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In November of 1980, a former Hollywood actor walked into the White House promising morning in America. He smiled, he told jokes, he told us government wasn't the solution. Government was actually the problem. His name was Ronald Reagan. And more than 40 years later, we're still living inside the country that he built. Before the presidency, Reagan was a B movie actor, a GE pitchman, and a union leader who turned on his own union and a two term governor of California. But the real story isn't the man, it's the marriage. Because when Reagan walked down the aisle with the modern conservative movement, Buckley's National Review, the Heritage foundation, the supply side economist, the religious right, the corporate lobbyists who spent 30 years plotting the rollback of the New Deal, he gave them something they had never had before. A frontman the country actually liked. A grandfather figure who could sell shareholder capitalism with a wink and a one liner. And once that coalition had power, it used it. The top marginal income tax rate dropped from 70% to 28. Air traffic controllers went on strike in 1981 and Reagan fired all of them. A signal flare to corporate America that the federal government had switched sides in a war between labor and capital and it was no longer on the side of the worker. Antitrust enforcement went dormant. Financial regulation got hollowed out. Wealth that used to flow to wages, to public investment, into the middle class started flowing somewhere else upward. And it never came back down. Trickle down economics is a lie. The promise that was prosperity at the top would trickle down did not. Since 1980, worker productivity has roughly doubled, but typical wages have barely budged. Almost, almost all of the gains were captured at the very, very top. Today, the richest 1% of Americans own nearly as much wealth as the entire bottom 90% of people combined. And that isn't on accident. That's a policy outcome. That was a decision and it has a date of birth. Over this next two episodes, we're going to trace how it happened. The deals, the doctrines, the dogma, who Ronald Reagan was, what that marriage looked like, and the question that people who built this system would really rather you didn't ask, what did this presidency actually cost? The rest. Today we're covering Ronald Reagan on flipping tables. Welcome back, everyone. This is part one of two on Ronald Reagan and the impact that his presidency had on the economy. I just wanted to say a huge thank you to my Patreon supporters, but also to my followers online who have been so supportive and so patient. As of this recording, I closed on a house two days ago and it was one of the most nerve wracking terrifying, anxiety inducing experiences of my life. But there were so many things that happened for me to be able to get precisely this house and it has enough space for me to have an office as well as a content creation studio, which will just be transformative in my schedule, in my life. But I was pretty silent on social media last week, but I was getting so many messages from people that were so encouraging, so uplifting. A lot of congratulations. You might have seen my video where I show briefly the side of my house. It was a big moment for me. When I was 23, I was homeless for 10 months because my then fiance had used my identity to put $65,000 of debt in my name. I had to file for bankruptcy at 23 and I was so convinced that my life was over and that it would never recover. And then to be able to buy this house, to be able to rent out my condo that I own is just such a huge healing point for me. And I've had really good friends and family come in and help me. But you've all been so, so supportive of me, messaging me about giving me a housewarming gift and just, I, I didn't even know what to do to that. I just looked at the message and cried. So I wanted to say thank you so much for that patience, for that grace, for that honoring. And also I have a couple announcements and then we're going to jump right in again. This is going to be a two part series. The first thing is that this podcast has over a million streams and downloads now, which is amazing and wild. And I wanted to say thank you for listening, for sharing, for rating and reviewing. Please continue to do so. That helps the show grow, it helps me stay in business, it helps me continue to push back. I had a quick question I wanted to answer. I had gotten some emails about this where people had asked me why the podcast was still on Spotify, which it is. And I completely understand this question, especially considering what Spotify has supported. I debated for a long time kind of across social media platforms about what to do with my content. So the reason my Patreon page exists, which is patreon.com Monty Mater is my attempt to build a platform outside of primary social media to have a space that's mine that I have a little bit more ownership of. With Spotify, you can I opted out of any government related ads so they cannot be advertised on this show. If you ever hear that, please email me immediately and let me know. So I was able to opt out of those ads. I believe in using their money against them. But when I. I almost left social media entirely about six months ago because Meta supports the Trump administration. And now TikTok is owned by Ellisons, who are building a, you know, Christian nationalist media empire. But for me, what it came down to is 2025 was the first year that people are getting more of their news and information from social media than traditional media sources. And if everyone like me or people on the left or people that are really working hard to give true information leave these platforms, they will become echo chambers. And the only voices we will hear are Christian nationalists, the voices on the right, the voices that are in support of the Trump administration, what's going on? And so many people, especially people, these are the spaces where they live. So for me, my decision was based on, I am going to push back on these platforms. I am going to build an empire. It is my vision to unseat Joe Rogan. I'm tired of his misinformation. I am tired of the lies. But in order to do that, I have to be in the spaces and deal with the backlash that comes with that, deal with the violence that comes with that at times, which has already impacted myself and my living situation. And that was why I made that decision, was that if I leave these spaces, it's the same reason that I decided to buy a house in Tennessee, is that the United States will only be as progressive as the south is. And if I can work and fight to make Tennessee blue, to flip this state, we can flip the rest of the South. So I hope that answers the question. I totally understand why people would send that in, why they would ask. And I wanted to clarify that. And I had a great. I did an Instagram story asking for people's feedback, and a lot of us kind of all came to the same conclusion of we have to be voices in these spaces. If they push us out, it becomes an echo chamber. And especially for the younger generation, they'll get looped into this whirlwind. So I just wanted to clarify that a little bit also. And this I. This is being recorded on May 2nd. So starting this week, we are starting the How We Got the Bible series. I am sorry I had to delay that. We had a second flood in my building I'm living in now. So I had to move a week ahead of when I planned. The How We Got the Bible series is going to take each section of the Bible and break down its history. Where it came from, what age it came from. It's also going to break down Every single book. So there will be 66 breakdowns of each book. These videos on Patreon will be about the deep dives are going to be about 10 minutes long, 10 to 12 minutes. And then there are going to be summaries on Instagram as well. But if you want to follow that from the start, Please subscribe@patreon.com Monty Mater that's where the longer, a little bit more meaty deep dives are going to live. But they will also be on Instagram. The goal of these, again, is just like my Bible studies. It is not conversion, it's knowledge. The Bible is being weaponized right now for cruelty and greed and selfishness and evil, evil and discrimination. And I just want to present information and say, hey, this is where these books came from. This is how they got put together the way they did. You make your decision about what you believe. Thank you again for your support. And if, of course, if you ever have questions, you can email infomontymater.com we will help as much as we can. Let's dive in. Because the reason that we are economically where we are at, the reason the Trump administration exists, is because of Ronald McDonald's Reagan. And we're going to break some of that down today. This is going to be broken down in two parts. And really, this one, we're going to focus a little bit more on his road to the presidency. And the second one, we're going to focus on the presidency and its impact economically. Let's dive in. Before Ronald Wilson Reagan became the 40th president of the United States, he was a working actor in Hollywood with a talent for reading lines that someone else wrote for him. He joined the Screen Actors guild in the 1940s and eventually became its president, a position that placed him at the center of the most heated labor battles in American entertainment history. He stood at podiums and gave speeches about protecting the rights of actors. He talked about fairness and fighting for the little guy. But behind the curtain, Reagan was playing a very different role, one that public would not learn about for decades. Declassified information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that Reagan served as a confidential informant during the post war red scare. If you have not listened to episode 26 on this podcast about Joseph McCarthy, this is all about what Joseph McCarthy was doing. Demonizing people, saying he was, you know, chasing communists when he was just demonizing anyone who disagreed with him. Reagan was an informant in this post war red scare operating. He operated under the designation T10 while publicly leading the union that was supposed to protect Actors from exploitation. Reagan was privately reporting the names, personal beliefs and political associations of his colleagues to federal agents. He identified fellow actors he suspected of holding Communist sympathies, and those names ended up in FBI files that could follow a person for the rest of their life. The people whose names he gave were not spies or criminals. They were writers, artists, directors, performers whose politics Reagan found disagreeable. So he reported them to the FBI working for Joseph McCarthy. The weight of this contradiction cannot be overstated. Reagan was the face of a union saying he was defending laborers while he was reporting them. If he didn't like what they believed. Reagan occupied a position of trust. The members of the Screen Actors Guild believed their president was working on their behalf. Instead, he used his access to their private conversations and personal views as currency to build a relationship with the federal government. This was not an act of patriotism rooted in evidence of any espionage. It was an act of political positioning that sacrificed real people on the altar of Cold War paranoia. Several of the individuals identified in these reports connected to Reagan's informant activity lost their careers during the Hollywood blacklist era. The Hollywood blacklist destroyed with efficiency of a machine. Actors, directors and screenwriters who were accused of Communist sympathies, often on the basis of nothing more than attending a meeting one time or signing a petition for a political change, found themselves unemployable overnight. The studios, who were terrified of congressional investigators and public backlash, compiled lists of names that refused to hire anyone whose loyalty was considered questionable. Some of the most talented artists in American cinema lost everything. