization that culminated in the loss of all the Western empires and the ultimate conquest of the West by the liberated peoples of their former colonies.” [4] World War Two was used by the newly ascendant ruling class to cast moral doubt upon the notion of White nationalism and White identity altogether; Hitler’s Germany was reconfigured as nationalism, not gone haywire, but rather fully realized, as the logical consequence of having any national ethnic identity. To prevent “the Holocaust” [5] from ever happening again, the people of the West were told that their identities had to be abolished. [6] Thus were the foundations laid for the Egalitarian Regime. [7]

Before we examine The Plot Against America, we will examine the history of Charles Lindbergh, the America First Committee, and just how it is that we came to be engaged in the most devastating war in human history. In other words, we will examine the real plot: the plot against America First. Note that I use the term “noninterventionism,” and that “isolationism” will not be used, as it is purely a pejorative term of negation, inherently implying that the natural state of man is international “togetherness” and “interdependence.” One online thesaurus tells us that the synonyms of “isolationism” are “alienation,” “apathy,” “callousness,” “disdain,” “inattention,” “indifference,” “inertia,” “insensitivity,” “negligence,” and so forth. The proffered antonyms are words such as “attention,” “caring,” “compassion,” “esteem,” “respect,” and “sympathy.” As Joseph Sobran put it, “isolationism” is “an abusive term that has helped the American people forget the principles of the Founders’ warnings against foreign entanglements. . . It’s interesting that the only isolationists on earth are Americans. When Russia pulls its military forces out of other countries, nobody worries that the Russians are becoming isolationist or forsaking their global responsibilities. Foreign countries are not supposed to assert their power beyond their own borders. That’s strictly an American prerogative. Presumably, it’s our way of ‘serving’ mankind.” We are expected to waste ourselves for Jewish-defined “American interests,” but never are we to look after our true interests- those of our people.

Charles Lindbergh

Charles Augustus Lindbergh [8] was, and remains, the personification of the America First Committee [9] and the larger struggle of noninterventionism against American entry into World War Two. He was the central figure in this movement because he had ascended to the status of American hero. In 1927, he had made aviation history by becoming the first man to complete a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, flying from New York to Paris in his Spirit of St. Louis. Upon his arrival in Paris, he was greeted by a crowd of over one hundred thousand people; a steamer provided by President Coolidge transported him back to America, where he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and Congressional Medal of Honor. He was awarded a commission as a colonel in the Air Corps Reserve, and treated to a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan that was attended by four million people. Lindbergh’s fame exacted an unfathomable toll. In 1932, his eighteen-month-old son was abducted and murdered. Lindbergh’s mutual hatred with the “lies and insults of the press” was made permanent when ‘reporters’ broke into the morgue to photograph the infant’s corpse. His wife, Anne, remarked, “If it were not for the publicity that surrounds us, we might still have him.”

Lindbergh as a boy with his father.

Lindbergh’s great passion was for aviation, and was supremely impressed the incredible alacrity with which Adolf Hitler had rebuilt Germany and its air power, as a phoenix risen from the ashes of Versailles. He admired Hitler as, while by no means perfect, “undoubtedly a great man [who] has done much for the German people. He is a fanatic in many ways. . . [but] has accomplished results which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism. . . moderation is possible only with an already established strength.” He saw that Hitler had the overwhelming support of the German people, and felt in Germany, the most “virile” nation in Europe, “a sense of decency and value which in many ways is far ahead of our own. . . among the headlines of murder, rape, and divorce on the billboards of London.” In October 1938, at a dinner at the American Embassy held in his honor, Lindbergh was presented with the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle with the Star. Field Marshal Hermann Göring, “in the name of the Führer,” gave him the high civilian medal for his services to aviation.

