This F*cking Guy: Ronald Reagan

Welcome to another episode of this fucking guy, the show where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I'm Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media's hysteria podcast. And I'm Alyssa Mastermonico, the other host of Crooked Media's hysteria podcast. This episode, we're going to talk about somebody who probably sounds awfully familiar. This divorced guy was elected president on the back of the slogan, "Let's make America great again." This born policy was driven by a piece through strength slogan that didn't exactly work. He did some ill-advised fucking around in Iran. Under this president-taxes and social programs were slashed, defense spending ballooned, and the office of the first lady was occupied by a woman about which rumors swirled about her opaque sexual history. He'd done a middling career hosting a forgettable network TV show. He broke the record for the oldest non-encomment to win the presidency in U.S. history. He was famously a dummy. This all sounds very familiar. Now friends, we may be tired, but we haven't totally lost our minds. We know this sounds a lot like Donald Trump, who we have already covered on this series. But it's actually Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, and one of history's great monsters. We've got a lap to cover. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, before the Titanic. And Aquarius. In a small town called Tampico Illinois. A shithole. You said it, not me. Ronald's dad was an alcoholic named Jack, and his mom was a religious zealot named Nelly. Ever since he was a young boy, Reagan demonstrated a capacity for making shit up. For example, later in his life, Reagan would recall playing a football game as a member of Dixon Illinois's high school team against hated rival Mendoza. Reagan would tell a story over and over about how, at a key moment in the game, a referee asked Reagan if he'd committed a disputed penalty, and Reagan, in his George Washingtonian ability to tell a fib, admitted it. "I told the truth, the penalty was ruled, and Dixon lost the game," Reagan used to say. But writer Lou Cannon looked into this charming yarn in 1984, and found that, quote, "There are no other known accounts of this incident, the only game that Dixon lost to Mendoza when Reagan played was by a 24 to 0 score." In other words, there's no way that scenario ever happened anywhere, but Reagan's imagination. Reagan attended Ureca College, affiliated with his mom's religious denomination, but he wasn't a very good student. Although he was quite the joiner, he was a cheerleader and involved in the drama club among other activities that future Reagan voters would probably classify as less fruity, like being the president of his local chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and playing some football. Because these get-degrees, Reagan graduated from Ureca College in 1932 with a BA in Econ and Sociology, and set out to find his fortune. What he found was that his soothing mid-century voice was perhaps his greatest asset, and he got a job calling Big Ten Football Games, and eventually Chicago Cubs Games, on local Iowa radio stations. Now, remember, this was the 1930s, announcers back then only got bare descriptions of faraway games via the wire service, which meant that sportscasters had to take unadorn descriptions of events and conjure play-by-play narratives using the power of their imagination. So Reagan's job was to make it sound like he was doing something, watching the game and describing what he was seeing to listeners, when he was actually doing something else, reading a wire and telling dramatic stories about what might be happening from a radio station booth in Iowa. In 1937, Reagan traveled with the Cubs to their spring training in California, where he took a screen test. That's like an old timey audition. He must have done a good job or at least his hair did because it landed him a seven-year film contract with Warner Brothers. Imagine that job security in the entertainment business today. Here's a clip from the trailer for his film debut, 1937's Love is On The Air. My job is spreading news. That guy and his mayor brother-in-law are in with Nicely Ferguson's gang. Ms. Ternickles is riding for a fall. And you're the mattress he's going to fall on. Hello again, folks. Here's something hot right off the griddle. I should probably be using more of my mid-century broadcast of voice. Get into it. Inspired by that stirring performance or haircut, other roles came quickly. The next year, while filming the 1938 comedy Brother Rat, Reagan first crossed paths with actress Jane Wyman. Wyman was a gifted actor already well on her way to the A-list. She had also been married and divorced before twice. The heart wants what it wants and love makes people stupid, and Reagan and Wyman were married in 1940. Ronald and Jane had two daughters together, Maureen born in 1941, and Christine born in 1947 who died shortly after her birth. The couple adopted a son Michael in 1945. Shortly after the heartbreak of losing their second daughter, Wyman filed for divorce from Reagan. And it couldn't have been a long time after that devastating personal loss that Wyman won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1948 for her role as a deaf girl in the film Johnny Belinda. Here's her acceptance speech. I accept this very gratefully for keeping my mouth shut once. I think I'll do it again. Wyman was actually more politically conservative than Ronald during their marriage, but that didn't stop her from marrying twice after divorcing Reagan. However, in 1953, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and after she broke up for good with husband number five, she never remarried again. She was a late tertiary of the Dominican Order of Nuns, and so she was buried in full non-regalia after she passed away of natural causes at age 90. A nun that has been married five times. What a life! But back to Ronnie, despite appearing in films alongside his actually talented first wife. Ronald was never destined for anything above the Hollywood Belist. In his most well-known film role, Notre Dame football player George Gipp in Newt Rock Knee, All-American, Reagan's most famous line was delivered in a poorly acted, overwritten death scene. Go Irish! By the early 1940s, Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood star the same way that Dean Kane or Mark McGrath would have been at the height of their careers. But at this way, if the podcast "Who Weekly" had been made in the 1940s, they probably would have talked about Ronald Reagan a lot. But then World War II interrupted things. Reagan, the man who would later build a career denouncing government favoritism, began his war by benefiting from it. On September 17, 1941, a college frat brother turned FBI agent named Charles Browning Jr. wrote to FBI headquarters that he was "intimately acquainted through the fraternity with various VIPs who, quote, "might be of some assistance to the bureau." Reagan was among them. Legendary freak FBI director Jay Edgar Hoover filed Reagan's info with the head of the LA Field Office just in case the Gipper might come in handy. And he did. That fall, Reagan was working on the biggest film of his career, The Million Dollar Warner Brothers Production Kings Row, and negotiating a contract that would nearly triple his salary when he learned he would have to report for military service. That's the second worst thing that Hitler did, was interrupt Ronald Reagan's movie career and steer him toward politics. According to the historian Stephen Vaughn, Reagan received special treatment to avoid combat. His studio, Warner Brothers, first requested a deferment on the grounds that losing him would cost them a lot of money. When that failed, Jack Warner turned to William Guthrie, the studio's liaison to the military. Guthrie had lasted only two years at the FBI before being dismissed in 1920, quote, "because of conduct, unbecoming an agent," with an internal inquiry, concluding he was, quote, "entirely dishonest," had used his position to further his own ends and was, quote, "not above accepting gratuities or graft." In other words, a total slime ball. Guthrie's solution to Reagan's act of duty problem was to have the studio dispatch a retired officer who was friendly with the general in charge of the Presidio Army base in San Francisco and lobby him directly for Reagan's deferment. It worked. His call to duty was put off at least twice until April 19, 1942. When he finally reported, it was to the Calvary Reserve at Fort Mason in the Presidio, where his poor eyesight made him eligible only for limited state side service. Behind the scenes, Warner and Guthrie had persuaded the Army Air Corps to set up a dedicated movie detail, and so the first motion picture unit was established in Culver City, California. According to Reagan's own military