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Ronald Reagan called Medicare & Medicaid dangerous socialism in 1961... he was a right winger of the Barry Goldwater variety, not the warm and fuzzy presidential muppet he has become in his canonization by the 1980s Alex P. Keatons in the commentariat.
Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, just 16 years after Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were lynched there, 17 years after Medgar Evers' slaying and 12 years after Dr. King's assassination.
He did it send a message to white voters, not different from the message Donald Trump sent. He was letting white people who were resentful of civil rights advances know whose side he was on, further codifying the GOP as America's white interests party. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/19/ronald-reagan-philadelphia-miss-donald-trump-tulsa-pattern-racially-divisive-politics/
Reagan gutted what was left of the Great Society to shovel tax cuts into the pockets of the super rich. (My mother's federal job was deleted by his first presidential budget, though my absentee father was a big Reagan fan. Needless to say they divorced). https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/10/us/reagan-blames-great-society-for-economic-woes.html
Reagan tried to ignore the AIDS pandemic which killed more people than Trump's COVID pandemic has. He just didn't give it the time of day, even though at the time, it was something seemingly everyone thought about, talked about and was terrified of. https://www.history.com/news/aids-epidemic-ronald-reagan
I will never forget in 6th grade people refusing to share milk at lunch because the myth was you could "get AIDS" from letting someone drink from your carton. Or years later seeing people in NYC who looked like zombies, who were clearly dying of AIDS.
Reagan seemed to have almost no reaction to that until 1985 -- about five years in. The administration even seemed to have great fun with dismissing it (with nuff respect to persistent journalist Lester Kinsolving).
Reagan sold arms to Iran to fund an illegal war in Central America being waged by a drug dealing cartel/insurgent group called the Contras against the presumably communist Nicaraguan Sandinista government. And he should have been impeached for it.
And to get his little anti-commie war, he let Central American crack flood America's poor and particularly Black communities so he -- the man who invented the fraudulent, racist meme of the "welfare queen," could lock hundreds of thousands of us up.
Reagan was belittling Black women long before Donald Trump was even a thing... https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen
And yeah, he gave one good speech written by a rich white lady who hates Kamala's laugh. But only after screwups at NASA under his administration cost 7 brave astronauts, including the first teacher in space, their lives.
So forgive me if I pass on the Reagan encomiums. He was just Trump with better hair, better breeding and a sense of humor. He even coined the term, "make America great again."