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had won an Academy Award, was forced to write under a false name for years. Actor Larry Parks, who had starred in the Jolson story, saw his career collapse after testifying before the House UN American Activities Committee Director Herbert Biberman was imprisoned and blacklisted for a decade. These were the human costs of the Red Scare, and Reagan contributed to that system that produced them by feeding names and suspicions to the FBI. And he literally could have just fed names of people he just didn't like. Reagan's first wife, the actress Jane Wyman, was also a member of the Screen Actors Guild period during. During this period. Excuse me. Wyman, who divorced Reagan in 1949, later told friends that Reagan's obsession with politics and his increasingly rigid ideological views had become unbearable. Well, doesn't that sound familiar? She reportedly grew exhausted by his nightly monologues about communism and the threats facing America, conversations that reflected the fears he was channeling into FBI reports. The divorce was, by most accounts, the only time in Reagan's public life that he was genuinely humiliated. And it left a scar that he covered with the same practical ease, practiced ease he applied to everything else that contradicted his carefully maintained image. The transition from union leader to corporate spokesperson happened gradually but deliberately. In 1954, Reagan became the host of General Electric Theater, a weekly television program sponsored by one of the largest corporations in America. Also remember, a lot of these same corporations bought preachers to also preach against labor rights within the church. The job came with a second and less public obligation. Reagan would travel the country, visiting General Electric plants, giving speeches to factory workers and local business groups. These were not casual appearances. General Electric's leadership, particularly executive Lemuel Bolware, used Reagan as a messenger to deliver a very specific philosophy. That government regulation was the enemy of freedom, that labor unions asked for just two too much, and that the free market would solve every problem if politicians would simply get out of the way. I say to you again, does this sound familiar? Bulware was a pioneer of the corporate anti union strategy. He developed what became known as bulwerism, an approach to labor negotiations that involved making a single final offer to the union and refusing to negotiate further. The strategy was designed to undermine the bargaining process itself, sending the message that unions were unnecessary because management already knew what was fair. Reagan absorbed Bulware's philosophy completely. He later described his years with General Electric as a political awakening. But the awakening was not the result of independent thought. It was the product of a corporate education program that trained him to deliver a very specific set of ideas. Over the course of nearly a decade with ge, Reagan delivered this message thousands of times across the country. He refined his delivery. Remember, he's already an actor. It already felt natural. He the words sounded like they were coming from his heart rather than a boardroom who's lining his pockets. He learned to smile when he said things that would hurt working people. He learned to wrap corporate interests in the language of patriotism, loving America, individual liberty. GE did not just give Reagan a television show. The company gave him political education and a rehearsal stage for the career that would follow. He was the corporate man they wanted in positions of power. The Persona that emerged from this period was carefully constructed. Reagan presented himself as a man of a people, the former New Deal Democrat who had seen the light and come to understand that big government was the real threat to American families, not the corporations ripping them off. He told stories about his childhood in small town Illinois, about his father's struggles during the Great Depression, about the values of hard work and Self reliance that shaped his character. These stories were effective because they contained just enough truth to feel authentic stories. Similar to all of us who were born or raised and grew up in different circumstances, Reagan did grow up in modest circumstances. His father did struggle with alcohol and unemployment. But the conclusions Reagan drew from these experiences were shaped not by his own reflection in life, but by years of corporate coaching that taught him to see every social problem problem as the result of too much government and never as the result of too little accountability from people in power. Very in alignment with Abraham Verde from the family. Like, oh, the corporations are never wrong. The powerful are never wrong. It's everybody on the bottom that you know, I'm sorry you're in this situation, but the government is the problem. You know, you can't allow the government to help. It's the powerful that need the help. Don't hold them accountable for anything they do or don't regulate anything. You're just getting in the way of my money. By the time Reagan entered politics as a candidate for the governor of California in 1966, his transformation was complete. The actor who had once led a labor union was now running on a platform that promised to dismantle the very protections unions had fought to create. He won that race with a commanding margin. And he governed California with policies that reflected his GE training far more than his union background. He cut funding for mental health services, released thousands of vulnerable patients onto the street. The streets. He sent the National Guard to suppress student protests at the University of California, Berkeley, declaring the state's public universities had become haven havens for radicals and malcontents. He would also cut funding to statewide education because previously education in college was very affordable. There was barely any tuition. A lot of in state tuition was free so you could go to college. Understand that America has already had free college. Many in state colleges were free. They were an extension of the education system. If you did paid any tuition for certain schools, it was much more affordable. You could actually work your way through school. And Reagan ended all of that because he didn't like that the students were protesting in a way that he didn't believe in. He didn't care that it was their right. He didn't care that it was guaranteed by the Constitution. He didn't like their opinions, so he took it out on them. He sent the National Guard not just to suppress the protest, but then started to cut funding so that that students could not access higher education as easily. Education has always been the enemy of conservative movements that want to strip labor rights. Labor rights and give the powerful more and more power and more and more money. Every action reinforced the message that had been written for him years before. Government help was a trap, and those for asked. Those who asked for it were either lazy or dangerous. Reagan's governorship of California from 1967 to 1975 served as a proving ground for the ideas he would later bring to the national n national stage, the ideas we are still suffering from. One of his earliest and most consequential decisions was the signing of the Lanterman Petra Short act in 1967, which dramatically reduced the state's ability to commit individuals to psychiatric hospitals against their will. This law was framed as a victory for civil liberties, protecting patients from being warehoused in overcrowded and underfunded state institutions. And let's be clear, the treatment of people who needed psychiatric care was abominable, and these were overcrowded, underfunded institutions. But in practice, this bill resulted in the closure of state mental hospitals so that no one could get care. It discharged thousands of patients who had no housing, no support system, no ability to care for themselves, and could not function in society. So you're not wrong to say someone shouldn't be committed against their will. But instead of giving these. These places that are overcrowded and underfunded the funding that they need to adequately take care of people and be in a good situation, it instead caused the closure of those hospitals. And of course, in an era in the demonization of mental health, many of these people ended up on the streets of California cities, where they became the foundation of the modern homelessness crisis that continues to define urban life kind of everywhere. Reagan would later apply the same logic at the federal level, cutting funding for community mental health centers that were supposed to serve patients his policies had displaced. His handling again of the student protest movement at the University of California also revealed the political instincts that would define his presidency. When the students at Berkeley organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War and in support of the civil rights movement, Reagan treated them not as citizens exercising their constitutional rights, but as enemies of public order who needed to be crushed. This is like reliving last year. He declared a state of emergency, deployed the National Guard, and authorized the use of tear gas and buckshot against unarmed students. One student, James Rector, was killed by police gunfire during the People's park protest of 1969. Reagan's response to the death was to blame the protesters themselves, declaring that if there had to be a bloodbath, let's quote, get it over with. The statement was chilling in its Indifference. But it was enormously popular with voters who had grown weary of campus unrest and cultural upheaval. People hate change. Oh, do they hate change. They don't like people pushing back on authority. They don't like the idea of what does it mean if, if black people have the same civil rights that I do? They don't like it. These students, they're just out of line. No, these students are the future. You're just narrow minded. We see