records, Guthrie arranged Reagan's quick transfer into the unit. Rest of the war, Reagan narrated and appeared in films promoting the Air Corps, recruiting enlistees, and training men for combat he would never see, while also helping produce newsreels for movie theaters. He was promoted to Captain. Captain Pretend. By the end of the Second World War, Reagan had ingratiated himself to the FBI. You see, while Ronald was cranking out over 400 American propaganda films seen by millions, behind the scenes he was building his snitch resume. In 1945, after his Army Air Corps basketball team played the FBI's team at the Elk's Club that is so mid-century, Reagan drove home with agent H. Rex Ellis and passed along Goss, tailored to director Hoover's interests. A second-hand claim that New York Governor Thomas Dewey, while running for president, had vowed that if elected there would not be enough jails for the people he intended to imprison, and that Hoover would be among the first. The special agent in charge in LA forwarded the item to Hoover in a report that described Reagan in flattering terms, noting he was, of course, a Captain in the U.S. Army, and had said he would certainly be inclined to side with Hoover. When the war wound down, Reagan skated out of military service on the same zamboni to ice that he'd skated in on. In the fall of 1945, Guthrie arranged his prompt discharge, returning him to civilian life and a salary of $3,500 a week, which is about $65,163 in $226 money. Reagan had fought the entire war from about 20 minutes from his Beverly Hills house. As the Cold War set in, director Hoover sunk even further into his paranoia. He became obsessed with the idea of a Kremlin-directed plot to take control of Hollywood and turn the world's largest film industry into a Soviet op. Even before the war ended, Hoover opened an inquiry code named ComPick, that's communist infiltration of the motion picture industry, if you're nasty, aimed at gauging communist activity in the film unions and among screenwriters, actors, directors, executives, and what one FBI report called the so-called intellectuals in general. Reagan soon turned up in the reporting. Alongside Reagan, the report listed two Democratic congressmen, the writer Carrie McWilliams, and the actors Gregory Peck and Edward G. Robinson. Reagan had also lent his name to a committee dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, as had Paul Robeson, the vocally anti-racist singer, and actor who openly admired the USSR. Why was Ronald suspected of communism simply by attending a dinner with a communism appreciator? Well, Alyssa Domino theory dictates that if you eat dinner next to a Soviet sympathizer, you can catch communism. It's like measles. As ComPick intensified, Hoover told his LA agents to cultivate more Hollywood informers, and guess who was perfect for the part, this fucking guy. Reviewing their files, the agents found Reagan doubly useful, while placed inside the allegedly suspicious organizations, like the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, or Hick Asp. Reagan also had a good wrap with the Bureau due to the 1945 DOE tip. It didn't hurt that Reagan's brother Neil Moon Reagan, who was working at the McCann Erickson ad agency, was also an FBI snitch. Snitching is the family business. Moon Reagan was serving as an informer in the Bureau's investigation of alleged communist infiltration of radio and television, logged as confidential informant T-36. Ronnie's confidential informant number was T-10, but the Tommy wrote his 1990 memoir in American life. Sorry, I love doing this in Russian. Donald Reagan had finessed the story of how he became a slut for the FBI as reluctant patriotism. The agents he wrote confided that communists were trying to rest control of the Hollywood workforce and shape the content of films. So naturally, when Feds asked whether they could meet with him periodically, he said, "Of course, they could. What patriot wouldn't?" Hugged that flag tight, his cooperation extended to handling the records of an organization he belonged to. Before quitting Hick Asp, Reagan absconded with some of its internal documents. Hick Asp's 1946 minutes, according to Bureau records, subsequently made their way into the FBI's possession. By the fall of 1946, Reagan, who is now an officer of the Screen Actors Guild, had thrown himself into what he viewed as a fight against an international communist conspiracy in Hollywood. This was around when there was a big debate over whether SAG members should back the conference of studio unions or CSU, which was striking on behalf of movie set builders for better wages and working conditions. Although the National Labor Relations Board had recognized the CSU, Reagan and his fellow directors concluded the union was merely waging a jurisdictional turf war with rival Ayatsi. Coincidentally, Ayatsi was headed by Roy Brewer, one of Hollywood's most strident anti-communists. When SAG convened at the Old Hollywood Legion Stadium, Reagan delivered the board's recommendation against supporting the CSU strike. The meeting boiled over with more drama than the Vanderpump Rules reunion after Skand Evolved. Harper and an Edward G. Robinson argued for backing the strike, and the actor Alexander Knox rose to deliver a mean parody of Reagan's remarks. Eventually, however, the actors' guild voted overwhelmingly to not join the strike. The strike was sporadically violent over its many months and produced what was then the largest mass arrests in California history, 700 people detained for violating a court order capping the number of picketers. Rick Pearlstein, in The Invisible Bridge, argued that Reagan's maneuvering gave cover to the studio's campaign to break the more radical of the two unions, handing SAG liberals who didn't want a strike, a story that turned them into moral innocence instead of scabs. Reagan won a special election to become the president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, which brings us back to him and Jane Wyman. On April 10th, the FBI interviewed Reagan, and he and Wyman handed over the names of the actors they suspected of communist sympathies. But six months later, on October 23rd, 1947, in open testimony before the House on American Activities Committee, or Huak, Reagan not only didn't name names, he pretended he had no way of knowing who the communists were in Hollywood. We have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people's activities curtailed. After all, we must legally recognize them like the president is a political party. On that basis, we have exposed their lives when we came across them. We have been eminently successful in preventing them from their usual tactic of trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority. For context, the House on American Activities Committee was established as a standing committee of the House of Representatives in 1938. It was ostensibly created to investigate subversion, but in practice, it functioned as a cudgel against people critical of the actions of the American government by creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Huak was the original cancel culture, a body that could weaponize accusations of being un-American to destroy people's lives and careers. Most of its focus was on the left, as evidenced by its infamous 1947 and 1951 Hollywood hearings where it hold writers, actors, and directors before cameras, and demanded they confess their politics and title on their friends. Ever heard the phrase, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" Huak is where that came from. In Huak's defense, at least for all the havoc it wreaked and distrust it sowed and careers it ruined, it produced no useful legislation and few actual spies. So you know, that's a little solace. Anyway, just to review, Ronald Reagan told the committee, six months after turning over a list of people's names, that there was no way he could possibly know the names of subversives working in Hollywood. Classy. Classy and Brave. You really can tell he fought World War II from Culver City. Reagan also probably directed the SAG executive director to name 54 more alleged subversives in Hollywood. One of them was a character actor named Jay Edward Bromberg, who was forced to testify before Huak despite his complaints that he had a bad heart. He was blacklisted and died six months later of a heart attack. We only know the extent of Reagan's Hollywood snitching because the San Jose Mercury news obtained the FBI report by filing a FOIA request in 1985. What we don't know is the eight names Reagan and Wyman gave because all of them were blacked out. Amid the tumult of his snitching, running sag and getting divorced, in 1949, Reagan met a young aspiring actress named Nancy Davis. Davis, like Reagan, was an actor of middling talent and quixotic ambition. She'd ended up on a Hollywood blacklist due to some kind of