The Baublehead Ronald Reagan Got Us Here

Gayle Leslie
2 min readSep 9, 2021

For anyone not yet born or for those who were and may have forgotten where this whole debacle started: DO NOT FORGET that Ronald Reagan was little more than a talking baublehead in a fine suit when he was elected and may well have been manifesting dementia in his first term. He provided a magnificent vessel for the most virulent and most well dressed white nationalists of the day — Donald Rumsfeld, William Barr, Roger Ailes, G. Gordan Liddy et. al. — to lay the foundations among privileged, entitled and deeply fearful white people for the national moment we are in today. Make no mistake: the ascension of the baublehead 2.0 was all by design and if young people don’t know the true history and depth of the sinister madness that got us here, they risk being outplayed by it. These guys — still living or dead — were evil and they were smart. They just underestimated the possibility that the rest of us were smart enough to see what they were doing.

Per Heather Cox Richardson:

“…Part of that polarization was an increasing conviction that Republicans were justified in undercutting Democrats, who were somehow anti-American, even if it meant breaking laws.

In the 1980s, members of the Reagan administration did just that. They were so determined to provide funds for the Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the leftist Sandinista government, that they ignored a law passed by a Democratic Congress against such aid. In a terribly complicated plan, administration officials, led by National Security…

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