Stronger Than You

the funny thing is that i don't think younger people - and i mean those under the age of 40 - really have a grasp on how many of today's issues can be tied back to a disastrous reagan policy:

this is just what i could come up with in a relatively short time and i did not even live under this man's presidency. the level at which ronald reagan has broken the united states truly can't be overstated.

A couple of these started earlier (before Nixon, for-profit health insurance was not allowed, and Nixon also started the war on drugs specifically to target minorities and anti-war activists), but Reagan doubled down on them and made them even worse. It was the difference between sliding down the side of a hill and jumping off a cliff.

The people behind project2025 started with Reagan

Carter is underrated and Reagan sucks.

If you want to be educated on the "welfare queen" stereotype in a hilarious and informative and thorough manner, I will once again recommend this episode of You're Wrong About

When y’all talk about the AIDS epidemic and Reagan, please do not leave out black people. Like for real, there’s several popular posts that circulate around this site about the epidemic in the 80’s and none of them mention black people at all, which is really upsetting to me. Black communities were ravaged by aids in the 80’s just like gay communities were. They suffered along side each other. While Reagan celebrated the deaths of gay people, he was also celebrating the deaths of black people. AIDS was killing off the “welfare queens” that Reagan and other republicans were constantly harping on about. AIDS killing black people meant less dependency on the social programs that they loathed and wanted to get rid of. It was another thing that helped them keep us from gaining power while the CIA brought crack into our communities to weaken us. And till this day, black people are contracting HIV and AIDS at the highest rates.

Please stop leaving out black people when talking about AIDS and Reagan’s response to it.

PBS made a very informative documentary on the epidemiology and ongoing impact of HIV/AIDs on Black communities which is free to watch online: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/endgame-aids-in-black-america/

Thank you so much for adding this awesome resource!

national holiday

Ron Reagan's legacy is crushing us. His trickle down economics destroyed the middle class.

Don’t forget a whole lot of the people who worked for Reagan (who understood very little of any of his policies, between being not very bright and the dementia) also worked for both Bush White Houses.

Unhappy Death Day, Mister President

Fuck Reagan and everyone who enabled him. Reagan makes me wish I believed in Hell.

national holiday

happy holiday

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.

its a national holiday

Celebrating someone’s death seems like a really macabre thing to do. Like I get that people don’t like him because of how his administration dealt with the AIDS epidemic, but promoting someone’s death as a good thing doesn’t sit well with me.

during his administration, we had a problem with abuse of patients in mental healthcare facilities (asylums, but don’t call them that), and his response to it was just to shut down the entire system. he closed all public mental healthcare facilities because a few of them were mistreating patients, and all those mentally ill people suddenly found themselves homeless without the skills necessary to survive in the general populous. he’s the reason why our healthcare system is so terrible, and he’s to blame for the homelessness epidemic (i’ll get into the next reason why he’s responsible for our high homeless population in a sec). millions of people lost everything because of reagan. thousands died.

he also completely restructured our economy. from 1776 until he became president, we had an economic system like no other (look up the American School), but he removed most of the rules and regulations we had to keep the system in place because our system at the time limited accumulation of wealth. we had a built-in buffer that kept most people middle class. when he restructured our economy so he and his friends could get richer, reagan removed the safeguards that kept us out of poverty (most of the time), so now the lower echelons of society were in freefall towards homelessness. people lost their homes and businesses because the rich could do basically whatever they wanted now. superstores like wal-mart rose to prominence and pushed out small businesses because of this. our government also greatly reduced its expenditure on infrastructure. ronald reagan’s greed is why we don’t have enough trains and all our roads are falling apart.

he also expanded our already bloated military while in power. one of his slogans was “peace in strength.” his goal for our country was to get an iron grip around the rest of the world and impose our own agendas on other countries at gunpoint.

One of the first things reagan did when he came to power was to ignore the supreme court’s earlier ruling, ignore the constitution, and try to enforce a mandatory daily christian prayer time in all schools. when government workers went on strike against him and his policies, he fired 11,345 people. he put 11,345 people out of a job because they didn’t like him.

he lowered taxes for the rich, but increased taxes on the poor, contributing to the aforementioned lack of infrastructure and homelessness crisis. he also began privatising the government, which put thousands of jobs at risk and made wealthy capitalists the men who run our country. reagan is responsible for trickle down economics.

after the great depression, our government put in social programs to help people stay afloat, like universal healthcare for the elderly and disabled, basic income (the government paid people to dig ditches if they couldn’t find any other jobs. the ditches didn’t serve any purpose, but those people needed money and the government was willing to give money to anyone who worked), and food stamps. ronald reagan slashed all these programs and more, like the EPA, which made sure we were a “green” country.

as a result of these slashes, people who had been secure on government assistance programs were now having to take out loans and get into debt, which jeopardised our economy. we had a stock market crash because people were becoming too poor to buy stocks, and our national debt increased by 3 times. we went from $997 billion in debt to $2.85 trillion in 1987.

he also pushed us further into the cold war. previously, our relations with russia were cooling down a bit, but during reagan’s second term, he began actively threatening russia again. ronald reagan brought us to the brink of a nuclear war that would have killed all humans on earth.

Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the most hated prime minister in UK history, were close friends. he was also personal friends with Donald Trump.

Under reagan, we resumed a history of violent military imperialism in foreign countries, most notably lebanon, afghanistan, and pakistan. In lebanon, we tried to stop a revolution against an oppressive regime, and in afghanistan and pakistan, reagan ordered the CIA to train civilians and create a military force to fight russia for us. Reagan created the taliban, a militant group that even today publicly dismembers people for playing games in public. they cut off children’s hands. He also began dealing weapons with China, betraying our longstanding ally, Taiwan, destabilising politics in the pacific. Under his orders, we secretly aided african and south american military dictatorships in crushing their opposition. He assisted Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran who started the 1979 revolution, in purging political opposition from the government. in 1988 our military shot down an iranian commercial flight, killing 290 civilians.

Reagan was a Nazi sympathiser and referred to slain SS officers as “victims” of the war. just to make sure you read that right: Ronald Reagan supported the Nazis.

He declared the war on drugs, a movement that has greatly increased the disproportionate incarceration rates of african american and latino men in this country.

During Reagan’s second term, 115,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 70,000 died of it. Reagan did nothing to curb the spread, despite knowing that the AIDS epidemic almost exclusively affected black people and the LGBT community. when he learned how many people were dying and who they were, he laughed. he laughed at our suffering while we were dropping dead.

In short, Ronald Reagan was a wealthy, selfish, greedy, capitalistic, imperialist, racist, ableist, homophobic, genocidal, antisemitic, warmongering, backstabbing murderer. Ronald Reagan was a monster.

Wow and this didn’t even cover the crack epidemic

It doesn’t cover the crack epidemic, or the various wars in South America, that resulted in the refugees immigrant crisis now.