clerical error and was told Ronnie was the one to see to fix it. And well, the rest is history. Nancy's mom was a stage actress who chose the stage over Nancy's biological father. Thanks to her mother's theater connections, Nancy's godmother was an avant-garde actress named Ala Nazimova. One of the most influential and important figures in what's now known as "Safic Hollywood." She was privately bisexual and many of her films explored feminism and queerness. She was truly a pioneer ahead of her time. So Nancy Reagan has no excuse for turning out as lame as she turned out. She was handed the keys to the cool kingdom and said, "You know what? I want to hang out with Ronald Reagan and yell at children about drugs instead." Eventually Nancy's mom remarried this time to a wealthy neurosurgeon who moved the family to Chicago. As a result, Nancy grew up rubbing elbows with other rich kids and the occasional celebrity, her mom knew. Unlike communism, talent is not contagious. And Nancy Davis as much as she wanted to follow in her talented mother's footsteps was not a talented actor. Here's the future Mrs. Reagan showing off her chops in the next voice you hear. "It was a kind of a funny thing on the radio just now. That was a kind of a funny, empty sound. And then a voice said, "This is God. I'll be with you for the next few days." "What?" "A voice said, "This is God." "I'll be with you for the next few days." "Well, that would happen." Not a Jane Wyman. So, for being a woman of room temperature talent, how did Nancy Davis get parts? According to Kitty Kelly's unauthorized 1991 biography, Nancy "was renowned in Hollywood for performing oral sex." The book claims she was known as "Just Say Yes," Nancy, and gave an award-winning blowjob "Not only in the evening, but in offices. That was one of the reasons that she was very popular on the MGM lot." And we'll let Kitty Kelly's words stand on their own. In 2021, the salacious claim would resurface again via a particularly funny version of the Streisand effect, Abby Shapiro, whose brother is pocket-sized douchebag Ben Shapiro, posted a tweet comparing Madonna and Nancy Reagan at around the same age, claiming that Nancy was the picture of living with class while Madonna was trashy. Now, this was the perfect alley-oop to another Twitter user who resurfaced, an excerpt from a 1998 Village Voice article repeating the chicken head rumour from the disputed Kelly book. One thing led to another, the internet-internet-ed, and that's how Nancy Reagan's throat goat became a trending topic on Twitter years after the former First Lady's death. Anyway, Ronald and Nancy fell in love somehow. They were married in March 1952 and had two children. children, Patti in October, 1952, and Ron in May, 1958. By this point in his career, Reagan was never going to be bankable as a movie star, so he went slumming on television. He was tapped to host General Electric Theater, an anthology stocked with guest stars. He and Nancy still acting under the name Nancy Davis appeared together in three episodes. "Oh, that's hot." "Oh, it's not." "Oh, but delicious." "Well, it's the easiest meal to make. My electric servants do everything." "Well, that's part of living better electrically." "The English muffins. My new toaster toast to them, then I sprinkled on some grated cheese and put them in the toaster oven down here at that melt of the cheese." "Wow." "She could even melt cheese. What can't she do?" After General Electric Theater's cancellation in 1965, Reagan picked up the reigns of another show "Death Valley Days." In a remarkable act of synergy, "Death Valley Days" told on Western themed stories that took place mostly in the area in and around "Death Valley." After Borex's mind, "Death Valley Days" gave soft-handed boy Ronald Reagan a chance to burnish his cowboy credentials, which came in handy when he decided to audition for the role of cowboy president. Now, it's important to remember here that the FBI was not done with Reagan at all. Author Seth Rosenfeld, in his excellent 2012 book "Subversives," revealed the extent to which Reagan the politician could not have existed without meddling from the feds. He and Jay Edgar Hoover were constantly jerking each other off. Frankly, as far as we know. In 1960, Reagan had them check on his daughter, Maureen, who was rumored to be shacking up with a married man. "Extremely cool and normal." And according to Rosenfeld, in January of 1965, FBI agents were close to arresting a mobster named Joe, Joe Bananas, Banana. Mid-century American mobsters had the best nicknames you do have to hand it to them. Yes, you do. Credit where it's due. So, Joe Bananas was about to get arrested, but the agent circling him discovered that the gangsters shit had teen son had been doing some hell-raising with the shit had teen son of an important informant who had political aspirations, codename T10, aka Ronald Wilson Reagan. Jay Edgar Hoover himself intervened and told the agents that they should warn Ronald Reagan instead of using Reagan's son to get to banana. In the interest of not derailing T10's career, the FBI never did Nab Joe Bananas. Martin Scorsese could really have punched that story up. But now the political pivot. Reagan had been a lifelong New Deal Democrat, but he drifted right during his year as hosting General Electric Theater. Part of his contract with the sponsor company required him to tour GE Plants and hang out with the Hoi Ploy, and his talks to the working masses grew steadily more anti-government and anti-tax. Reagan re-registered as a Republican in 1962. His real launchpad was a single televised address, a time for choosing, delivered on October 27, 1964, for Barry Goldwater's collapsing presidential bid. "One side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used. We've never had it so good. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. The day 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector share. And yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last 12 months. And now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world." And I'm going to make it worse. I mean, you know, the speech thrilled audiences. I guess people were bored in the early 1960s. And out of Goldwater's landslide defeat, it left Reagan as the conservative movement's most marketable new face. A gaggle of wealthy Southern California businessmen, the Friends of Ronald Reagan, promptly formed to recruit and fund him, hired a PR firm to run the campaign, and brought in two behavioral scientists to school him on policy and teach him how to fend off attacks about his lack of experience. Having Jay Edgar Hoover in his corner was nothing to sneeze at, but Reagan's political career was also helped along by serendipitous social changes. By 1966, California's white middle class was unnerved by the televised chaos of the previous decade. The free speech movement and student radicalism at Berkeley, the deadly Watts riots of August 1965, rising crime in taxes, and resentment of fair housing law. In other words, the whites were scared, and nothing good happens when the whites are scared. Reagan's campaigns tend to fused superficial optimism with cultural grievance. Reagan presented himself as just an ordinary California guy running against career politicians in bloated bureaucracy, a nice bit of political jiu-jitsu that turned his paperthin resume into his strength. A real Spencer Pratt. California's craved a phony who was telling them that things were the way they wished they were instead of the way they actually were, and Reagan was just that phony. Genial and telegenic on the surface, he was a master of the dog whistle back before the dog whistle had turned into a bullhorn. He vowed to clean up the mess at Berkeley, hammered welfare waste in law and order, and played on anxieties about disorder and race without saying so outright. "History is brought to you by Helix. I didn't believe a mattress could make that much of a difference until I got my Helix midnight lux mattress. It perfectly matches my specific sleep needs with zoned lumbar support. 