The lying American press, increasingly in proportion to Lindbergh’s noninterventionist activities, lambasted him for accepting the medal. Because of an unconveyed message, none of the Americans at the dinner knew that the award was to be presented; even had they known, however, declining the medal would have made for an international incident. Later, in a 1941 address to a Zionist meeting, President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, called Lindbergh the “Knight of the German Eagle” who had accepted the “decoration at the hands of a brutal dictator who with that same hand is robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beings.” In response, Lindbergh wrote an open letter to Roosevelt, in which he reminded the Administration that the medal had been received at the Embassy and in the presence of Roosevelt’s Ambassador. He requested an apology which was never given. Years later, Lindbergh wrote that even “had there been no decoration, they would have found something else,” and that as such, he would take “exactly the same course again” even if he had foreseen “all the wartime hysteria and propaganda that lay ahead.” He “didn’t give a damn” about the spurious attacks on him, and neither desired nor respected the press. He “preferred its enmity,” as “it would be necessary to sell my character if I wished to maintain the friendship of modern journalism.”

As the clouds of war began to gather, Lindbergh utilized as many of his influential contacts as possible to advocate against war. He was a Cassandra; history has vindicated him as remarkably prescient. He saw that German military superiority made Great Britain and France lost causes, but beyond this, he knew that “no one can win anything worth having. The best blood of Europe will be dead when it is over.” He clearly saw the war as “a fratricidal struggle” not for democracy, but for “the balance of power. . . brought about by the desire for strength on the part of Germany and the fear of strength on the part of England and France.” He warned that it was a war “among a dominant people for power, blind, insatiable, suicidal. . . a war likely to be more prostrating than any in the past, a war in which the White race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain, a war which may easily lead our civilization through more Dark Ages if it survives at all.” [10] He was a realist, recognizing that neither side had “a monopoly of right,” and stated plainly that the war would “reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization.” He advocated that European nations rebuild their “White ramparts” as the “guardians of our common heritage” in order to avoid “racial suicide by internal conflict.”

He foresaw the war as the tragedy that it would be, and understood that America’s “bond with Europe is a bond of race and not of political ideology.” Lindbergh knew that we “can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” He saw that, to use T. Lothrop Stoddard’s term, “the rising tide of color” was the actual long-term threat that Whites should array themselves against. He believed that “a man should be proud of his race,” and that “each race must protect its own security territorially and otherwise.” Quoting H.A.L. Fisher, Lindbergh said that “we know a European when we see one.” He “did not want to see American bombers dropping bombs which will kill and mutilate European children, even if they are not flown by American pilots.” He accurately predicted that victory on either side would “result in prostration in Europe such as we have never seen.”

Lindbergh was doubly prescient in his apprehension of the Red Menace, seeing that Russia would be the only winner. In a meeting with David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War One, Lindbergh was taken aback by the man’s description of the war as a defense of “the prestige of democracy,” as well as by the man’s obtuse conflation of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Lindbergh replied that he “did not see how democratic prestige would gain much from an unsuccessful war,” and later wrote that Lloyd George did not “seem to recognize any difference. . . between an alliance with European Germany and Asiatic Russia.” Lindbergh knew that “a war now might easily result in the loss of European civilization [and] Communism running over Europe and, judging by Russia, anything seems preferable.” After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, clamoring interventionists suddenly found common cause with Communism. Lindbergh was disgusted that “the murderers and plunderers of yesterday are accepted as the valiant defenders of civilization today; and the valiant defenders of yesterday have become the wicked aggressors of today. . . the idealists who have been shouting against the horrors of Nazi Germany, are now ready to welcome Soviet Russia as an ally. . . ready to join with a nation whose record of cruelty, bloodshed, and barbarism is without parallel in human history.” He courageously asserted time and again that “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself. . . even with Germany. . . than with the. . . godlessness. . . that exist[s] in the Soviet Union” and that “a Russian-dominated Europe would. . . be far worse than a German-dominated Europe.”

