[Warning: Ronald Reagan, racism]
It’s been a sort of open question as to whether or not Ronald Reagan was really a racist, or perhaps just a soupçon racist.
Recent material from the archives has settled that issue:
That was 20 years before his diagnosis of Alzheimers. He sounds bright and sharp, like a hardened piece of shit. Nixon, you’ll notice walked by Reagan’s comment with a laugh. Nixon was known to get his racism on regarding a variety of targets. He was a piece of shit who, apparently never looked in the mirror and saw the drunk, dishonored, miserable war criminal looking back at him.
Maybe it’s time for a new meme, alongside “all cops are bastards” namely, “all politicians are pieces of shit.”
I know you all knew about Nixon and suspected about Reagan but now you can transition from “suspect” to “know.”
One of the problems with racism is that it encourages sad mediocrities like Reagan and Nixon to think that they are superior to anybody.
Unrelated: I’ve been a bit quiet the last week, but that is because I’m making an intense push on some buildy stuff and it’s taking a lot of my physical and mental energy. I’ll post some stuff about it when I feel ready, but for now I’m willing to say that the project is going well.
Cart? Horse?
If I were to attempt to make a serious case for the superiority of the white race, most white supremacists are not the examples I would choose.
Reginald Selkirk:
I will definitely be stealing that! 8-)
Nixon was a right bastard, but he also started the EPA and instituted agriculture policies that were very beneficial to family farmers. All of that is tarnished by Vietnam, watergate, and the Southern Strategy, but he wasn’t a completely self-absorbed bigot.
The other one is a mediocre actor who tried to classify ketchup and mustard in school lunches as vegetables. You might think that the GOOP would have learned it’s lesson with backing unqualified celebrities for elected office.
Jesse Ventura was another example of an actor getting elected to office, and proceeding to be an incompetent embarrassment. I think he is the reason Minnesota Republicans said hell no to tfg. They still haven’t recovered from that debacle.
Joking aside for a moment. By “white supremacy” I don’t see how it can be assessed in any terms other than political power. There is no inherent superiority (natural inequality) just social inequality, to steal Rousseau’s terms. In other words, white people are the biggest and most evil bastards.
@3
The lesson that it got them in power for 2 terms and there was no pushback?
No pushback? That’s quite a feat of selective memory if you managed to forget about hanging chads.
@6
Hanging chads? I fail to see how a bit of drama that contributed to the failure to prevent Bush Jr from becoming 43rd POTUS could be construed as pushback against the 40th. Although it does work in the opposite direction as yet more evidence that if they’re prepared to break or bend all the rules it usually only benefits them.
Like all actors, Reagan had skill at saying the words written for him on a script. If I heard something from a phone call compared to his public speeches who we know who wrote them she’s still alive and is still blithering in print, I’d take the phone call as evidence first. It’s peculiar that the reporter and the texas historian only weakly alluded to this and the other one just assumed you knew.
The restrictive gun laws in the State of California were written *by the NRA* and adopted pretty much as-written by our legislature because African-Americans were acting (sensibly and reasonably) as if also the laws allowing Californians to own and carry guns in public also applied to them also (and that black lives mattered also, repetition of ‘also’ intentional).
It is in my living memory before these laws of seeing folks carrying guns in public. You had to keep the flap buckled completely, or the snap snapped shut, or if you were black or brown you had better have both features on your holster and use both because the cops would lie about ‘brandishing’. You could also hold vietnam-era rifles as long as they were withing fifteen degrees of vertical (or ninety degrees exactly if you were brown or black, natch). Everybody thought these folks were weird, and my parents warned me to stay away from them, but nobody thought anything else about it before then.
Ronald Reagan was supportive of these restrictive laws. The words he said are the words being said today, in a way that would not be acceptable today by Republicans. The motivation IMO? Melanin.
Reagan was an unmitigated shitshow. Every president has to do some good and bad things. Just look at the US federal holiday coming up on Monday. Trump did that because someone sold him on the idea that a Juneteenth holiday would appeal to some voters. He was a bit simple, so it’s clear he was hoping the holiday would make people forget his open support of white supremacists.
Nixon, though… He was kind of next level. I think you probably have to add “traitor” to his list. Negotiating with foreign powers against the US goverment to extend a war the US is trying to end is one of the few things that definitely makes you a traitor to the US. And while I remember hearing Nixon was surprisingly competent and effective in some areas, he completely bungled his original plan of getting the US out of Vietnam once he was in power.
Fortunately this happened decades ago so there’s no major political faction trying to tell us all that the inept self-dealing betrayals of this former president in his bid to steal power somehow makes him the One True Patriot.
Correction: Got the Trump thing wrong. Apparently that was Biden with the Juneteenth holiday and my memory failed me. Trump did… something useful? I think? I can’t remember what. Maybe getting out of Afghanistan, although I don’t think that was what I was thinking of because he made that more costly than it had to be for everyone.
It’ll come to me someday. Mostly I remember Trump, Reagan and what I learned about Nixon (he was before my time) as abject failures who did their level best to cause the pointless deaths of as many Americans as possible. I don’t think the AIDS epidemic or Vietnam measure up to the cost of covid denial though, so Trump wins among the failures. Which sadly seems like something that might make him happy.