that now. The significance of this early period is not just simply Reagan changing his political views. From being a union worker turned informant turned corporate latchkey kid or whatever he was. People are allowed to change their mind. The significant of this is that the change was manufactured by a corporation tested on thousands of audiences across the nation and delivered by a man whose profession was to make fiction feel like truth. The everyman Persona was a performance. And it was a performance that worked so well, it carried Reagan from the soundstage in Hollywood to the Governor's mansion in Sacramento and then to the White House. And how similar to Trump and his rise being someone who was made famous because of a reality TV show that gave him a Persona that's not real. Not real, but that Americans bought into thinking he could lead the country. And before we dive into the unholy marriage between the GOP and the Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan, let's take Our 1st of 2 Mid Show Sponsor breaks. If you want to hear these ad free and have access to all of the backlog, all of the Bible studies, all the Bible study notes, as well as the incoming series How We Got the Bible, you can sign up@patreon.com Monty Mater. The alliance between Ronald Reagan and the religious right was built through a series of strategic meetings and political calculations that joined conservative evangelical leaders with the Republican party operatives who were looking for a new base of reliable voters. The story of this alliance is often told is kind of this natural partnership between shared values and the religious movement that wanted to protect American families. But history tells us a very, very different story. The Moral Majority was founded in 1979 by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the Baptist pastor from Lynchburg, Virginia, the founder of Liberty University, which is where I went to school, who had spent the previous decade building one of the largest church congregations in the country through his television ministry. Falwell was a gifted communicator who understood the power of media and saw an opportunity to transform evangelical Christians from a politically passive community, which they were, into an organized voting block that could shape national elections. But the issue that first Motivated falwell and his allies to enter politics was not abortion, prayer in schools, or any of the moral clauses that they would champion. It was race, because, of course, it was. In 1971, the Internal Revenue service revoked the tax exempt status of bob jones university in greenville, south carolina, because the school maintained racially discriminatory admissions policies, Policies which they held, by the way, until the year 2000. March of 2000 was when they finally said that people could interracially date. They also had really discriminatory admissions processes in bob jones. The decision was upheld in federal court, and it sent a wave of fear through the network of private christian schools and colleges that had been established across the south in the years following public school desegregation. These institutions, many of which had been created specifically to allow white families to avoid their children, to sending their children to integrated schools, Suddenly faced the possibility of losing that tax exempt status that kept them financially viable and kept their leaders very, very rich. This has always been about segregation. This has always been about the integration of schools because those schools were founded so that rich white kids would not have to go to school with black people. That is the foundation of all of this. Conservative activists whose name you've heard me talk about, Paul weyrich, the later founder of the heritage foundation, who had been searching for an issue that could unite evangel evangelical voters behind the republican party, Recognized that the tax exemption fight could serve as a catalyst for a new political movement, but that segregation wouldn't be the issue they would use to do it. Weyrich was a catholic political strategist from wisconsin who had already co founded the Heritage foundation in 1973 and would go to co found the american legislative exchange council. He was not primarily motivated by religious conviction, of course not. He was motivated by the belief that conservative economic policies could only succeed if they were supported by a mass voting bloc that could be mobilized through cultural and mo and moral appeals. Not economic ones, cultural and moral ones. In a moment of candor years later, Wick admitted the true origin of the movement. He told a gathering of evangelical leaders that the religious right was not born out of opposition to abortion. He said, quote, I was trying to get people interested in those issues and utterly failed. Wick said, Describing his early efforts to mobilize evangelicals around roe v. Wade, because evangelicals agreed with a woman's right to choose jews. So did pastors, so did the southern baptist convention. So did the dallas theological seminary. When roe was passed, they all agreed that it's an unfortunate decision. They may have had difference of opinion on morals. But they did truly believe that the government shouldn't be in your hospital room and that a woman, the woman who was facing her body being destroyed or death, should be the one to choose. The issue that finally worked, the one that finally made pastors rally around his call to use abortion, was the threat to the tax exempt status of their racially segregated schools. When that tax threat came down, Wyrick could finally get them to rally around him using the issue of abortion so that they could protect their tax exempt status and their segregation academies. Wyrick, along with strategists like Richard Vigory. I think that's how I pronounce his name. I'm. I think so. And Howard Phillips, organized meetings with Falwell and other prominent pastors to discuss the formation of a political organization that could mobilize evangelical voters on a national scale. Scale. They understood that the tax exemption issue. Money, money, money, money, While deeply felt among Christian school administrators, was not the cause that would inspire the churchgoers to the polls. They needed a bigger issue. They need a set of issues, if you will. Abortion, which had been legalized nationwide in 1973. Roe vs. Wade, became the centerpiece of the new platform opposition to the era, the Equal rights amendment. Because equal rights are scary, right? Right. Concern about the portrayal of sexuality on television and anxiety about the changing role of women in American society were added to a create to create a comprehensive agenda that positioned the Republican party as the defender of, quote, traditional family values. It's worth pausing this timeline just for a second. The Roe v. Wade decision again was handed down in January of 1973. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, responded with several resol resolutions that affirmed the legitimacy of a abortion in cases evolving rape, incest, fetal deformity, and the emotional health of the mother. They released two. They had also released a former proposal, prior to it being passed, of the same thing that they believed in these instances it should be allowed. And they included emotional and physical and mental health of the mother. Within those reasons. W.A. criswell, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, was one of the most influential evangelical pastors in America, declared that he believed the ruling was right, stating that he had, quote, always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, end quote. That's the leader of the sbc, one of the most powerful pastors in the country at that time. The idea that evangelical Christians had always been opposed to abortion is a myth. And it was constructed after the fact to get evangelicals out to vote in support of the people who wanted to maintain segregation academy economies. Reagan's relationship with this movement required a little bit of political flexibility that bordered on contradiction. We see a lot of that these days. As governor of California, he had signed the Therapeutic Abortion act of 1967, which loosened restrictions on abortion in the state and led to a significant increase in the number of legal abortions performed in California. By some estimates, the law resulted in more than 1 million abortions over the following decade. Reagan later expressed regret about signing the legislation, but the fact remained that he had done so, and the religious leaders who were now being asked to support him knew it. The resolution of the contradiction was achieved through personal meetings and private assurances. Reagan met directly with Falwell and other evangelical leaders and told them that they what they needed to hear, that he changed his mind, that he understood the moral stakes for their movement and that as president, he would fight for the causes they held sacred. He would fight for this new pamphlet of traditional values that they were seeking to defend. He spoke their language with the ease of a man, of course, who has spent decades delivering lines to make them believable. Whether Reagan truly held these convictions or simply wanted more power is up for debate. We won't know. What is not debatable is the result. The evangelical vote, which had been split between the two parties throughout the 1970s, swung decisively towards Reagan in 1980, and it has remained a cornerstone of the republic Republican electoral strategy ever since. On July 17th of 1980, Reagan stood before the Republican National Convention in Detroit and delivered an acceptance speech that wove together all these threads of his political career into just one beautiful performance. He spoke of the American family as a sacred institution that was under siege. He spoke of faith and freedom and the need to restore America's sense of purpose. And in the final moments of the speech, he did something that no major party nominee had done before at a national convention. He asked the entire arena to bow their heads in silent prayer. The gesture was calculated to signal to evangelical voters that this was their message. Man. That a vote for Reagan was a vote for God's plan in America. And it worked. And for this portion, I'm going to play you an audio clip from Reagan's 19801980 RNC acceptance speech.
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I have thought of something that's not a part of my speech and worried over whether I should do it. Can we doubt that only a divorce? Divine providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free. Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain. The boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and of Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters in Afghanistan, and our own countrymen held in savage captivity. I'll confess that I've been a little afraid to suggest what I'm going to suggest. I'm more afraid not to. Can we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer?
