Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,091

This is the grave of George Neumayr.

Well, when you run across a grave like this in a cemetery, you snap a quick picture and figure you might find more about this person later. Information about Neumayr isn’t that complete. He was never big enough to get a Wikipedia page or for anyone important to notice when he died. But the Catholic World Report wrote their own and so I have some thoughts.

Born in 1972 in Northridge, California, George Neumayr was a far right Cathfash who loved to promote any right-wing conspiracy theory or other form of idiocy. He grew up in Thousand Oaks. He came out of the far right Catholic world. His father was the founder of Thomas Aquinas College, which is in Santa Paula, California and describes itself as a place dedicated to “Catholic orthodoxy.” His mother was an editor and the daughter of the British writer James Cameron. I assume that’s no relation to the director. Neumayr went to the University of San Francisco for college, where he embraced his parents’ ideology and worked for the school newspaper, writing essays about the glories of pre-Vatican II Catholicism and, one supposes, that Torquemada was correct. By this time, he was also writing for the National Catholic Register and got some kind of internship at the White House. I assume this was in the Bush administration, not Clinton.

There’s a whole Catholic version of the wingnut welfare train and Neumayr rode on it for his whole life. He edited a paper called the San Francisco Faith, got a job as op-ed editor of the Investor’s Business Daily, got onto the board of the California Political Review, and all of this of course led to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, that long-time home of right-wing sewer gas.

For whatever reason, he never really broke out of the right-wing fever dreams to get that big, but he was a frequent columnist and editor of the Catholic World Report from 2006-11. This rag, founded in 1991 by Joseph Fessio, is dedicated to hating any kind of change in the Catholic Church and society generally. This includes the horrors of Vatican II. This is the kind of publication that appeals to the authoritarian Catholic converts such as J.D. Vance, who see the Church in its idealized form as the kind of institution that should run America–top-down, patriarchal, distant from the masses, unquestioned rule. What I love about these far-right Catholic converts is that they are choosing their religion based upon their politics, which is the most Protestant move possible.

Basically, this guy is everything wrong with the Catholic Church in the 21st century and the exact reason why someone like Vance would join the church. I’m not really going to read this garbage. But let’s consider some of his fine, fine publications. Neumayr wrote a book with the finest person who ever existed–Phyllis Schlafly–in 2012 called No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom. Because you know Neumayr and Schlafly cared deeply about the religious freedom of everyone and not just far-right Catholics and evangelicals. Could never accuse people like this of being hypocrites!

In fact, Neumayr attacked Francis directly in The Political Left: How Pope Francis is Delighting the Liberal Left and Abandoning Conservatives, from 2017. That sounds nice. I always appreciate how right-wingers just use liberal and left as synonyms, which maybe could be a lesson to Democrats to quit just appealing to a vague middle since they are going to be attacked as being commies no matter what they do. He attacked Pope Francis in his previous book for not saying that Islam was inherently violent and evil and pointing out that Catholics had committed a lot of violence over the centuries too. Damn you Francis, you and your objectively correct facts! Then there’s his 2020 book The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or Democrats’ Crypto-Socialist? Oh, definitely the latter, totally. Crypto-socialist, these fucking people are amazing.

Now, I’d think a guy like this would have gotten more attention when he died and he really didn’t. But he was around. There’s an Alexander Cockburn book called End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate that mentions him because he was on some episode of the News Hour on PBS in which Neumayr used the opportunity to unload on how PBS was filled with liberal bias. Cockburn’s point is that this show, like all of the news shows, amplified the voices of idiots like Neumayr while having no one on the left or even a solid liberal to counter him.

Neumayr later was at The American Spectator, because of course he was. He was a frequent writer over there for years, though seemingly little publicly mourned when he died. Also, for some reason, despite not being a priest and being a Man of God, he never married. I’m sure there was nothing suspicious about that at all. Probably just never found a woman as Catholic as he was.

Neumayr died in a classic way: malaria. Wait, what? Who dies of malaria in 2023? I mean, sadly Africans do still die of this if they don’t receive treatment. It’s terrible. But a privileged white guy? For some reason, Neumayr was in the Ivory Coast. Supposedly he was “reporting” from there, though who knows what that really means. But he got sick. Then he got really sick. And he outright refused to see a doctor or go to a hospital. So he dropped dead at the age of 50.

George Neumayr is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery, Alexandria, Virginia.

I’m really glad I stumbled upon this asshole’s grave. You know, you watch the Trump administration and you think, I’m not going to outlive some of these people. That’s true, but you are going to outlive some of them and you will enjoy every one of their deaths, especially when they are something as stupid as from malaria. Maybe Stephen Miller has untreated tuberculosis. A man can dream.

If you would like this series to visit other right-wing windbags, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Phyllis Schlafly is in St. Louis. So is Rush Limbaugh. Friends, you should send me to St. Louis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.