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Now Reagan had some skeletons in his closet due to the fact that he was a rap that the FBI used like its own personal errand boy for petty revenge. Luckily Hoover's FBI was pretty good at keeping skeletons buried, Reagan lied by omission on a form containing a list of his group memberships, lying on said form was a felony, the FBI helped him cover it up. California's incumbent Democratic governor Pat Brown ran an ad attacking Reagan, where and he reminded school children that an actor had shot Lincoln, but it read his petty and backfired with tracks, I love that so much, you know an actor, they shoot presidents, okay. Dangerous. November 8, 1966, Reagan won the California governor's race by nearly a million votes, roughly 58 to 42% and took office in January 1967, proving the template, phony-ass optimism that forms the bright candy shell around a molten interior of piss and vinegar that would carry him to the White House 14 years later. Once an office, Reagan tackled the most urgent issue to regular Californians. Lowering taxes? Nope, decreasing the crime rate, nope, bringing good jobs to the state, no less, obviously it was getting University of California president Clark Kerr fired. Now throughout his campaign for governor, Reagan had been fixated on UC Berkeley. He called UC Berkeley's campus a "haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviance," and recounted sexual orgy so violent, "Get out, describe them to you." He likened protesters to the Viet Cong and Hitler's stormtroopers and accused professors of turning universities into staging areas for insurrection. So good. This is puzzling because, like, what? Why would Ronald Reagan, a California transplant who had attended college in Illinois, have his tidy whiteies in such a twist over the president of the UC system? Unless, unless, the real grudge wasn't Reagan's, it was Jay Agarhoovers. Andrew's grudge with Kerr had solidified when in 1959, the UC system application contained the essay question, "What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?" In response, Hoover demonstrated exactly what those dangers were. In 1960, the Bureau escalated from spying to active sabotage. FBI officials mounted a covert campaign to turn public opinion against the university and embarrass officials by planting negative news stories and arranging for conservative allies to complain to the regents, an astroturf campaign like a brick-and-mortar gamer gate. In late 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson picked Kerr to become Secretary of Health Education and Welfare and Hoover killed it. The FBI misled Johnson by sending the White House allegations smearing Kerr and two of his staff members, even though the Bureau had investigated the claims and knew they were false. The nomination was withdrawn. Hoover kept up his psychotic campaign of surveillance and sabotage through Reagan's campaign. In 1966, Reagan met with UC Berkeley staff and faculty who were also informants. They briefed him about communist efforts to influence the students, and argued that Kerr's removal was vital to the university's future. Meanwhile, Hoover, working the other end, ordered his agents to leak information to members of the Board of Regents to convince them that Kerr was not being tough enough on student protesters and had to be shitt canned. Reagan was sworn in January 2, 1967. He immediately stacked the university's Board of Regents with sycophants, and weeks later, Kerr was forced out. Fun fact, among those sycophantic board members, voting to fire Kerr was Regent H.R. Bob Haldeman, the Watergate guy. Wow, it's a small world after all. So why do we know all this? In 1991, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled the FBI had been spying on campus protest groups at Berkeley, and that the bureau had investigated Kerr unlawfully. The files themselves were released in 2002 after a 15-year legal battle, the FBI fought up toward the Supreme Court. Kerr hadn't even seen his own FBI file, and when author Seth Rosenfeld showed it to him, he was shocked. He had no idea. Was Reagan a straight shooter? No. But was Reagan a good fiscal mind? Also no. Reagan had run against government bloat, but when he took office, he faced quite a pickle. How do I pay all these bills without making more money? Turns out the way the government gets more money is to take more money, and in 1967, he signed the largest tax increase in the history of any state to that point. And over his two terms in office, California's budget more than doubled, from $4.6 billion to a cool $10.2 billion, hardly a picture of fiscal conservatism. In 1967, the future white knight of the nascent pro-life movement signed the therapeutic abortion act into law. The law basically made abortion legal in California years before Roe v. Wade would legalize it nationally. You know what? Ronald Reagan also did no fault divorce. California's first state in the country to allow no fault divorce, a real feminist. Late in 1967, columnist Drew Pearson published a column alleging a homosexual ring operating in the governor's office. Pearson claimed that eight men had an orgy in a late Tahoe hotel. The riving pile of limbs allegedly included two staffers from the governor's office, both of whom had already quietly been pushed out. Ronald Reagan held an entire press conference to quash the rumors. Reagan denied it, but his comms director appeared to confirm that, in fact, two of his staffers had been fired after their homosexual acts were discovered. After Black Panthers strapped with weapons, protested at the state capitol in May 1967, Reagan signed one of the nation's most comprehensive pieces of gun control legislation, the Malford Act, which prohibited the carrying of a loaded firearm without a permit. Reagan said there was no reason why on the street today, citizens should be carrying loaded weapons. Sometimes people are right for the wrong reasons. In this case, this was more about Reagan's here of armed black people than concerned for gun control. It must have been a real Sophie's choice for him to choose between racism and the second amendment. With 1969, could be considered the Battle of Bunker Hill of Governor Reagan's War on Hippies. Reagan pressured his old nemesis UC Berkeley to fence off a community park that was slated for development, and police ended up firing on protesters and bystanders. A 25-year-old man named James Rector was killed. 128 residents of Berkeley were hospitalized. Reagan ratcheted up the violence by sending 2700 National Guard troops to occupy the city for two weeks. This had claimed that Rector was the instigator, but that turned out to be bullshit. Time magazine reported he wasn't even a protester. He just happened to be there, a bystander. 12 of the police deputies were indicted over the incident. Reagan continued to be a huge asshole about the whole thing, saying, "Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen." Unless your FBI agent, buddy, can get you out of it by inventing a special movie division where you only pretend to fight in war. And showbiz, the dogs of war can be added in post. Now, let's talk about how Ronald Reagan helped create America's current homelessness problem. California had already kicked more than half of the patients out of state mental health care facilities by the time Reagan took office. But in 1967, Reagan signed the Lanterman Petrus Short Act, or LPS. At the time, its proponents fancied it a landmark piece of civil liberties legislation protecting people from involuntary hospitalization. In practice, the Act made it more difficult for mental health patients to receive care. Within a few years, California's state-run hospitals were virtually empty. The emptying of state-run mental health care facilities created a money-making opportunity for terrible people, care homes. And even more luckily, Ronald Reagan knew some terrible people who wanted to get in on the ground floor. One chain of these four-profit care centers called Beverly Enterprises owned 38 facilities. In an almost supernatural coincidence, five of its board members were active Ronald Reagan fundraisers and donors. Wow! Care homes could be nightmarish places. Many were overcrowded, dirty, unregulated, and clustered in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Patients would be kicked out when their symptoms became unmanageable and end up on the street. Others would leave willingly due to the horrible conditions and also end up on the street. And because of where the facilities were located, patients who left care homes were vulnerable [BLANK_AUDIO] violence and exploitation. Now that it was so difficult for mentally ill people to get hospitalized, police would use a rest as a backdoor to get people off the streets. Reagan's signing LPS essentially created a system where mental illness was criminalized because Jill was the only place sick people had to go. By the mid-1970s, some assessments found that around one in 20 inmates in California were psychotic. While people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be victims of crimes and perpetrators, a flood of severely mentally ill people unable to obtain treatment also led to a surge in violent crimes in the Golden State. In 1970, John Frazier thought he was responding to the voice of God and killed a husband and wife, their two sons, and the husband's secretary. This, after his mother and wife had both tried and failed to get him treatment. Herbert Mullin killed 13 people in 1972 after three hospitalizations and as many premature releases, he believed that killing people prevented earthquakes. Perhaps most famously, in 1973, Edmund Kemper, a severely mentally ill man who was