In his home country, Lindbergh devoted himself to noninterventionism. He began his twenty-seven-month-long campaign against American participation in the war on September 15, 1939, with a radio broadcast. Prior to the broadcast, the Roosevelt Administration offered to create the Cabinet position of Secretary of Air and to give the position to Lindbergh, provided that he cancel his broadcast and agree to never speak publicly against their foreign policy. The aviator, principled man that he was, declined. He recalled the only time that he had met Roosevelt, the previous April; he had found that “there was something about him he did not trust. . . like talking to a person wearing a mask.” With Lindbergh’s reputation as a national hero, it was not long before the America First Committee approached him.

America First

The America First Committee was officially formed in September 1940. It had grown out of a loose association founded by R. Douglas Stuart, a Yale Law student and the son of the first vice president of Quaker Oats. The organization had its inception in a circulated petition which stated: “We. . . believe that the United States must now concentrate all its energies on building a strong defense for this hemisphere. We believe that today our American democracy can only be preserved by keeping out of war abroad. We. . . insist on nonintervention in Europe. Even if Great Britain is on the verge of defeat, we demand that Congress refrain from war.” As the group gained strength, it gathered the support of many luminaries, such as: General Robert Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck, and Company; U.S. Senators Robert La Follette, Gerald Nye, and Burton Wheeler; future Governor Chester Bowles; future U.S. Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup; writers John Flynn and Kathleen Norris; actress Lillian Gish; publishers Colonel Robert McCormick and William Regnery; executives of Whiting, Hormel, and Morton Salt; future Presidents Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy; and many more, including architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

America First was the only major noninterventionist pressure group; by the time that Pearl Harbor was attacked, the organization had four hundred and fifty chapters across the nation, with more than eight hundred thousand members.

Its principles:

1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.
2. No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America.
3. American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European wars.
4. “Aid short of war” weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.
5. [Added June 1941] The Committee advocates a national advisory referendum on the issue of peace or war.

Its activities:

1. To bring together all Americans, regardless of political differences on other matters, who see eye-to-eye on these principles. (This does not include Nazists [sic], Fascists, Communists, or members of other groups that place the interest of any other nation above those of our own country.)
2. To urge Americans to keep their heads amid rising hysteria in times of crisis.
3. To provide sane national leadership for the majority of the American people who want to keep out of the European wars.
4. To register this opinion with the President and with Congress.
   

   An America First rally.

Committee spokesmen echoed many of Lindbergh’s thoughts, asserting that Great Britain was fighting a war for the maintenance of its own empire, “to perpetuate its hold upon Asia,” not for democracy, and that recurring European wars were not America’s to police. They feared the erosion of liberty at home and the ruinous spread of Communism, far more dangerous than National Socialism, abroad. They predicted the devastation that would be wrought in Europe, and “were convinced that even a successful American intervention would be more disastrous for the United States and the whole world than a British defeat.” They recognized that England was not our “first line of defense” and sardonically emphasized that “Britain would fight to the last drop of American blood.” They denied that American intervention was inevitable, insisting that our own country must take precedence over all else. The Committee saw the Orwellian “aid short of war” precisely for what it was, incremental steps directly to war. Senator Wheeler referred to Roosevelt’s foreign policy as “the New Deal’s triple ‘A’. . . it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Flynn asked if Americans were to die “to make Europe safe for Communism.” After Roosevelt’s repeal of key provisions of the Neutrality Act, Flynn noted that “this is a plan to stick our neck out in the hope that someone will hack at it.” Wood referred to the move as the issuance of “an engraved drowning license to American seamen.”

