Ronald Reagan Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Lazy racism

“welfare queens”

There is a lazy racism that takes place in the United States in periods of plenty, but especially in periods of difficulty. The poster above is from postbellum America, almost certainly during the term of President Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), at war with the so-called “Radical” Republicans in Congress.

Redlining started in the 1930s or earlier and continued in post-World War II America, when many black veterans couldn’t take full advantage of the GI Bill.

A recent example, as laid out by Renée Graham in the Boston Globe (paywall likely) in early November 2025, about how FOTUS’s “government shutdown is fueling anti-Black propaganda.”

The subhead: “Under the boot of an administration that would rather foment racism than end its manufactured crisis, the authoritarian president is willing to let millions of real people — regardless of race — starve.”

Early in the shutdown, “social media was suddenly inundated with AI slop, videos generated by artificial intelligence, depicting Black people complaining about the loss of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

“Of course, the short clips on TikTok and Instagram evoked the ‘welfare queen’ stereotypes that Ronald Reagan first conjured nearly 50 years ago during his first race-baiting run for president in 1976.”

“A Fox News contributor… showed a slew of AI slop… introduced by saying that the clips would show ‘exactly why the welfare system needs to be completely overhauled because the entitlement in these videos … is certifiably insane.'”

The influencer “either didn’t know — or didn’t care — that some of the videos… are phony… The clips served their intended purpose of villainizing Black people, particularly Black women, as lazy, greedy, duplicitous, and a burden to hard-working and honest (white) Americans.” The misogynoir is strong.

“Them”

Then there’s this story from the same time period about “a viral chart [that] claimed to show the majority of the nation’s food stamp recipients are non-white and noncitizens.

“The chart, titled Food Stamps by Ethnicity, listed 36 groups of people and said it showed the “percentage of US households receiving SNAP benefits.”

However, according to “the most recent USDA data available, from 2023, white people are the largest racial group receiving SNAP benefits, at 35.4 percent. African Americans are next, making up 25.7 percent of recipients, then Hispanic people at 15.6 percent, Asian people at 3.9 percent, Native Americans at 1.3 percent, and multiracial people at 1 percent. The race of 17 percent of participants is unknown.”

“The same report found that 89.4 percent of SNAP recipients were U.S.-born citizens, meaning less than 11 percent of SNAP participants were foreign-born. Of the latter figure, 6.2 percent were naturalised citizens, 1.1 percent were refugees, and 3.3 percent were other noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents and other eligible noncitizens.”

In periods of stress, blaming the “other” for the difficulties seems to be the fallback position.

Power

Read Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It. “In a perverse kind of trickle-down racism, his attack on Black Lives Matter became a permission structure for increased on-the-ground bigotry. White influencers proudly wore blackface for Halloween. Politico exposed a Young Republicans’ chat where they gleefully traded racist comments.

“Black comedian W. Kamau Bell has painted a portrait of a right-wing shift in standup performances in which anti-trans jokes and anti-Black slurs have become commonplace. This is not a series of isolated events: FBI statistics on anti-Black hate crime, consistently the most common form of hate crime, spiked during his two terms.”

Ronald Reagan and “Are we doomed?”

American exceptionalism?

9-28-1982 President Reagan speaking at the podium at his 13th Press Conference in the East Room

Kelly Sedinger had two somewhat related questions.

I’ve come to believe very strongly that the election of Ronald Reagan is the inflection point whereupon everything went in the wrong direction. Thoughts?

Ronald Reagan is one of the most beloved Presidents ever. He regularly appears in the Top 10 lists of best Presidents.

This one, e.g., quotes a scholar who wrote about the Gipper “winning the Cold War, restoring American economic prosperity rooted in Judeo-Christian values, and optimism about America’s exceptionalism… He understood a) what the Soviet threat was about, b) what we needed to do to defeat it, and he left Bill Clinton a very strong hand. In many ways, we’ve been living off borrowed military capital of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, when he inherited a military in disarray.”

However…

Yet, I think Kelly is mostly right. Every economic survey I’ve seen has shown that the disparity in the pay ratio between CEOs and employees began in earnest during his administration, thanks to tax cuts for the rich. The cliche that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is largely true.

These measures also added to the debt. As a percentage, the debt went up more under Reagan than any other 20th or 21st-century President save for the war Presidents Wilson and FDR, and the latter, who served over three terms, was also dealing with the Great Depression.

The New York Times review of The New Jim Crow, which I quoted : “The book marshals pages of statistics and legal citations to argue that the get-tough approach to crime that began in the Nixon administration and intensified with Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs has devastated black America.”

Reagan’s response to the AIDS epidemic before 1987 was notoriously awful.