the inspiration for the book and TV series Mindhunter, killed his mother and seven other people, mostly young women he'd picked up hitchhiking around Santa Cruz, California. He'd killed his grandparents eight years prior at age 15, but had been released from a state hospital. - So, in a way, some of those horrifying 1970s California murders were Ronald Reagan's fault. Well, they weren't Ronald McDonald's. Reagan had his sights set on the White House before he even left Sacramento. He announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican nomination for presidency at the National Press Club in Washington on November 20th, 1975. This was considered a bit gauche as he was challenging the sitting president of his own party, Gerald Ford, only one sitting U.S. Senator backed him. - It was during these primaries that Reagan's dog whistle racism intensified. In Florida, he used racially coded language about food stamp recipients, calling them, quote, "strapping young bucks" gross. The '76 campaign is also when he popularized the welfare queen story drawn from the case of Linda Taylor. He would tell that story so often, over and over again for years, and with his retellings, her story got more elaborate. By the end, she had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 social security cards, and was collecting benefits for four dead husbands who didn't even exist. All in, the Taylor of Reagan's stories had collected $150,000 from the government. - The real story was much less dramatic. Taylor had only used two fake names to net $8,000, and she was convicted for those crimes. Even after the press looked into the story and confronted Reagan with the actual facts, he kept using his exaggerated version of the story. Never let the truth get in the way of a good narrative. That's the Ronald Reagan way. Against the odds, the Reagan Ford primary fight went all the way to the convention where the sitting president defeated his same party challenger on the first ballot. That loss ended the official campaign for Ronald Reagan in 1976, but he never really stopped running. He stuck around biting his time and bitching about Jimmy Carter until on November 13th, 1979, Reagan launched his 1980 campaign in a nationally televised speech from New York City. - From there, the destination is familiar, a sweep of the primaries, the nomination at Detroit in July with George H. W. Bush as his running mate, Reagan's staff stealing Jimmy Carter's briefing book before a debate and decisive victory over his beswettered nemesis on November 4th, 1980. Republicans also took control of the Senate, 5346, handing over to a former middle and actor, incredible power. Perhaps the best frame through which to view the Reagan years is as years of collective American optimistic self-delusion, led by a man so enamored with embellishment that he couldn't tell the truth from fiction or didn't care. Lots of politicians lie, but usually it seems like there's a reason. President Trump, for example, lies to make himself sound bigger and stronger and richer than he actually is. But Ronald Reagan seemed to lie about things for no reason. It could be that he confused real life with things he'd seen in movies or that he just loved interesting stories so much that he convinced himself that they were real or maybe he was one of those weirdos who just lied for fun. He didn't even make it through his inaugural address before telling the first lie of his presidency. - And on the far shore, the sloping heels of Arlington National Cemetery with its row upon row of simple white markers under one such marker, lies a young man, Martin Treptown, who left his job in a small town barbershop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We're told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf, under the heading, my pledge, he had written these words. America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone. - Chicken Soup for the Yuppie Soul Tonicide. Treptow is not buried in Arlington National Cemetery as Reagan implies, he's buried in Bloomer, Wisconsin. Reagan knew this when he delivered the speech, his aides told him as much, but Reagan chose to go with the more interesting version of events. - Two months after Reagan's inauguration, a super fan of the film Taxi Driver named John Hinckley shot the president in an attempt to impress the actress Jodie Foster. The bullet that hit Reagan injured him in the underarm, ribs, and lung. His press secretary, James Brady, suffered a brain injury serious enough to disable him for the remainder of his life. Jodie Foster and John Hinckley did not fall in love. - Such a shame. Love isn't real after all. Okay, so I hope it's not too soon to politicize this 45 year old incident of gun violence, but we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Hinckley had untreated schizophrenia. More care options would have been available to him, head former California Governor Ronald Reagan, not helped lead the way in a nationwide trend of deinstitutionalization. Now, that wasn't Reagan's first brush with the consequences of his own artless approach to mental illness. His personal tax advisor Roy Miller had two sons who developed schizophrenia. One of them died by suicide. The other killed his mother. And there were plenty of high profile cases of people who were untreated, causing harm to themselves or people around them. During the 1980s, John Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman, who also had untreated schizophrenia. A former member of Congress named Allard Lowenstein was killed by a former mentee named Dennis Sweeney, whose untreated schizophrenia led him to believe that Lowenstein had put a transmitter implant in his teeth. Still, Reagan and his classically himboway didn't seem to connect the dots. One person who did want to connect the dots, if by dots, you mean stars in the sky, was his wife Nancy. America's first throw-go, Aaron. I'm sorry, (laughs) America's first throw-go was so upset by the 1981 attempt on her husband's life that she called on Joan Quigley, a astrologer, and brought her on as a sort of unofficial advisor. And by unofficial advisor, I mean, that people didn't know about it until it had been going on for years. Nancy was so beholden to Joan's readings that Joan was dictating things like meeting and debate times and when press conferences should happen. Air Force One was circling airports so that it could land when the planets were correctly aligned according to Joan. And the first lady was paying Joan about three grand a month to be at her back in call, the equivalent of more than $10,000 a month today. The two would speak on an unsecure line. In 1988, Reagan's former chief of staff, Donald Reagan, which is confusing because it sounds like a clumsy alias that Ronald Reagan would make up in a panic, wrote a book about his time working for the president. In it, he recounted his tense relationship with the first lady due to her reliance on Quigley's advice. Donald Reagan resigned in 1987, but the exposure of Nancy's astrologer caused some waves because of the gookiness of it and also because it was horribly bad for national security to have some lady in San Francisco getting briefed on the president's movements by his wife via unsecure phone line. Can't confirm, that's not good. That's not good. Once Joan Quigley's cover was blown, she and Nancy never spoke again, but Joan and Nancy both wrote books with conflicting narratives about how everything went down. Look, I think astrology's interesting and some of the reflexive ridicule of it, smacks of misogyny. However, it's also fair to be skeptical of how the Reagans utilized it and the disregard for information security Nancy had when it came to Joan. Especially because Nancy was a demonstrably silly frivolous woman. For example, shortly after Reagan's election in 1980, his transition team requested that Jimmy Carter and his family move out of the White House early so that Nancy could start decorating, which is extremely uncool. So rude, her extravagance seems quaint in the Trump era, but at the time it all came across as very tacky. Nancy also raised more than $800,000 from donors for her project and spent about $200,000 on a new set of White House China. Bear in mind, this was all happening during a recession when ordinary Americans were pinching pennies and under the watch of a president who had promised to slash spending on programs that benefited the poor and needy. Gee, this sounds awfully familiar. Queen Nancy, as she was called by her haters, defended her spending by saying she was supporting the fashion industry and donating her wardrobe to museums. Her signature anti-drug campaign did real work refurbishing the self-involved image she'd acquired early on, but it has aged badly with critics, probably because it was ridiculously stupid. The thrill can kill. The drug dealers need to know that we want them out of our schools, neighborhoods, and our lives. And the only way to do that is to take the customers away from the product, say no to drugs, and say yes to life. Just say no is a trite summation that offered window-dressing to Reagan's punitive foolish and disastrous war on drugs. The Anti-drug Abuse Act of 1986 funneled $1.7 billion into this so-called drug war and dictated mandatory minimum sentences that gave judges no wiggle room. There was also a massive sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. It only took five grams of crack to trigger a mandatory five-year prison sentence. It would take 500 grams of powder cocaine to catch the same charge. The two drugs are chemically identical, but crack was cheaper and more common in black neighborhoods. Thus, the war on drugs was a mass incarceration campaign waged against black Americans. The rate sent to federal prison went from 50 to 250 per 100,000 adults under Reagan's watch. White people were more likely to use crack in their lifetimes than black people. So while Nancy Reagan's just say no campaign reads like the "Best" of the 1980s, it gave a sinister effort an anondine cover. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan's big ideas about fiscal conservatism were face planting. He had promised his 1981 Economic Recovery Act would cut taxes by 30 percent and increase defense spending by $750 billion. But somehow through the magic of trickled on economics, balanced the federal budget within three years. Reagan did enact the largest tax cuts in U.S. history, but there was no spike in revenue from increased economic activity. It turns out that when you give rich people more money, they just keep it. By late 1981, America was in an own goal of a recession, and a Reagan official named David Stockman admitted in November of that year that, quote, "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers." Oh no, that's your whole job, you're an economist. And that supply side economics, quote, "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." Extremely cool when the director of the Office of Management and Budget is just like, "Huh!" Some of Reagan's lies were kind of funny. On the campaign trail, Reagan had claimed that "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." And later arrived at a campaign event to find a tree festooned with a sign that warned "Chop me down before I kill again." It's so good. Reagan claimed, in 1982, "In England, if a criminal carried a gun, even though he didn't use it, he was tried for first degree murder and hung if he was found guilty. He was told the story wasn't true, and his spokesperson, who was literally named Larry Speaks, defended the story on the basis of, it made the point, didn't it?" Reagan repeated the story again during an interview with The New York Times in 1986. Ronny once claimed that apartheid South Africa had, quote, "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought." But South Africa had been on the wrong side of World War II, the war that Ronald Reagan made movies about serving in, which brings up a question that I've been very curious about since I was a kid listening to my parents grumbling about Ronald Reagan. Just how long was his brain turning into Swiss cheese? Like we know that Alzheimer's was taking a notable toll on him by a second-term in office, but honestly, he seems a bit adult by the early '80s. In 1983, Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir that he'd been a photographer with the U.S. Army, and that he'd personally been there to film the liberation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. Then he repeated the story to Simon Weissenthal, a literal Holocaust survivor in February 1984. Ronald Reagan wasn't there when Allied forces liberated the death camps. It was in Culver City, making movies about the people who were actually doing the liberating. In 1983, Reagan gave a speech to a convention of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, where he told a story of a heroic World War II service member. The story goes that a B-17 plane was hit by enemy fire on the way back to England, trapping a young ball turret gunner. As the plane began to lose altitude, the other soldiers aboard were ordered to bail out. When the commander saw that the boy was trapped, he opted to stay back and go down with the gunner and the plane, telling the boy, "Nevermind, son, we'll ride it down together." According to Reagan, the commander was given the Medal of Honor posthumously. Reagan got visibly emotional telling that story. Lars Erick Nelson of The New York Daily News checked hundreds of Medal of Honor records. He discovered, quote, "It didn't happen. It's a Reagan story. The president of the United States went before an audience of 300 real Congressional Medal of Honor winners and told them about a make-believe Medal of Honor winner." Wow, this incident is used as an example of how false memories are created. Some have surmised that Reagan's mockish fib mirror is a scene from a 1944 film called "Wing in a Prayer." There was also a story in an issue of readers' digest of which Reagan was an ardent reader that mirrored the general trajectory of the story. The White House never found evidence that the story was true. Most of Reagan's lies were senile or perplexing, but there was one haystack of falsehoods that almost derailed his presidency, the Iran Contra Affair. The Iran Contra Affair didn't hit until after Reagan was in his second term. He defeated Democratic nominee Walter Mondale in a historic electoral shalacking in 1984, netting 524 votes to Mondale's 13. Go Minnesota. 13? I know Minnesota rites since forever, correct? Rites since forever, yes. But percentage-wise, it wasn't that dramatic. Reagan won 58.8% of the popular votes. Still, Americans were 100% drinking the Reagan Kool-Aid. Reagan 2.0 is what brought us this saccharin tribe, which kind of sums up the soft focus overly earnest fable-making of the Reagan '80s. It's morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. What interest rates had about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years, under the leadership of President Reagan. The country is prouder, and stronger, and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago? I'll say this. What the fuck is this? At least Ronald Reagan's Make America Great Again wasn't as cacophonous as Trump. I mean, at least that was like, at least that was soft. Meanwhile, it was midnight in the White House. The Reagan administration had immediately gotten up to some international fuckery when it came into power in 1981. But it was after his re-election in 1984 that his administration took his landslide as a mandate and began operating with even more impunity. So to put it briefly, because it can be confusing, the Iran-Contra affair was an illegal, secret foreign policy run out of Reagan's White House across 1985 and '86 in defiance of the law and of Congress. There was a civil war going on at Nicaragua at the time, a piece of legislation called the Bolin Amendment barred federally appropriated funds for the war against the country's Sandinista government. But National Security Council staff, led by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, under advisers Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, kept the right wing conscious armed through a covert off-the-book's network in violation of that amendment. It gets worse. To sustain it, the administration sold missiles to Iran, a nation under a U.S. arms embargo, partly to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Which contradicted Reagan's vow to never deal with terrorists. Anti-tank missiles began moving through Israel in August 1985, and in January 1986, Reagan signed a covert action authorizing direct U.S. sales. The proceeds were then diverted to the Congress. To review, the Reagan administration was financing a militant group that they were specifically not supposed to be selling weapons to on account of the fact that it was a designated sponsor of terrorism and the weapons were being run through a country that was perpetually hostile to the country, buying the weapons. Now, that's a lot of plates to spin at once, and they all came crashing down pretty quickly. The scheme began to surface on October 5, 1986, when a contra-resupply plane was shot down over Nicaragua. On November 3, 1986, the Lebanese magazine Ashira exposed the arms deal. On November 13, 1986, Reagan went on national television, admitted weapons had been sold to Iran, but denied they were traded for hostages. We did not repeat, did not trade weapons, or anything else for hostages. Nor will we. Pretty convincing. Days later, between November 21 and 25, Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, shredded and altered NSC documents stuffing enough into the White House shredder to jam it, while point-dexter destroyed what may have been the only signed copy of the