This guy decided he’d have an easy post that would appeal (he thought) to the totebaggers who read the HuffPo:
NEW COLUMN — Trump put up a new portrait of Ronald Reagan overlooking the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. If it could move, it would turn its back in shame.
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-…
— S.V. Dáte (@svdate.bsky.social) February 23, 2025 at 10:19 AM
I beg to differ. Reagan would fucking clap, a standing ovation. The guy who hired Lee Atwater, who kicked off his campaign with a “state’s rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same county where three CORE workers were killed in 1964, would fucking love the idea that someone was finally kicking blacks and women out of high-level government jobs. The “Southern Strategy” candidate who helped complete the South’s turn from segregationist Democrats to wish-we-could-segregate Republicans would be happy to see that his dreams, the wishes that his heart made, finally came true.
I don’t mean to be too critical of Mr Date, who probably just wanted an easy hook for his story. But Reagan’s legacy needs no burnishing from anyone who is to the left of, say, Mike Lee or the ghost of Jesse Helms. Reagan’s presidency was eight years of retrograde motion. It started the long trip to where we are today, beginning the inexorable motion backwards from the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to, well, the notion that anyone who thinks that US history was anything but a cakewalk for blacks and women is “woke”.
One of the key talents of right wing propagandists is revisionist history. Making Reagan a secular saint is a hardly even a reach for those revisionists, who are busy trying to convince us that the Civil War was fought over economic issues. But we don’t need to participate — in fact, we need to push back. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump represent a steady slide into racism, sexism, stupidity and hate. Treating Trump like some kind of aberration, rather than the logical consequence of 45 years of Republican policy, ignores the plain facts in front of our faces.
(The title is a deep cut but it’s CanCon.)
In case you missed it, I have a new site where I’ll be writing — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off. The site is hosted on beehiiv, which is like Substack with fewer nazis. You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here. Thanks for all the kind comments from lurkers via email or in my adios post yesterday.