Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

As usual, there was too much cross-talk and chaos on stage.

And there was way too much partisan cheering and hooting by the audience.

But the first Republican presidential primary debate on Fox News was an entertaining spectacle.

Instead of watching Tucker Carlson interview Donald Trump on Twitter/X, it was a good way to check out the personalities and political positions of the GOP’s lineup of second and third stringers who have the impossible dream of beating out Trump for the party’s 2024 nomination.

No one jumped off the screen and looked presidential, or even vice presidential, but as I tweeted during the debate, the biggest winner was Nikki Haley.

The only woman in a rough-and-tumble verbal rumble with seven cocky men, she not only held her own, she kicked butt.

As tough and sharp as any man up there, she gave solid answers to questions about why it’s so important for us to support Ukraine and the reality of what Republicans can accomplish on abortion.

Haley said the Republican goal of a federal law on abortion was a pipe dream because it’ll take 60 votes in the U.S. Senate – and that will never happen.

And she was also not afraid to point out the obvious – that Republicans are also to blame for racking up our $32 trillion national debt.

Haley not only seemed to be a happy warrior, she didn’t spit out pre-programmed answers or canned pitches boasting about her experience as governor of South Carolina or UN ambassador.

Speaking of pre-programmed answers, Ron DeSantis – who I like a lot as governor of Florida – was OK. But he was stiff as a surfboard, unlikable and smiled just once.

At one point I think I tweeted, “Please stop yelling at me. Have a conversation with me.”

The 38-year-old frat boy on stage – entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy – tried way too hard to be cute and provocative and he suffered from it, especially in his exchanges with Haley and Mike Pence.

The former VP did a perfectly fine, adult-like job, but No MAGA Republican will ever support Pence for president, vice president or South Bend dog catcher.

Ditto for Chris Christie. The ex-New Jersey governor was the most relaxed of anyone up there, but his whole campaign is basically one slogan – “I hate Trump.” You need more than that to become president.

The good and likable senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, did a perfectly fine job.

But the other two nice Republican scrubs – the North Dakota governor and Arkansas’ ex-governor Asa Hutchinson – were essentially invisible and should have skipped the first try out.

I hope they don’t make the cut for the next Republican debate Sept. 27 at the Reagan Library.

It should be more substantive and less crazy, now that the candidates have introduced themselves to the country and thrown spitballs at each other.

No one had a breakout moment Wednesday night, unless it was Haley.

And I don’t think anyone really did serious damage to themselves – not even Ramaswamy with his crack about everyone else on stage being bought and paid for by donors.

But now it’s time for the candidates to do what might be the most important thing of all – simply prove to American voters that they are likable human beings.

No matter what their policies are, whoever becomes the standard bearer for the Republican Party needs to be likable to win.

Likable candidates are able to attract votes from independents and even Democrats who don’t agree with them politically.

That’s a big reason my dad won in 1980. It’s why Trump won in 2016.

And if a Republican hopes to become president in 2024 and save the country from the Democrats, he – or she – will have to be the most likable.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Another week, another lame Trump indictment.

Another week, another slimy Hunter Biden report.

Another week, another smash-and-grab at a California mall.

You can’t get away from this crummy stuff unless you turn off the TV, take the alerts off your phone and sleep all day on the beach for a week like Joe Biden.

But I’m totally worn out by the never-ending troubles and crimes of Trump and Hunter.

Nothing that happens to either of them in a courtroom months or years from now will hurt me, cut high gas prices or make my family safer.

What concerns me more than anything now are smash-and-grabs like the one that occurred in Los Angeles last weekend at a Nordstrom store inside Westfield Topanga Mall, which my family goes to all the time.

You’ve no doubt seen the video or one like it – a mob-style robbery by about 30 masked young men who smash display cases, grab expensive merchandise and race out the door.

Between $60,000 and $100,000 in merchandise reportedly was stolen by the well-organized gang.

In case any bleeding heart seriously thinks they were poor, hungry and desperate kids from a ghetto, they jumped into several waiting cars, including a BMW and a Lexus.

Police say they’re looking for the perps, who reportedly sprayed the unarmed “security” man with bear spray.

Of course, we all know the police will catch only a few robbers at best, and if they do they probably will not be prosecuted.

So, let’s get some things straight about where I live in California.

Los Angeles is already an urban, crime-ridden campground and open-air drug den for about 75,000 “unhoused” people with mental or drug problems. A small community of tent people lives by the freeway entrance half a mile away.

And now I have to worry about my family being safe at the local mall? Great.

We know the government people in charge are never going to do what is necessary to end the smash-and-grabs at malls and Beverly Hills jewelry stores.

So the other day I humbly tweeted what I’d do if I owned a retail store or a mall – hire security guards armed with Glocks.

If robbers are going to shoot bear spray at a security guard, I figure a guard needs a Glock to shoot back.

I know how hysterical the media and the left would become the first time a robber was killed or seriously wounded by a mall security guard, but the young workers in the smash-and-grab industry would instantly get the message and pursue other careers.

Of course, we wouldn’t have to resort to shooting robbers with Glocks if the country’s Black leaders stood up for what’s right.

But the Obamas, Oprah, LeBron James, Vice President Harris and dozens of other great Black artists and athletes are AWOL on the subject of smash-and-grabs – and spineless.

They should be all over the major media scolding and shaming the young Black men whom we all know from the videos we’ve watched make up the gangs who pull off the smash-and-grabs.

