It is funny that Hitlers last moments of life were pure misery and terror before he blew his own brains out, it is funny that Luis Carrero Blanco was blown up by a bomb so powerful it sent his car flying over a 3 story building, it is funny that Ronald Reagan got shot and that his wound led to health complications that plagued him for the rest of his vile life, it is funny that Margaret Thatcher lived in constant fear of assassination by the IRA, it is funny that Mussolini ended life looking like a prized ham in the deli section, and it is funny that Trump might die from covid.
America is the least educated country in the world when it comes to American history
For any of my followers who may genuinely have this question:
Gay people know Reagan as the president who laughed at AIDS and did nothing because “all the right people” (aka us gay people) were dying from it.
Reagan is the president under whose auspices the incarceration rate of Black people on drug charges ballooned to caricaturishly high levels.
Reagan is the president that abolished the air traffic controllers’ union.
Reagan is the president who espoused the flawed “trickle down economics” theory, cut federal funding for state welfare programmes by 80%, froze the federal minimum wage while taxes and costs skyrocketed, and established the capital gains tax cuts that set our corporate feudal state into motion.
Reagan is the president who gutted federal assistance programmes, purging the Social Security disability rolls, and caused my own grandfather to die because he could no longer afford to buy both food and medicine.
Then of course, there’s the Iran-Contra Affair, Star Wars (not the film, but the space based missile platform), school prayer, blah blah blah
But American History textbooks only remember him for “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” treating him like he alone was the force that united East and West Germany and brought the Soviet Union to its knees.
Reagan in his first term was consided much the same way Trump is right now, which is why I’m convinced if Trump wins a second term he’ll he deified the same way Reagan was.
I’ll add to the list though:
- Left a wreath at a memorial for Nazi SS soldiers, said they were the true victims of Nazism
- Supported apartheid
- Sold out countless peers/competition in Hollywood to the House Unamerican Activities Committee
- 25,000 dead in El Salvador
- Go look at his governorship of California, it’s bad
- Ketchup is a vegetable
It is quite literally impossible to overstate how much damage Reagan’s presidency is still inflicting upon American, even today.
Remembering Reagan’s evil on his birthday is kinda important, because otherwise people can and will forget and whitewash his image.