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The consequences of this alliance extended far beyond the elections. Once in office, Reagan rewarded his religious supporters with symbolic gestures and policy positions that shaped American life for decades. It's shaping us now. He endorsed a constitutional amendment to permit organized prayer in public schools. He appointed judges who were sympathetic to the socially conservative agenda. Does that sound familiar to the Supreme Court right now? He spoke at events organized by Falwell's Moral Majority. And understand that they've never been the majority of, like, good verbiage, good branding. They've never been the majority, nor are they moral in any way, shape or form. And he gave the movement a degree of legitimacy that it never had before, of course, really blurring that separation of church and state line. And that's one of the things growing up in the 90s. There's this idea that there was this huge attack on Christianity because they took out the Ten Commandments and they took out prayer. It was simply about the belief that government should be secular in order to protect religious freedom. Because religious freedom means your ability to choose how to worship, when to worship or not to worship at all, if you choose to. And the government showing favoritism is. Is a violation of everyone's equal rights to freedom of religion. It's just about equality. But the Moral Majority in particular was really good at curating this persecution narrative that if Christians weren't being favored, they were being persecuted. Not at all the same thing, because propose to them that we hang tenants from the Quran or we offer prayer rugs in schools, and they will suddenly understand that maybe if we just pick one religion, it shouldn't be in schools. For instance, I'm opposed to, like, the Ten Commandments posters on the wall, but if they wanted to hang up a bunch of different posters of tenets of different faiths, I would have no problem with that. It's the favoritism, it's the push. It's the added legitimacy to one faith over another that is the problem. And in my belief, the violation of the separation of church and state. At the same time, the most ambitious goals of the Religious right, including a constitutional ban on abortion and the formal establishment of the United States as a Christian nation remained unfulfilled. We are in that now understand with certainty that this group wants to ban abortion nationwide. And it's not because they care about abortions. It's not, it's not because they care about the kids that are here, that are starving. Right. They also cut funds, funding to every child who needs it, or single parents or orphaned children. They won't, they won't deal with the foster care system. They don't care. What they want is women stuck in the home. Because remember that one of the tenets of their propaganda plan was they were, they were uneasy about the changing role of women in America. The goal of that is to keep women barefoot, pregnant, impoverished, dependent on a man and stuck in the house. And for men to get the best jobs, the highest quality of life, all the leadership positions, all the money, all the power. That's the goal. But they didn't get there with Reagan. They are getting there with Trump. But it has always been the goal. And again, America is not a Christian nation. It was nation founded on religious liberty, which is what makes, makes it so distinct. Reagan's support was real enough to keep evangelical voters loyal, but measured enough to avoid alienating the moderate voters. Reagan was the lynchpin to lead us to Trump. The personal life of the man who championed himself as traditional family values was also a very interesting study in contradict. Reagan was the first divorced president in American history. He had a distant and often strained relationship with several of his children. His daughter Patty Davis would later write publicly about the emotional coldness she experienced growing up in the Reagan household. And perhaps most remarkably, both Ronald and Nancy Reagan relied heavily on the advice of astrologer named Joan Quigley, who was consulted on matters ranging from the time of presidential travel to the scheduling of major policy announcements, which most evangelicals would consider to be demonic or witchcraft. For his second inauguration, the Reagan's insisted the ceremony take place at a specific time because Quigley had determined it would be the most astrologically favorable. The man who closed the 1980 Republican convention with a prayer was making decisions about about governance of a nuclear superpower based on the alignment of the stars. Cool. This dynamic created a pattern that would repeat itself across multiple Republican administrations. The party offered evangelical voters just enough to keep them engaged while delivering its most substantial policy victories in the areas that mattered most to its corporate donors. Deregulation and the weakening of organized labor. Understand that regulation and organized labor protections protect you, the worker. These are good for you. And the reason that they're telling you they are so bad for you is because it's not good for for them. It holds them accountable, it puts more money in your pocket and they don't like that. Again, the marriage between the GOP and the Moral Majority was from the beginning, a partnership which benefits were distributed unequally. The religious voters provided the numbers, needed the corporate interest, collected the money, and it was a way to convince religious people, truly good religious people. I want to add that the majority of them were good people who thought they were doing the right thing. And what they were doing was dumping money out of their own pockets and making the future insecure for their children. And they didn't know it. They got played by their by these people, the people who are most harmed by the resulting policies, including the poor, women, communities of color had no seat at the table where the deals were being made. But let's talk about the theft of 1980 because, oh, this makes me so mad. The Hostage crisis the 1980 presidential election took place against the backdrop of one of the most humiliating foreign policy crises in a American history. On November 4th of 1979, exactly one year before election Day, a group of Iranian students stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took 52American diplomats and citizens hostage. President Jimmy Carter, a real Christian, spent the remaining 14 months of his presidency consumed by the crisis, attempting both diplomatic negotiations and a failed military rescue mission that resulted in the death of eight American servicemen in the Iranian desert. The hostage crisis defined the final year of Carter's presidency and according to many historians, made his election reelection nearly impossible. We would be living on a different planet if Jimmy Carter had been elected a second time. The question that has followed this election for more than four decades is whether the outcome was shaped not only by Carter's misfortune, but by deliberate interference from the Reagan campaign. The allegation, commonly referred to as the October Surprise, holds that members of Reagan's campaign team conducted secret negotiations with Iranian officials to ensure that the hostages would not be released before November of 1980. If the hostages came home while Carter was still president, it would have given Carter a surge of public support that might have changed the outcome of the race. By keeping the hostages in captivity until after Reagan's victory, the campaign would have removed Carter's last chance at redemption. The man at the center of this was William Casey, Reagan's campaign manager and a figure whose career in intelligence stretched back to the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, too. Casey was not a politician In a traditional sense, he was a spy, an operator who spent decades in the shadow of COVID action and clandestine negotiation. He understood how to make deals that left no paper trail. And he had the contacts in the intelligence community to facilitate meetings that official channels could never acknowledge. After the election, Reagan rewarded Casey with the position of the Director of the CIA, a post that gave him institutional power to continue operating in the shadow on a global scale. The circumstantial evidence surrounding this allegation is extensive and deeply troubling. Yes, this is still technically, quote, a theory, but there is an enormous amount of evidence that the Reagan campaign worked directly with Iran to make sure those hostages stayed put until Reagan won. The 52 hostages were released on January 20th of 1981 at virtually the exact moment hint that Reagan was sworn in as president. The timing was so precise that it appeared choreographed. So you have a man getting sworn in as president as the hostages are getting freed. Iran's decision to release the hostages at that specific moment rather than at any point during the preceding 14 months of negotiations has never been explained. Gary Sick, the former National Security Council staff member who served under both Presidents Ford and Carter, published a detailed investigation of the allegations in 1991. Sick documented testimony from multiple sources who claimed that William Casey traveled to Madrid and Paris in the summer and fall of 1980 to meet with Iranian intermediaries. According to these accounts, Casey offered the Iranians a deal if they held the hostages until after the election. The new Reagan administration would provide Iran with military spare parts and weapons that the country country desperately needed for its war with Iraq. Several of the witnesses who provided testimony to Sick and congressional investigators had backgrounds in intelligence and arms dealing, gave their accounts credibility through their reliability was also questioned of course by skeptics. But we he actually had meetings with Iranian intermediaries during that time. I wonder what they could have been possibly talking about. One of the most significant witnesses was Ari Ben Manashi, a former Israeli intelligence officer who claimed to have attended meetings between Casey and Iranian officials in Paris in October of 1980. Ben Minashi's account was detailed in specific placing Casey in a suite at the Hotel Raphael during the weekend when according to Reagan's campaign officials records Casey's whereabouts could not be confirmed. The Reagan campaign later produced conflicting accounts of where Casey had been during the dates in question, with some records placing him in Washington and others leaving gaps critics argued were large enough to accommodate a trip to Europe. In 2024, investigative journalist Craig Unger published Den of Spies, which presented newly uncovered evidence that strengthened the case for the October Surprise