30 March 1981

I’ve long believed that the success of Ronald Reagan in getting his legislative agenda passed in 1981 was partly due to surviving an assassination attempt. And with humor, no less: “Honey, I forgot to duck,” cribbed from boxer Jack Dempsey’s line to his wife the night he was beaten by Gene Tunney in 1926.

The Guardian article concurs. “Such displays of wit and courage under fire helped humanise Reagan and deliver a political boost that shaped his presidency. ‘His personal style of leadership endeared him to people on both sides of the aisle not only in Congress, but around the country… “I think the president and his team were smart enough to realise that here was an opportunity for his brand to demonstrate leadership and put forth ideas that he always believed in but now would perhaps have a greater chance of enacting because of his popularity.'”

During a Presidential debate in 1984, when asked if, at 73, he was too old to be President. Reagan replied, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Walter Mondale, his Democratic opponent, laughed.

Communicator

As much as I despised his policies, I understood his appeal. He was an actor, after all, and could call on a line in the script to respond to many situations.

On Quora, a guy named Jonathan Kurtzman learned from Reagan’s staff “how he prepared his speeches… He’d switch words to fit his voice, but then the secret was that he’d read the speech with a pencil and he’d underline each phrase so the words fit his natural breath, his natural cadence, and the emphasis he wanted. An old professional acting trick.

At the time, I wished he were a king with no Constitutional responsibilities at the time. He could go out and give those rah-rah speeches.

Reagan’s terms showed one inflection point. But at least he was still communicating regularly with House Speaker Tip O’Neill.

We fell off the cliff after 1994 and sleazy Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America. Oops, it was the Contract WITH America. It is an easy mistake for me to make. It’s strange, too, because President Bill Clinton was largely a fiscal conservative.

On balance

Scale of 1-10, with 1 being “We are doomed” and 10 being “We’ll get through this and we’ll be better for it”, how do you feel about America right now?

I’ll give us a 2. The greatest issue is climate change, which will screw up everything from food supply to transportation to the inability of homeowners to get affordable insurance for their properties.

The US is becoming a ‘developing country’ on global rankings that measure democracy and inequality. U.S. Education Rankings Are Falling Behind the Rest of the World. We’re not among the 10 Countries With the Best Public Health Systems. Or the top 20. There’s so much more that I’d become depressed if I delved any further.

Yakkity yak

Meanwhile, listening to many of the 2024 Republican candidates who waffle about whether the actions of djt before and after the 2020 election were illegal and immoral is very disheartening. And watching tainted dudes like Gym Jordan and Matt Gaetz grilling Attorney General Merritt Garland would have been laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

You don’t need me to note that the information Americans take in is so fractured that we often operate in different realities. More worrisome, “death threats have become rampant as MAGA culture twists norms and makes once-marginal forms of violence mainstream.”

So why 2 instead of 1? Irrational optimism? Believing that there are enough people who believe in the American promise to turn things around? Yeah, probably. When one is a person of faith, you hope. Maybe it’s like rooting for the Yankees, Red Sox, or Mets, all of whom sucked in 2023. Maybe next year. Or not.

I’ll address all of Kelly’s other queries soon.

Nobody claim 2022 as “your year”

please don’t suck

2022 as A friend of mine posted this graphic on their Facebook feed. Nobody claim 2022 as “your year”. And I get it.

I got to sing in my church’s Christmas Eve service for the first time in two years, which was great. Now, I felt rusty but that was OK. In 2020, the church had audio and video of the choir’s prior performances shown on the Facebook feed. Listening to the sounds of our voices was OK; I’d been doing so almost every week for months of the regular service. but watching the film of me, and others, singing made me EXTREMELY melancholy.

The Boston Globe readers commented on the past year. The intro: “If 2020 felt like a year like no other, then 2021 felt like more of the same. One step forward and two steps back, or vice versa? It depended on the day. We saw vaccines rolled out, then resisted. Bitter partisanship kept its grip on our politics.”

I love the word hegemony

If I read this article, The Respite Is Coming to an End. “All around us we can see the forces of white nationalist authoritarianism engaged in a second, far more methodical, far better coordinated, and already more successful attempt to do what they failed to do on January 6, 2021. If matters continue on this path, the Biden administration will prove only a brief respite before those forces snuff out the grand American experiment and secure a permanent, counter-majoritarian chokehold on the erstwhile republic.” And it’s a compelling argument.

And Foreign Affairs had a piece, The Real Crisis of Global Order. Illiberalism on the Rise. It addresses, among other things, the collapse of US hegemony, which Trump’s election helped to create and Biden’s election almost certainly can’t fix. For instance, as the Daily Show illustrated, Why China Is in Africa.

Rodgers and Hammerstein

I’m already exhausted from 2022, like Sinatra or Gordon MacRae singing Soliloquy from Carousel, musing what “my boy Bill” will be like. “Say, why am I carrying on like this? My kid ain’t even been born yet.” And neither has 2022. Well, maybe in New Zealand.