presidential order on the covert operation. On fact, 40 years later, in 2025, Oliver North and his paper shredder jamming secretary, Fawn Hall got married. Love Israel. Now, back to the shady '80s. On November 25, 1986, Attorney General Edwin Mies announced the diversion of funds to the contra-res. North was fired, point-dexter resigned, and Mies' inquiry steered the spotlight onto the diversion and away from whether Reagan himself had broken the law. On March 4, 1987, Reagan finally conceded that the facts and evidence contradicted his denial. A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. But I did. That's, like, pretty wild, like, just crazy thing to say. It's like, can you tell the difference between real life and fiction? Seriously. That was a lot of very bad crimes committed by a lot of powerful people, yet accountability flitted away like a fickle butterfly. A 14-people charged, an 11 convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. North's convictions were vacated in July 1990, and point-dexter's were overturned on appeal. on December 24, 1892, President George H. W. Bush pardoned six principles. BT-Dubs, there were American hostages in Lebanon at the time because Reagan had allowed his lipless secretary of state Alexander Hague to give a thumbs up to Israel's incursion into Lebanon in 1982. Hague denies that he did this, but then again, politicians are also self-preserving liars. Reagan's abandonment of neutrality converted the United States from bystander into enemy in a conflict that could have kept our noses out of it. It made Americans deliberate targets in his arms deals then rewarded and prolonged the taking of the hostages. Additionally, Israel's incursion into Lebanon in the 1980s inflamed regional tensions so much that it birthed Hezbollah, so we also have Reagan to think for that. Name a problem with the world today, and it can probably be traced back to Ronald Reagan directly or indirectly. Play it with your favorite history and politics nerds the next time you're hanging out. During his presidency across four continents, Reagan supplied weapons, money, training, or diplomatic protection to authoritarian and in several cases, murderous right-wing regimes. They justified all this with the Cold War imperative of rolling back communism. Now, El Salvador should probably be pissed at America forever. Between 1980 and 1992, the U.S. supplied El Salvador's government with over $5 billion. The money went to the military and death squads that analysts later found to be responsible for 85% of the assassinations and murders during that time period. In 1981, a U.S. trained group murdered 811 Salvadorans civilians in the neutral village of Almazote, on the auspices that they were providing aid to leftist rebels. Most of the murdered were women, children, and the elderly. Reagan officials characterized news reports of the atrocity as a gross exaggeration, even though later investigations would prove those officials to be liars. We kept giving the Salvadoran government money anyway. The Raid administration's side stepped a ban on military aid to Guatemala. Reagan praised the country's dictator, Efron Rios Mont, and called him a man of great personal integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy. This is in the midst of Rios Mont's committing genocide against the country's indigenous Maya people. Reagan approved millions in military supplies by passing Congress, despite having information about the government's ongoing massacres. Later, a UN commission found that Rios Mont's actions constituted genocide. Great job, Reagan. Honduras served an important purpose for the Contras and thus was a recipient of Boku Bucks from America, a Reagan official oversaw the creation of the battalion 316 Death Squad, which disappeared around 200 people over the course of the decade. Most of them students, union organizers, clergy, and journalists. Reagan sent billions to Pakistani military dictator Zia Al-Haq as it was a conduit for arming the Afghan Mujahideen. Meanwhile, Zia was lying about Pakistan's nuclear program and Pakistan developed its own bomb. Cool. The Reagan administration cheerleader dictators in South Korea, the Philippines, Zahir, Chad Somalia, and Liberia, and in the Iran-Iraq War in 1982, Reagan's administration publicly tilted its support toward a certain Iraqi leader named Saddam Hussein, heard of him. A few years later, they'd secretly sell arms to Iran. All this in addition to arming anti-Soviet rebel groups around the world, including through a CIA program called Operation Cyclone, which, along with matching funds from Saudi Arabia, armed anti-Soviet, Afghani, Mujahideen, some of which had ties to a certain someone named Osama bin Laden, heard of him to the tune of billions of dollars. Great job. Great job once again. The story of how the Reagan administration handled AIDS is a real study in what awful people, the Reagan's were. At best, they were shallow assholes, at worst, they were cruel bigots. On June 5, 1981, not even six months into Reagan's first term, the CDC's morbidity and mortality weekly report described five cases of a rare pneumonia and previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles reported by Dr. Michael Gottlieb and colleagues. This was the first published trace of what would become AIDS. Within weeks, officials logged a parallel cluster of a rare illness among gay men in New York and the CDC set up a task force. There was no acknowledgement from the administration. Within 16 months and 600 cases of the mysterious disease later, a member of the White House press corps named Lester Kinsolving finally asked press secretary Larry speaks about the gay plague, which is what it was called at the time. And speaks turned it into an opportunity to tease Kinsolving a staunch conservative about being gay, which he isn't. Speak said, "I don't have it, do you?" And everybody in the room laughed and laughed. President, have any reactions to the announcement of the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that A.I.D.S. is now an epidemic in over 600 cases? That's it, do you know what I'm going to say? It's known as gay plague. No, it is. I mean, it's a pretty serious thing that one and every three people like him have died and I wondered if the president is aware of it. I don't have it, are you? Do you? Do you have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that. Do you? Do you want to answer my question? How do you know? The president is going to work the White House looks on this as a great joke. No, I don't know the thing about it, Lester. What? The president. Does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry? I don't think so. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. No, no. There have been no personal experience here, Lester. Yeah, gross. That audio was retrieved from the Reagan Library and included in the 2015 documentary when AIDS was funny. You can find it on YouTube. It is quite a watch. Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent nine times more on Legionnaires' disease than it did on AIDS. Meanwhile, the body count kept increasing. By June 13, 1983, more than 2,000 AIDS deaths into the epidemic, Lester Kinsolving asked about it again, speaks again, used the opportunity to make a gay joke at Kinsolving's expense, dropping the word "fares" during the briefing. Not true. Ferry trails are not true, and this one's true. Lester's aegers perked up when you said "fares" and they're biting interest in that. Larry, does the president think that it might help if he suggested that the gays cut down their cruising? I didn't hear your answer, Larry. I just was acknowledged in your interest in this subject. You don't think that it would help if the gays cut down on their cruising and were helping you? We're researching. If we come up with any research that sheds some light on whether gays should cruise or not cruise, we might be available to you. By the end of 1984, AIDS had infected at least 7,700 people and killed more than 3500. Scientists had then identified HIV and mapped the major route's transmission. The science was moving, the president was not. What finally forced the administration's hand wasn't Reagan suddenly growing a conscience. Reagan's proposed an 1986 budget called for an 11% cut in AIDS spending from $95 million down to $85.5 million. At the same time, Congress kept appropriating more than the administration asked for. Reagan's diary first mentions AIDS on June 24, 1985, only because he had learned from a television report that his longtime friend, movie star Rock Hudson, might have it. But that's probably not how he learned about his friend's battle with a deadly illness in 1985. Hudson tried to receive AIDS treatment from Dr. Dominique Dormont at a Paris military hospital. The hospital turned him away as it only treated French people. Hudson's publicists sent the White House a