Remember when singers just sang?
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Sadly, in these modern times, all entertainers have got to tell everyone their political views — even if they’re really old and retired years ago.
Enter Linda Ronstadt. She was a great singer in the 1970s and 1980s, eventually becoming the highest paid women in music. She retired in 2011 and, now 73 years old, suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, saying she “can no longer sing a note.”
But she’s back in the news, comparing President Trump to Adolf Hitler and his administration to Nazi Germany.
“It’s exactly the same,” Ronstadt said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “You find a common enemy for everybody to hate. I was sure that Trump was going to get elected the day he announced. And I said, “It’s going to be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews”.
“And sure enough, that’s what he delivered, you know?”
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The singer was on CNN to promote “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” a CNN documentary about her life. In a clip aired Monday, Cooper mentioned that she had read a lot about the Weimar Republic in Germany.
“Hitler rose to power; there were a lot of chances to stop him, and they didn’t speak out. And the industrial complex thought they could control him once they got him in office. And of course, he was not controllable. By the time he got established, he put his own people in place and stacked the courts and did what he had to do to consolidate his power. And, we got Hitler and he destroyed Germany, he destroyed centuries of intellectual history forward and backward,” she said.
Cooper said “a lot of people … would be surprised to hear comparisons between what happened then and now.” Ronstadt said: “If you read the history, you won’t be surprised.”
Ronstadt also said Trump’s election had hurt her family.
“Some of my family in Tucson are Republicans,” Ronstadt said. “And instead of talking about that, we would sing together, and we’d have a great time. Now, I have to be careful because we’ve had so much taken away from us by this administration that I’m not willing to let them take my family relationships away. My family — the parts that are Republican were fairly rational Republicans. We don’t have that in our current White House.’