Perhaps I need more humour and a stiff upper lip, like Queen Elizabeth who lost her husband, Prince Philip, in 2021, who she’d only been married to since 1947, before I was born.

So I’m going to decide that 2022 will be great! Of course, I will also retreat to the ‘trust but verify” position about the new year, which is a quote Ronald Reagan cleverly pilfered.

What IS racist, anyway?

a long history of bigotry

Richard Nixon.Ronald Reagan ITEM: – I ~~suggested~~ stated clearly that I thought a certain orange-haired man was racist. Someone I do not know on Facebook wrote: “Evidence for racism?” Well, it was noted throughout the piece.

Still, I thought I’d try to further explain his long history of bigotry going back to the 1970s and an oral history.

My decision to engage was based on a conversation at the Triennium conference I attended, to try to understand a different POV. I knew he was trolling or sealioning me. But I let it run its course until it inevitably became pointless.

ITEM: Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation With Richard Nixon in 1971 when RWR was governor of California.

“Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: ‘To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!’ Nixon gave a huge laugh.”

Yet some folks on FOX “News” swear up and down that RWR was not racist. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you refer to black people as another primate, THAT IS RACIST. Prima facia racist.

At the very end of a recent Daily Show With Trevor Noah, you can hear what a stand-up guy Ronnie was. FINDING A BLACK PERSON TO SAY IT’S NOT RACIST DOES NOT MAKE IT NOT RACIST.

Maybe one needs to parse a racist action, which could be of the moment, from a pattern of racism.

“Whenever a person is accused of racism… they instinctively search for any example to bolster their ‘non-racist credentials’, which can be a low bar. When people are motivated to find evidence that they’re not prejudiced, they’re more likely to think having a black friend is really strong evidence.”

Secretary of HUD Ben Carson held a press conference to defend djt’s long-standing racism, and a Baltimore church rightly kicked him off the property.

ITEM: An article in The Atlantic – “We’re All Tired of Being Called Racists”. At a recent pep rally, Brandon Straka, a gay djt supporter, said “Insinuations of bigotry and racism are divisive tactics.” Don’t fall for the classic rubber and glue tactic. POINTING OUT RACISM DOESN’T MAKE YOU RACIST.

ITEM: When traditionally conservative media point out racism, PAY ATTENTION. From Foreign Policy: How Does Online Racism Spawn Mass Shooters?

ITEM: ONE SPEECH DOES NOT NEGATE DECADES OF RACISM. A Teleprompter speech on mass shootings was Completely Inconsistent With Everything He’s Ever Said and Done. The Boston Globe calls him the hypocrite in chief. Here’s what a real president says.

Ronald Reagan in Labor’s Hall of Honor

America once had at least an implicit norm guiding wages

About a year ago, the induction of the late President Ronald Reagan into the US Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor frankly shocked many working people.

As the New York Times wrote in 2011: “More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity.”

Ironically, PATCO had refused to endorse the Democratic Party because of “poor labor relations with the FAA (the employer of PATCO members) under the Carter administration and Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of the union and its struggle for better conditions during the 1980 election campaign.”

But when the union declared a strike in August 1981, “seeking better working conditions, better pay, and a 32-hour workweek, …Reagan declared the PATCO strike a “peril to national safety” and ordered them back to work under the terms of the Taft–Hartley Act.

“On August 5, following the PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life…” [Bill Clinton ended the lifetime ban.]

“The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it would take closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.

“In 2003, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, noted: ‘far more importantly his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.'”

“On March 1, 2018, Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta inducted President Ronald Reagan ” – the “only president to lead a major union”, the Screen Actors Guild – “into the… Hall of Honor, which was established in 1988 to honor Americans whose distinctive contributions have elevated working conditions, wages, and overall quality of life for American families.

“As a worker, an advocate, and a public official, President Ronald Reagan worked to unleash opportunity and prosperity for all Americans… As President of the United States, he returned a sense of economic optimism to our nation that resulted in the creation of millions of jobs for the American people.”

This Brookings article suggests that the Reagan economic policy was at best a mixed bag. Fortune’s Labor Day 2015 story was more explicit:

“America once had at least an implicit norm guiding wages… From roughly the end of World War II through much of the 1970s, real (cost of living-adjusted) wages increased in tandem with gains in productivity.

“More recently, analysts have begun to recognize that the long-term decline in unions and worker bargaining power accounts for a sizable portion of the problem [of stagnant wages].

“It is no coincidence that the gap between wages and productivity began to expand dramatically around 1980, a turning point for collective bargaining.” Clearly, there were other factors, but the decline of unions, championed by the Labor Department’s honoree, Ronald Reagan, certainly contributed to that.