desperate telegram that read, in part, only one hospital in the world can offer necessary medical treatment to save the life of Rock Hudson, or at least alleviate his illness. Dr. Dormont in Paris believes a request from the White House or high American official would change his mind. And what did the Reagan do when their friend was dying of AIDS and needed them to help? Nothing. Not a fucking thing. Nancy Reagan intervened, determining that helping her terminally ill friend wasn't something the White House should get involved with. The White House at the same time was doing Iran Contra, so we know they had no problem doing secret stuff. Nancy Reagan was just a fucking asshole. Here's what Ronald Reagan did do. The very least he possibly could have done. He called Hudson to check on him. Thanks, bro. More than four years into the AIDS crisis in September 1985, Reagan said the word "AIDS" in public for the first time. Two weeks later, on October 2nd, Rock Hudson died of complications resulting from the virus. By then, more than 5,000 Americans were dead, and roughly 30 presidential news conferences had come and gone without Reagan ever being asked about the epidemic, let alone volunteering a word about it. Even as the dying accelerated, sanctimonious contempt for its victims remained the North star in the administration's response. In October 1986, Bob Woodward reported a national security meeting in which Reagan quipped about Momar Gaddafi's wardrobe. And Secretary of State George Schultz joked, "Why don't we give him AIDS?" and "Everybody laughed and laughed." Now Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who was an evangelical conservative, we know probably didn't spend much time around gay friends due to his haircut, emerged as one of the few heroes in this story. Reagan had tried to keep his Surgeon General away from the AIDS crisis during his first term, but issued a half-ass request for a report on the virus in February 1986. Rather than delegate, Dr. Koop wrote 17 drafts of the report himself. The Surgeon General's report released October 22, 1986, separated its author's morals from the medical facts. It explained transmission plainly, reassured the public that casual contact carried no risk and called for condoms, voluntary testing, and sex education, for telling the truth and creating the template for clear, helpful public health communication in the modern era Koop was burned in effigy. On May 31, 1987, Reagan delivered his first speech on AIDS, in part due to actress Elizabeth Taylor's urging. At that point, more than 16,000 Americans were dead. In preparing for the address, his speech writer, Landon Parvin, discovered that the president had not once met with his own surge in general about the epidemic, though Koup had tried to arrange it at least a dozen times and had been refused. Here's what Reagan's foot dragging cost. By the end of 1987, 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported, and 27,909 people had died. By the middle of 1988, 60,852 Americans had contracted the disease, and 34,088 had died. Reagan's people spent the time they could have spent saving lives, cracking gay jokes. Now, let's get back to the question of Reagan's Swiss cheese brain. Okay. In response to concerns about his age, Ronald Reagan had promised prior to becoming the oldest man ever elected president, that he would undergo regular physical and cognitive tests, and that he would step down if doctors found anything. But against the promises and official accounts, many observers noted that it appeared the president's brain was dissolving like an alkycelser tablet in the glass of water, while before anybody in his inner circle publicly admitted as such. One of those observers was his son Ron, who later wrote that he had noticed science as dad's brain wasn't working right as early as his first term. Reagan was also visibly confused and disoriented sometimes, like during a 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, and in his 1990 testimony regarding the Iran contra affair. One 2015 study analyzed all 46 of Reagan's press conferences, and found that over his two terms, he'd shown significant signs of decline, in a matter consistent with the onset of dementia. We don't know whether Reagan was actually sharp as attacked during the entirety of his presidency, or if staffers and supporters were scrambling behind the scenes to maintain the image of a man who was mentally fit for office as his condition deteriorated. We may never know the full truth. Reagan announced his Alzheimer's diagnosis in 1994 years after leaving office. He died of complications of Alzheimer's in 2004, after taking all the prosperity and social infrastructure built by post-war America and pissing it away. Nancy Reagan passed away in 2016, likely believing that Hillary Clinton was going to be the president. I love that for her. Reagan's surviving children with Joan Weiman, Michael and Maureen both grew up to be active in conservative politics. Michael died in January 2026. Ronald's children with Nancy were a horse of a different color, though. His daughter, Patty, was active in the nuclear non-proliferation movement, took her mother's last name and tried to have a private life. She's kept her distance totally from the conservative movement. And her brother, Ron, grew up to be a successful ballet dancer, a vowed public atheist, and a host of a progressive radio show. But here's what Ronald Reagan left us with. Politicization of public health, dismantling of the social safety net, the homelessness problem, a general lack of affordability. We can organize labor the country's crippling debt that our children and grandchildren will be forced to repay, a generation worth of political unrest and bloodshed in Central America and elsewhere, and the ensuing migration pushed from those regions that overwhelm this country's law enforcement capacity, the absurdly ineffective war on drugs, deregulation, pollution, putting us behind everybody else on green energy and energy independence. And probably some other stuff. Probably some other stuff. He also stacked the court with some people that would eventually play important roles in overturning Roe v. Wade. So there you have it, Alyssa. Ronald fucking Reagan. Where do we think he lies on our matrix of fucking guys? Aaron, I don't know. Okay, I'm gonna go with, he doesn't feel like a skimmer to be, so I'll go with reckless dumbass. And I guess opportunist. Yeah, right? I think useful idiot goes along with reckless dumbass. I think those are like cousins. I'm adding more to the chart. But yeah, he was a useful idiot who I think just as other people pointed out, wrote about him as a guy who was always just playing with the president, like the campaigns were auditions. And he was just playing a role. And he also laid the groundwork for all of these people in entertainment who have no business being in public service, thinking that they should be in public service. Like Ronald Reagan will and he ate jelly beans so that Donald Trump did. So Donald Trump could stuff his face with McDonald's and overcooked beef. And yeah, an overcooked beef. Well, that about wraps up the time we have for this episode of this fucking guy. If you like what you've seen, hit the like button, share with your friends and leave us a comment if you got an idea for a future fucking guy subject. And if you're listening to this, please leave the show a five star rating. It will help other people find us. This episode was written in co-researched by me with a writing assist from Melissa Master Monaco. All the rest of the credits, as well as links to our sources like where to buy a Seth Rosenfeld subversives can be found in our show notes. Trust me, guys. The bibliography is always a fun read. And please read that book. It is so, so good. Take care, be well. Save your pee for Ronald Reagan's grave, located at 40 presidential drive Simee Valley, California 93065. And fuck that guy! hysteria is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Caroline Reston, Claire Fogarty, Kendra James, Adrian Hill, Alyssa Master Monaco, and me, Aaron Ryan. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Rachel Gayeski, Dylan Villanueva, Claudia Shang, Mia Kelman, Jay Banks, Charlotte Landis, and Jordan Cantor. Our staff is probably unionized with the writers' gale of America East. I'm Nate Silver. I'm Galen Drook. And I'm Claire Malone. We're back. This time with our friends at crooked media for a new show called Still Counting. Yeah, numbers are hard. It takes very easy. And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually say? How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world? And how do you set the data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? New episodes every Wednesday, starting September 9th. Subscribe to Still Counting on youtube.com/atstillcountingpodcast or wherever you get your podcasts.