America First offered Lindbergh the position of chairman, but he declined, instead choosing to join the national Committee. He was far and away the Committee’s most effective speaker, consistently addressing overflow crowds of tens of thousands of people who honored him with thunderous, minutes-long ovations. He had been impelled to take a stand for his country because he understood that “the future of the human world hangs in the balance today. This war will change all of our lives.” He understood that “The only way our American life and ideals can be preserved is by staying out of this war. . . the only way European civilization can be saved is by ending [the war] quickly.” He said, “I do not intend to stand by and see this country pushed into war if it is not absolutely essential to the future welfare of the nation. Much as I dislike taking part in politics and public life, I intend to do so if necessary.” He did not believe in isolation, but rather in “an independent destiny for America,” where “soldiers will not have to fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours.” He described noninterventionism as “a policy not of isolation, but of independence; not of defeat, but of courage.” Lindbergh declared that it was “not. . . within our power to control the wars, or to solve the problems that have existed in Europe since European history began. . . our participation in this war would simply add to bloodshed and prostration in Europe, and bring confusion to our own country. . . we in America do not have to depend upon any foreign country for our security and welfare.” The real defeatist, he said, so frequently tarred with that name himself, “is the man who says that this nation cannot survive alone.”

He asked whether we should sell our “birthright for the mess of pottage that is offered us in Europe and Asia today; or shall we preserve for our children the free and independent heritage that our forefathers passed on to us?” He asked, “Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we. . . guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?” Our security, Lindbergh recognized, “does not lie in fighting European wars. It lies in our own internal strength, in the character of the American people and of American institutions.” He noted, “There are many of us who believe that the place to save democracy is right here in America. We do not accept the claim that Christianity will thrive on famine, or that our way of life can be spread around the world by force. We believe that it is possible for a man or a nation to be self-reliant.”

In one of his final America First addresses, Lindbergh laid out his mission:

I have no motive in mind other than the welfare of my country and my civilization. This is not a life that I enjoy. Speaking is not my vocation, and political life is not my ambition. . . I have given up my normal life and interests. . . because I believe my country is in mortal danger, and because I could not stand by and see her going to destruction without pitting everything I had against that trend. . . I shall continue to try, as long as it is possible, to give you the truth without prejudice and without passion.

He was partially motivated by the knowledge of what had become of our participation in World War One, which “demonstrated the fallacy of sending American soldiers to European battlefields.” Americans were still smarting from the unpaid debts and unfulfilled commitments that the European powers had made, and the deceit with which Wilson had maneuvered them into war.

In the approach of that war, Lindbergh recalled, we “listened to politicians and idealists calling upon the people for war, with hardly a thought of how that war is to be fought or won. We left the future of the world in the hands of our college presidents and our idealists [who] themselves seem to be about all we fought for in the last war that remains intact.”

Lindbergh’s father had been a formative influence on his philosophy. The senior Lindbergh was a U.S. Representative for Minnesota, an agrarian populist who bitterly opposed our intervention into that European “war to end all wars.” This agrarian strain was passed on to Lindbergh:

The spiritual decline which seems invariably to accompany an industrial life. . . How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?

For the three years leading to our plunge into war, Lindbergh’s father publicly denounced the Money Trust and Wall Street interests agitating for war, just as his son would when he warned that “there are interests in America who would rather lose American lives than their own dollars.” Much like his son would be almost thirty years later, the Congressman was subjected to extreme abuse; as Lindbergh would recall, “his meetings were broken up, his patriotism was questioned, and the plates of his book were destroyed by government agents.” He was defeated in a 1916 Senate bid, and never again won office, his image permanently tarnished.

Notes

[1] Raimondo, Justin. Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008); Gottfried, Paul E. Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Gottfried, Paul, & Spencer, Richard. (Eds.) The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement (Washington Summit, 2015).

[2] Wilcox, Robert K. Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (Regnery, 2008).

[3] Irving, David. Hitler’s War (Focal Point, 2002).

[4] Buchanan, Patrick. Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War (Crown, 2008).

[5] Dalton, Thomas. Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides (Castle Hill, 2020).

[6] Reno, R.R. Return of the Strong Gods (Gateway, 2019).

[7] Caldwell, Christopher. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

[8] Cole, Wayne S. Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). Note: All Lindbergh information and quotes, unless otherwise cited, come from this source.

[9] Cole, Wayne S. America First: The Battle Against Intervention (Octagon, 1971). Note: All America First Committee information and quotes, unless otherwise cited, come from this source.

[10] MacDonald, Kevin. The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1st Book Library, 2002).