theory. Unger's research drew on recently declassified documents, new interviews with intelligence sources, and re examination of previously dismissed testimonies testimony. Among the most significant findings was the evidence that individuals connected to the Reagan campaign had contact with Iranian officials through intermediary channels at times that aligned with these alleged meetings that were described in early investigations. Unger argued that the totality of the evidence, both old and new, pointed toward a coordinated effort by the Reagan campaign to manipulate the hostage crisis for political advantage. I agree, I agree. All of the evidence that has come out and I highly recommend reading Den of Spies as well. To me, strongly, strongly says that the Reagan campaign deliberately manipulated this crisis to make sure he got in office and in return gave Iran military resources. Congressional investigators into the October Surprise allegations produced mixed results. The 1993 House Task Force concluded that the evidence did not support the theory. But critics noted that the investigation was limited in scope, very limited, and that several key witnesses were not called to testify. The Senate investigation, conducted under a shorter timeline and with even fewer resources, reached a similar conclusion. Neither investigation had the authority or resources to conduct a thorough examination that the gravity of these allegations really demanded. Supporters of the October Surprise theory have argued for decades that the investigations were designed to fail. I agree either because the political establishment did not want the to confront the possibility of a sitting president committing treason. Reason sounds familiar. Or because the passage of time had made definitive finding impossible. What is beyond dispute is that the human cost of the hostage crisis. Regardless of the political manipulation, the 52Americans held in Tehran endured 444 days of captivity, much of it in isolation and under constant psychological pressure. Several hostages were subjected to mock executions. Others were beaten. All of them lived with the daily uncertainty of whether or not they would survive. Survive. Their families at home endured, of course, parallel suffering. Watching the crisis unfold on television with no way to help. If any political campaign in any election extended that suffering by even a day to win a vote, the moral weight of that choice is staggering. Colonel Charles Scott, one of the hostages held in Tehran, later described the experience of the mock executions. In interviews with reporters, he recounted being blindfolded, forced to his knees and told that he was about to die, only to hear the click of an empty chain chamber. Other hostages describe weeks of solitary confinement in windowless rooms where the only human contact came from guards who did not speak English. The psychological damage from these experience, of course, would last for years, manifesting as nightmares, anxiety, profound distrust of government that had been unable to bring them home. The connection between The October Surprise allegations and the Iran Contra scandal that erupted during Reagan's second term, of course is something we have to make note of it as well. In 1985 and 1986, members of the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, the same country that had held those American hostages, the same country that these negotiations had allegedly happened with. And then they used the profits to fund Contra rebels fighting the leftist government in Nicaragua in violation of a congressional ban on such aid. The operation was run through the National Security Council by Lt. Col. Oliver north and when it was exposed it produced a constitutional crisis that, that consumed the final years of the Reagan presidency and I believe really lends credence to the idea that they had a relationship with Iran during the hostage crisis. If October Surprise allegations are true, then the arms for hostage deals with of the Iran Contra affair were not an aberration but a continuation of that relationship. Reagan himself of course, claimed to have no knowledge of the details of the Iran Contra operation. A defense that critics found difficult to accept from a President who was supposedly in command of his administration. Whether his ignorance was genuine or performed, it raised fundamental questions about accountability. Either the President of the United States was unaware that his own staff were conducting secret arms deals with a hostile foreign government and funneling the proceeds into an illegal war that they were also banned from working in, or he knew and he was lying. Neither possibility reflects well on the man who had promised to restore trust in American government, the trust that had fractured after the Watergate scheme scandal. And before I get into Reagan's racism and his classification of quote, the welfare queen, we're going to take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. If you would like these ad free with bonus content, please subscribe on patreon@patreon.com Monty Mater and welcome back. Thank you for listening to those ads. It helps keep the show afloat. In January of 1976, at a campaign rally in Asheville, North Carolina Ronald Reagan introduced an anecdote that would reshape the American conversation about poverty for the next 50 years. Because it got again, all of this is about segregation and it's about fighting back on the New Deal. Why? Because the New Deal benefited the working class and the middle class. It gave people protection, it led to workers rights, union rights, and it gave corporations like more of a hard time. They couldn't treat you the way they wanted to treat you all the time and guarantee you absolutely nothing and they made less profits. And then people didn't like the New Deal because communism, when really it's you're paying your taxes into this. You should get something from your taxes taxes instead of your taxes going to corporate bailouts, for instance. But let's talk about this anecdote. Standing before a crowd of supporters during his challenge to President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, Reagan described a woman from Chicago in language that was designed to produce outrage. And boy, did it. The details he provided were specific enough to sound credible and exaggerated enough to be very enraging. And the story was a masterpiece of political storytelling, and Reagan knew it. This comes from a 1976 campaign speech about the welfare Queen in Chicago.
- [45:46]
B
They found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, Veterans benefits for 4 non existent deceased veterans husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.
- [46:10]
A
Reagan never used this woman's name in his speeches, but reporters soon identified her as Linda Taylor, a woman who'd been arrested in Chicago on charges of welfare fraud. Before long, the press gave her the title that would enter American political vocabulary forever the Welfare Queen. Reagan would continue to tell the story through the 1976 campaign and again during his successful 1980 presidential run, each time adjusting the details to make the tale a little bit more dramatic. By the time he reached the White House, he'd inflated Taylor's number of aliases to 123 and her Social Security cards to 55. The actual charges against Taylor involved far fewer aliases and a fraud total of approximately $8,000, a fraction of the figure that Reagan would cite on the campaign trail. And like, this is the exact same thing that happened last year in Minnesota when they were like, oh, daycare fraud. And there was a white woman who had a massive amount of daycare fraud spanning from COVID and, and, and payouts and assistance that was coming through Covid to make help systems stay running. She had already, first of all, the raid and the investigation happened under the Biden administration. She had already gone through trial, she had already been convicted, and she had already been sentenced. It was taken care of. Does fraud happen in these instances? Yes, but it's very, very rare. The majority of people who are using social services are using it because they need it. And every time, especially the Trump administration has been like, fraud. Oh my God. God. It's already been prosecuted and caught. Nick Shirley is just a grifter because this is the movement of eternal grifting. But it was already prosecuted, it was already dealt with, and it's just a way for them. What I need you to, to. And again, I know it's hard when you grow up your whole life believing that, like, oh, all of this stuff is bad and they're taking you're, you know, a mooch and you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I know that it's hard to deprogram all of that, but understand that they are using this rhetoric of fraud that is extremely rare or doesn't exist at all in some cases to help you vote against what protects you because they want to take more of that money for themselves. The only welfare queens in this country are corporations. We send billions of dollars to corporations. How many times have we bailed out banks, hotels, airlines? You don't get that bailout from the government, do you? And these same corporations not paying taxes. Taxes. You and I both paid more in federal taxes than Disney did. Disney, you and I both paid. If you paid $1, you paid more in federal taxes than Disney did. You paid more in federal taxes percentage wise than Elon Musk did. Something to keep in mind, the real Linda Taylor was far more complicated and far more dangerous than the cartoon Reagan made of her investigative reporting and later scholarship, particularly from Joss Levin. In 2019, his book the Queen revealed that Taylor was simply a woman who cheated the welfare system. She was like a criminal. Again, this is not the. Nor the average person using welfare is not cheating the system. Linda Taylor was just a criminal, the same way other people are criminals and they break into houses and they burglarize. She was a suspected kidnapper who may have stolen children from hospitals. She was a suspected murderer who was connected to the deaths of multiple people in her orbit, including individuals whose life insurance policies she collected. She was a con artist of an extraordinary range. She was just a criminal. Again, this is not the average person who is on Medicare, Medicaid, Snap, Wick. No. This is just someone who was looking at any system they could exploit and she was going to exploit it. And that was life insurance policies. That was anything that she could do. And this just happened to be one of the things, one of the laws she broke. Law enforcement officials who investigated her believed her. She believed that she was capable of serious violent crime. And some of them spent years trying to build a case that would hold a behavior in court. One of the most disturbing