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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.