aspects of Linda Taylor's story is what happened while she was out on bail for the welfare fraud charges. A woman named Patricia Parks, who had been living with Taylor died of what was officially ruled a barbiturate overdose in 1975. Investigators suspected that Taylor had poisoned Parks to collect on a life insurance policy, but the case was never prosecuted. It was also not an isolated incident. Taylor was connected to other suspicious deaths, and detectives in multiple jurisdictions believed she was responsible for crimes far more serious than welfare fraud. None of this appeared in Reagan's speeches. None of it was useful to his campaign. A suspected serial killer did not serve the narrative he was building. A lazy woman living off the government did. This woman was a con artist. That's it. Welfare was just one of many tools. Again, she wasn't this average person. No, she was a criminal suspected of multiple murders. Taylor's racial identity itself was a reflection of complexity that Reagan's narrative, of course, erased. She claimed at various times to be white, black, Filipino, Hawaiian. Her actual ancestry remains unclear. She was pretty androgynous looking. I'm guessing I don't actually have a picture of her. But she would make a lot of claims about her life and lie. Why? Because she was a con artist. She was a criminal. She moved through racial categories the way she moved through identities. She adopted whatever classification served her purpose at a given moment, whatever identity she was assuming. But in the context of American racial politics, of course, the story that Reagan told was understood by his audience. Audience that the Welfare Queen was a black woman living in the inner city. And they did that on purpose. Again, remember, the foundation of the Moral Majority is racial discrimination in schools. It's also the foundation of the school voucher programs they're launching everywhere, including here in Tennessee. She was driving a Cadillac, collecting government checks and refusing to work. It's an image Drew that drew on centuries of racist stereotypes about black women as lazy, sexually responsible, fundamentally undeserving of public assistance. I want to tell you something about black women. Women. They are the hardest working humans you will ever see. They are incredibly smart, incredibly resourceful. They are powerful. So I, I, I am hard pressed to be convinced of another group of people who work harder, which is why this trope is so much more insulting. Reagan did not need to mention race explicitly because the programmed racism in America filled in the blanks for people. Scholars have documented the in detail how the Welfare Queen narrative functioned as a tool of racial div. Served economic interest. Also, as a reminder, there's more white people on aid than there are black people on aid, right? Like they act like white people aren't on welfare or Medicare or WIC like we are. There's a lot of poor white people, too. Angie Marie Hancock's 2004 study the Politics of disgust demonstrated that a public identity of the welfare queen was constructed through the intersection of race, gender and class stereotypes that made it possible for politicians to attack anti poverty person programs without appearing to attack poor people. Again, it was, it was curated to attack the safety nets that bring people out of poverty, which strengthens the middle class by focusing anger on the figure of undeserving recipient. Not only is she black, she's also a woman. She's also poor. How dare you be poor. Reagan and his allies could propose deep cuts to social programs again, that build the middle class while claiming to be protecting the taxpayers from fraud and sending your taxes instead to corporations who just really need it. Okay, they really need it. The policy consequences of this narrative shift, of course, have been enormous. During his presidency, Reagan signed legislation that tightened eligibility requirements for food stamps. We're seeing that now. Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medicaid, cutting benefits for millions of Americans who fell just above the new thresholds. This happened last year during Reagan's presidency was the largest upward transfer of wealth that this country had ever seen. Until the big ugly bill last last year. That was now the largest upward transfer of wealth that this country has ever seen. So you think the wealth disparity is big now buckle up because it's about to get a lot worse. He reduced funding for public housing, school lunch programs and job training initiatives. Right, the jobs that people need to get off the public assistance. He promoted the idea that the welfare created dependency. It doesn't. We have the data. It doesn't create dependency. People don't want to stay on welfare. Fair. Especially when if they make over a certain amount, they lose it and they're barely getting by it. People have shown over and over that the vast majority of people do not want to ask for government assistance. And when they don't need it anymore, they get off of it. He promoted the idea that welfare created, of course, this dependency and government assistance trapped people in cycles of poverty rather than lifting them out. We also know that's not true and that the solution was not more help, but less help. Just let them starve. That'll fix the problem. And we've seen the same thing with homelessness, and we've seen this in multiple countries. When the state intervenes and provides housing, people get on their feet almost 100% of the time. Like huge percentages of people will get back on their feet and will not be homeless again. Because guess what? When you have a place to live and you have a place to shower and get dressed, you can go apply for jobs and then you can move on when you've got a new job. The philosophy, of course, was built on the foundation that Reagan had laid with the welfare queen story, was the assumption that the poor were poor because of their choices, not because of policy decisions, and that helping them was both wasteful and morally wrong. I highly, highly recommend reading a couple books about this. Understand that poverty and homelessness are curated by American policy choices. They are intentional. If you have not read Poverty by Matthew Desmond and Eviction by Matthew Desmond, I highly, highly recommend it. These are policy choices. When you look around your community, you look around the economy, you are seeing the result of policy and it doesn't matter. I don't care if it's conservative, liberal, red, blue, hot pink, purple, or orange. Does it work if it's not working? We need different policies. And we have been living in the shadow of Reagan's policies policies since 1980, and they're not working. In February of 1986, Reagan delivered a radio address to the nation on the subject of this welfare reform. Speaking from the Oval Office, he described what he called a gathering crisis of family breakdown and declared that misguided welfare programs instituted in the name of compassion. Sounds like toxic empathy, right? Have actually helped turn a shrinking problem into a national tragedy. He framed poverty not as an economic condition, condition created by structural forces, policy decisions, but is a moral failure rooted in the collapse of the family unit. Here we go. Here we go. Here's the sauce. He spoke of teenage mothers, absent fathers, and entire communities where even the memory of families is in danger of becoming extinct. What? What? Nobody, nobody's memory is like, oh, I don't know what a family is. I can't remember what, what, what. We've lost the art of, like, basket weaving in some places. Some people still know how to do it. We've not lost the memory of families. But can you hear this rhetoric that's just. It's just not true. It's just indoctrination. The address was a distillation of every assumption embedded in the welfare queen narrative, delivering with it the full authority of the presidency. And here is a clip of that radio address to the nation on welfare reform, February 15th of 1980.
- [57:24]
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Permit me to take a few moments this afternoon to share with you why I believe this is so. The sad truth is that our welfare system represents one long and sorry tale of disappointment. From the 1950s on, poverty in America was on the decline as economic growth led millions up toward prosperity. Then as the federal government began to spend billions on welfare programs, poverty stopped short, shrinking, and actually began to grow worse. For the first time in our nation's history, millions of Americans became virtual wards of the state, trapped in a cycle of welfare dependency that robs them of dignity and opportunity. With our economic success of the 1980s, the poverty rate has again begun to shrink. But the problem of welfare dependency remains. No one doubts that welfare programs were designed with the best of intentions. But neither can anyone doubt that they failedfailed to boost people out of dependency. In the fight against poverty, we now know it's essential to have strong families. Families that teach children the skills and values they will need in the wider world. How many self made men and women in America owe their success to the strength of character given to them by hard working, loving parents? Yet when we ask whether our welfare system has encouraged families life, we must answer, far from it. Among the welfare poor today, families as we've always thought of them, are often not being formed. Since 1960, the percentage of babies born to unmarried mothers has more than tripled. And too often the mothers themselves are only children 15, 16, 17 years old, who with the birth of their babies, find all the responsibilities of grown ups thrust upon them. As for the fathers, much of the time they are nowhere to be found. We are also coming to understand that our welfare system weakens community values and self esteem. As a lack of skills prevents our young people from obtaining the jobs and careers they want, their hope for themselves and their neighbors disappears. To reverse this terrible cycle of despair, we must build on the vitality and strength in our communities. We must work with our young people as they strive to achieve the basic educational and work skills they need for a bright future. To do this, we must make dramatic changes in the old unworkable government programs. With less than half of the billions now spent on welfare, we could give every poor man, woman and child enough money to lift them above the poverty line. My friends, I believe we're too great a nation, too generous of heart, too bold in finding solutions to permit this waste of lives and money to continue. In seeking solutions, we should return to the basic values that helped build this faith in families, faith in individual dignity and work, and faith in our federal system of government.
- [60:25]
A
And of course, the women and children who bore the heaviest burden of these cuts were by overwhelming marks margins not committing fraud. They were single mothers working minimum wage jobs who relied on food stamps to feed their freaking kids. You want to tell me you're pro life, but as soon as it gets here, you don't care about feeding it if someone who was anti abortion came to me and they said, where I'm pro life. And they did, they did oppose abortion, but they said, I think that we should overhaul the foster care and adoption system system, that the background check should be rigorous, but it should be very affordable so that families that can't afford to have a kid, but can't afford 30 grand to adopt one can adopt these kids, these kids can find homes. I also think we need to put more funding into universal healthcare. We need to have education systems in place, we need to have snap, we need to have wic, we need to have Medicaid, we need to have all this stuff. If they said that to me, then I believe that you're pro life. I still disagree with you on the point of abortion, but you are a pro life person to me because you actually care about them when they get here. Meanwhile, we see everyone who's running around jibber jabbering about being pro life doing exactly the opposite. I don't believe you. Because you don't want anyone who's suffering, especially a kid, to get help. If you don't like their circumstance, if you think their mother's unworthy, if, well, what happened? Why did you get divor. Whatever it is, you have decided that because you don't like it, they don't deserve health and help. And when I tell you, please, for the love of God, send my taxes to feed kids instead of making bombs over oil, for the love of God, please take my taxes to feed kids and help kids go to the doctor. Because here's what happens. I don't have children, I won't have children. I'm not not bringing kids into this show. Absolutely not. But when I put my taxes towards my neighbor's children getting an education or going to the doctor or staying healthy, guess what happens? Well, they get a great degree, they get a great job, they get married, they have children, they're paying their taxes. And when I get old and I gotta go to the doctor a lot more often, all that tax money that I invested for them is now coming back to me because their tax money is helping me. It's about helping a community. That's the difference between matriarchy and patriarchy. Patriarchy is not the opposite of matriarchy. They're not equivalent. If we were to have an inverse of patriarchy, which is everything's built to benefit men, especially white men, then it would be like a gynarchy where things are just built to benefit women. Matriarchy is not that. Matriarchy is where children come first, community comes first, and policy decisions are built around the benefit of children and the benefit of community. And that's why it's so successful. These women were not fraudsters. They were single moms who. Who, like and I. Single moms get so demonized. Why would you demonize the parent that stayed? The parent that actually is taking care of their child, not the parent who left. People say daddy issues. Like a man leaving his child. Is the child's fault that. I'm sorry, I'm getting spicy now. These were also elderly women who had depended on Medicaid for their prescriptions. They were families in public housing who had nowhere to go. The actual rate of welfare fraud, according the government audits conducted during the 1980s, was less than 4% of total program expenditures. Reagan built national policy around the exception and punished the rule. The 96%. 96%. The National Welfare Rights Organization, which had its peak, mobilized more than 100,000 members to advocate for the rights of public assistant recipients, saw its influence collapse under the weight of the welfare queen narrative. The organization's members, many of whom were black women who had spent years fighting for decent income as a right rather than a privilege. Living wages. What? How dare you? Found that the political environment had shifted beneath their feet. The language of rights, dignity, economic justice that had animated the welfare rights movement of the 60s and 70s was replaced by the language of suspicion, surveillance and personal responsibility that assumed every recipient was a potential cheat until proven otherwise. Also, that every recipient's poverty was their fault. Fault. You can't help but lose a job. Sometimes. That happens. But this was all a lie. And again, we hear the same language right now. The legacy of the welfare queen narrative extended well beyond Reagan, of course. It became a central frame through which American politicians discussed poverty for the next three decades when President Bill Clinton signed the Presidential Response. Presidential. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation act of 1996, effectively ending the federal guarantee of cash assistance to poor families. He was operating within the same political landscape Reagan had created. Let's not play games. The Democrats are just as responsible for where we are now as the Republicans. The Conservative Party, the gop, the Moral Majority has been the driving force. And the Democrats, in large part, have sat on their hands. They have taken corporate donations. They have lined their own pockets. They have been weak as fuck. And they have also sided with some of these narratives. So let's hold them accountable, too. And also fuck Bill Clinton disrespectfully. That's a bad joke for him. You get it. You get it the assumptions embedded in that legislation that the poor needed discipline rather than support, that work requirements would solve poverty. They don't. And that the government had been too generous for too long not to rich people were direct descendants of the story that Reagan told on this campaign. And then let's go to poverty and the gender gap. So the budget cuts that were enacted during the Reagan administration produced a set of consequences that fell disproportionately on women in children. Children, all these traditional family people have no problem punishing women and children. A pattern that was documented extensively by government agencies, academic researchers, researchers and advocacy organizations throughout the 1980s. The program's target for reduction were precisely those that women and children relied on most heavily. Food assistance, childcare subsidies, maternal health services, and public housing. The numbers tell a story that I don't think is possible to misread. Between 1981 and 1983, more than 1 million people were removed from food stamp rolls as a result of the elig eligibility changes signed by Reagan. We're seeing this happen right now. Among those who lost benefits, women and children made up the largest share, of course. The Women Infants and Children Program, or wic, which provided nutrition assistance to pregnant women and young children, faced repeated budget proposals that would reduce its reach at a time when infant mortality rates in poor communities were astronomically high. Child care funding was reduced, of course, making it harder for single mothers to maintain employment. Again, this is an attack on women's position as well. Because a woman who can't get assistance, a woman who can't go to work, a woman who can't get education, can't get herself out of poverty, she's much more likely to be dependent on a man, much more likely to be unable to leave. But also her children suffer as a result of these people's very narrow view of what a woman can be. But the goal of this is to push women back because they they declared it in their campaign. They were uncomfortable with the new position of women just like they're uncomfortable with with it now. Reagan and his advisors argued that the solution to poverty was work, not welfare. But they simultaneously cut the programs that made work possible for single moms. Affordable child care, job training, transportation. The result was pos policy environment that told poor women to get jobs while removing the tools they needed to do so, again penalizing the parent who stayed. For many women, particularly women of color who were concentrated in low wage service sector employment, the Reagan era created a trap from which there was no no escape. The impact on children, of course, was measurable. And severe the rate of child poverty in the United States, which had been declining through the 60s and 70s. Again, social programs work. They get people out of poverty and into the middle class. They grow the middle class. That rate started to go the other direction during the 80s, and it began to rise. By 1983, more than 22% of American children were living below the federal poverty line, the highest rate in two deaths decades. Black and Latino children, of course, affected at a higher rate poverty levels in some communities exceeding 40%. These are children who went to school hungry, who lived in homes without heat during the winter, who lacked access to medical care that could have prevented lifelong health problems. The budget decisions. These are decisions, their choices that produce these outcomes were presented to the American people as fiscal responsibility. But the costs were simply shifted from the federal ledger to the bodies of the nation. And those tax cuts went to corporations, not to you and me. The gender gap in American politics, Of course, the measurable difference between how many men and women voted became a recognized phenomenon during the 1980 election and widened through Reagan's presidency. Women opposed Reagan's policies at higher rates than men. We see that now. The administration's response to this opposition revealed the degree to which concerns of women were treated as a political problem rather than a policy failure. Internal White House memos from this period show advisors discussing how to improve Reagan's image among women voters without actually changing the policies the women didn't like or that hurt them. The strategy was cosmetic. Appoint a few women to visible positions of power, hold events, events that feature women supporters and avoid any substantive engagement with policy demands and women's organizations. Sound familiar? And also, who's the first to get first fired? Oh, is it Pam Bondi and Kristi Gnome? Yeah, because the token women. A token always gets spent. The administration's response to the AIDS epidemic represents one of the most consequential failures of the Reagan presidency. The first case of what would later be identified as acquired immune deficiency syndrome, reported by the CDC in June of 1981, five months after Reagan took office. Over the next several years, as the death toll mounted and the disease spread through communities across the country. Country. The Reagan administration didn't do or say anything about it. The president did not publicly mention aids until 1985, by which point, more than 12,000Americans had already died from the disease. He did not deliver a major speech on the subject until 1987, seven years into the crisis and more than 20,000 deaths. The timeline of the administration's silence is damning. When placed alongside the timeline of the disease. In 1982, the CDC began contracting what is initially called the gay related immune deficiency Y. Yikes. And requested emergency funding to investigate the outbreak. The request was denied in 1983, when a reporter asked white house press secretary larry speaks about aids at a press briefing. The exchange became a moment of grotesque comedy. Speaks asked whether the reporter himself had aids, and the press room erupted in laughter. The exchange was recorded and preserved, A permanent document of the administration that treated a plague as a punchline because they thought it only affected the queer queer community. By 1984, scientists identified the virus that was responsible for it and began developing a test to detect it in blood supply. Federal funding for research remained a fraction of what public health officials said was necessary. The reason for this silence, of course, Was political and ideological. Aids was initially concentrated among gay men, and the religious conservative movement that formed a critical part of reagan's base Viewed the disease as a consequence of sinful behavior Rather than a public health emergency emergency. Jerry falwell publicly declared that aids was, quote, is not just God's punishment for homosexuals. It is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals. Pat buchanan, who served as reagan's director of communications, Wrote that the disease was, quote, nature's revenge on gay men, end quote. Within this political environment, an aggressive federal response to aids was seen as politically dangerous. Just let him die, right? A move that would alienate evangelical voters who would help put reagan in office. We can't save lives if the evangelicals don't to want like us. The human cost of this delay is measured, of course, in lives. Researchers and public health officials who worked on aids during the early years of the epidemic have documented in detail how earlier intervention, including increased funding for research, Public education, and support for the communities, could have slowed the spread and saved thousands, and I mean thousands of people. Dr. C. Everett Koop, reagan's own surgeon general, later stated that he was prevented from speaking publicly about aids for the first five years of the epidemic because senior white house officials, and including domestic policy adviser gary bauer, Blocked him from doing so. Coop, a conservative evangelical christian whom reagan had appointed in part to satisfy the religious right, eventually broke with the administration's position and issued a landmark report on AIDS in 1986 that called for comprehensive sex education and widespread distribution of condoms because that's what prevents the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Why is one. Why do we Ideology in the face of common sense? I tell you what. The report was distributed, of course, to every household in the united states, but it be it came Years too late. Thousands of people were already dead. And everyone's afraid. By the time the federal government mounted a serious response, the epidemic had already established itself. The United States, which had the scientific infrastructure and the resources to lead a global fight against AIDS from the beginning, was one of the slowest nations to respond. And the communities that paid the price price for that were. Excuse me. And the communities that paid the price were those that the Reagan administration's closest allies considered expendable. How Christian. The total number of AIDS related deaths in the United States during Reagan, the Reagan presidency exceeded 40,000. Each one of those deaths represented a person with a name, a family, a community that was left to grieve when nothing was being done. And let's get into the battle over the era. The Equal Rights Amendment Amendment. How horrible. To have a constitutional amendment that guarantees that both men and women have equal rights. How terrible. Which would have guaranteed again equal rights for all Americans regardless of sex. Also reached its conclusion during the Reagan era. The era had passed both chambers of Congress in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification with a deadline that was extended to 1982. Reagan opposed the amendment, breaking with the position that every Republican president since Eisenhower had held his opposition aligned with the campaign led by Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist from Alton, Illinois, who had spent decades building a grasswork grassroots network of women who opposed feminism. The indoctrination you have to have as a woman to oppose guaranteeing your own rights. Let's talk about Phyllis here for a second. Schlafly was a formidable political operator who understood the most effective weapon against women's movements was other women. Which is correct. Other women who buy into these conservative women movements are the most dangerous component to women's rights. She organized the Stop ERA campaign, recruiting thousands of women across the country to lobby their state legislatures against gratification. Her arguments were designed to appeal to women who felt threatened by the changes that feminism had brought to American life. She claimed that the ERA would force women into military comment, combat, eliminate alimony and child support protections, require unisex bathrooms, destroy the legal framework that she said protected women with within marriage. Bullshit. Most of these claims were misleading or outright false. Of course they were. But they were effective again because people are terrified of change. We all are in to certain degrees. Schlavly's campaign, which was funded in part by the same corporations that supported Reagan's agenda, succeeded in blocking the ratification. And that is why women do not have protection in the Constitution. The amendment fell three days short of its 38 required three states short. The defeat of the ERA was not simply, of course, a legislative outcome. It was a signal to women across the country whose interest the government intended to prioritize. And it wasn't theirs. Still not pushing us back quite fast. Combined with the budget cuts that devastated social programs, the neglect of the AIDS crisis that left entire communities to suffer, the elevation of the narrative about welfare that demonized poor women as authors of their own misery. We still see this, like in social media comments, will choose better instead of the man that, like, left her to cheat with his secretary. Yeah, choose better me. As if he didn't fake his personality for eight to 10 business years. The Reagan era represented a comprehensive assault on the progress that women had made, and we are seeing the second wave of that assault happening now. The policies and political strategies that Reagan introduced during his presidency did not end when he left office in January of 1989. 1989. They became the foundation upon which subsequent administrations were built. And what we are living in its final form, reform.
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The welfare reform legislation of 1996, again by Bill Clinton, continued alliance with the Republican Party and the evangelical Christian organizations, and the persistent use of racially coded language in political campaigns all trace their origins to Reagan. And again, all of this is racially motivated. All of it is. And all of it is also to benefit corporations, the powerful and the wealthy at the expense of you. Your taxes should give you something. You are not a mooch off the gun government. If you are paying taxes your entire life and for three years, when you get sick or you lost your job or somebody got hurt or your parents were sick, you had welfare assistance three years out of your whole life. Give me a break. The welfare queen, of course, is a political construct. Did not die with Linda Taylor, again a suspected serial killer. The figure evolved and adapted into new contexts, appearing in debates over immigration, health care, criminal justice. Whenever politicians need a scapegoat to justify cutting social services, but not cutting tax breaks to the rich, the underlying logic remained the same. There are people who do not deserve help, and the government wastes money trying to provide it. Of course, this also comes from Reagan. The religious coalition that Reagan assembled in 1980 has become a permanent fixture in American politics. It is responsible for the Trump administration. Evangelical Christians remain the single most reliable voting block in the Republican elections, and the issues that Falwell and Wyrick identified in the late 70s, including abortion, school prayer, opposition to the LGBTQ, continue to dominate the social conservative agenda as well as the opposition to women's rights. The bargain that was struck in those early meetings in which religious voters provided the electoral support in exchange for symbolic policy victories, which, while corporate interests collect the money, was proven quite remarkably durable. The October Surprise allegations remain unsolved, but there is significant amount of evidence to say that the Ronald Ronald Reagan. That the Reagan campaign did interfere with the hostage crisis. The publication of Craig unger's research in 2024 revived public interest in this question and introduced evidence that early investigations had not considered. And again, whether or not they absolutely did that we still have the Iran Contra affair that does indicate that the Reagan administration had connections with Iran supplying weapons. The AIDS crisis, which took more than 40,000American lives during the Reagan presidency alone left scars that never fully healed, prejudice that never healed. The women who lost access to child care, nutrition assistance and job training during those years raised children who grew up in poverty. Those children are now adults. Many of them face the same structural barriers of the Reagan era. And many of them are also predisposed to live in poverty themselves. And of course, the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment left a gap in American constitutional law that's never been filled, that still leaves women at risk to lose our rights and our civil rights liberties. Ronald Reagan is remembered by many Americans as the great communicator, a leader who restored confidence and optimism to the nation. The documented record, however, reveals a lot more complicated things. He was a man who was a great communicator, sure, but he was trained by a corporation deployed in service of an ideology that used to build a coalition that prioritized the powerful over the vulnerable and the corporate over the individual, and of course, the upper class over the middle class. The smile was real, the warmth was genuine. The consequences were devastating for millions of people. People. We also see that. We'll talk a little bit about his inauguration parties and how for the first time there were tickets and charges and it was expensive and ordinary Americans couldn't attend. And how that was really a predictor of what would happen to the presidency, to tax law, specifically within the GOP and the Republican Party. The decisions of Reagan. While his warmth was genuine, the consequences were devastating for millions of people who never had the chance to meet the the man who would change their lives without their consent. And thank you for joining me of part one of Ronald Reagan. I will see you next week for part two on flipping tables.