Does their silence mean Black leaders support the mob robberies? Of course not.

But they certainly must realize that the smash-and-grabbers are doing great harm to every Black person in America.

Their brazen and frightening criminality – which the chicken media won’t point out is committed predominantly by Black males – is hurting the country’s already strained racial relations and only creating more ill feelings and more white racists.

The other day in a tweet I asked if I was a racist because I’ve noticed the color of the smash-and-grabbers.

My conservative Black friends, lawyer Leo Terrell and talk show host David Webb, said no.

But I really don’t give a damn if anyone thinks I’m a racist for noticing what is so obvious.

Maybe the Obamas, LeBron and other Black icons should notice it too – and then use their moral authority and media power to tell young Black men and boys to do the right thing.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Half the country has no idea why the front page of Thursday’s New York Post was so hilarious.

That’s because, thanks to the liberal media, half of the country still has no idea who Hunter Biden is, or why he is in trouble for raking in millions for his extended family from foreign businessmen by selling access to his father Joe’s “brand” and political influence.

The Post – which is famous for its funny front pages and lively conservative journalism – brilliantly summed up the Biden Family’s international influence-peddling racket on Aug. 10.

Its front page carried the huge headline “JOE FOR $ALE” next to a big photo of a smiling President Biden holding a sign that said “Open for Business – Price $20 million.”

The Post also asked a question that would have mystified the half of the country that only watches MSNBC and reads the New York Times — “Foreign clients gave Hunter a Porsche, a diamond and millions of dollars – What did they THINK they were buying?”

The Blue half of the country would never get the Post’s jokes about Hunter and Joe Biden.

That’s because they have hardly ever heard any news about Hunter or the latest reports detailing how he and his dad worked their lucrative family side-gig.

The Post’s journalists have done heroic work on the Bidens – unlike the liberal mainstream print and electronic media, which is so biased, partisan and dishonest that it has barely mentioned Hunter’s name.

For four years the liberal media have shown zero interest in investigating the sleazy and incriminating contents of his “Laptop From Hell” or covering the ongoing investigations by House Republicans into Hunter’s banking and money-laundering tricks.

The left’s partisan journalists are still so fixated on hating Donald Trump and making sure he never returns to power that they will never cover the blunders, failures and crimes of the Bidens.

Did the Biden administration wreck the economy with high inflation, create a crisis at the Southern border, cripple our oil and gas industries, botch the withdrawal from Afghanistan, fail to prevent the war in Ukraine and mismanage the war on Covid?

The liberal media’s response – “We don’t care. We hate Trump.”

Did the Biden Justice Department overdo the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters for political reasons? Did the Biden FBI unfairly treat conservative Catholics as possible terrorists?

“Don’t care. We hate Trump.”

Did Biden’s CDC kowtow to the teachers union to keep schools closed for too long and lie to the country about the safety and efficacy of the covid vaccines?

“Dunno. We hate Trump.”

So now, after three years of Biden incompetence and lies, the liberal media refuses to admit that the country is a mess in many economic and social ways.

We have huge homeless populations living on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco. We have smash-and-grab gangs in Beverly Hills that go unpunished and we have chained up ice cream freezers in drug stores.

We have tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from dozens of countries overwhelming cities like New York and Boston. We have Fentanyl Island in Oakland, Ca.

What is President Biden and his administration doing to fix all these national and local problems? Is he to blame?

Don’t expect the liberal media to ever press Biden to answer that kind of question. They’re not interested. All they know is, “We hate Trump.”

The liberal mainstream media hate Trump so much they’d never do or say anything that might help him win or hurt Biden in 2024.

I fear for 2024. I’m truly concerned about Republicans winning back the White House. I don’t think Trump can win and he’s not going to let anyone else try.

My greatest worry is that if he doesn’t win the nomination he will sabotage the nominee, guarantee a Democrat victory and destroy the Republican Party – if he hasn’t done that already.

Then there’d be a legitimate reason for me to agree with the liberal media who say “We hate Trump.”

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

“In the eight years that my father was President of the United States I never once sat in the room with business associates and called him on the phone. If I had, the Democrats would have skewered me.”

When I posted that tweet the other day, it got a huge response.

As we know from this week’s big whistleblower news, over the course of 10 years – while Joe Biden was vice president and when he was out of power – Hunter Biden put his father on speaker phone at least 20 times during meetings he was having with foreign business people.

That bombshell proved Joe Biden was lying all those times he told voters and the media that he never once talked with Hunter about his sweet business deals with Ukrainian gas companies and Chinese banks.

It also showed how differently Joe and my father were when it came to using the power and political influence of the presidency to enrich their extended families and friends.

The story of how my father “helped” me goes back to Election Night in 1966.

My dad was running for governor of California. I was 21 and working on a trucking dock in Los Angeles, loading oil well freight from 5 p.m. to 1:30 am.

I had just dropped out of college. And when I did, my parents laid down the law.

They said, “While you were in college, we picked up the tab. But now that you’ve dropped out, you get to pick up the tab. Find a place to live and get a job.”

The victory celebration for my dad was at the old Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I got off early from work and remember going up to my father and congratulating him on winning the governorship.

The next thing I did was ask him for a job.

I thought any politician would immediately open the door and give their offspring a job if they wanted it or needed it. But my father said, “I don’t believe in nepotism.”

I guess I should have asked for the job before I voted for him, but he really believed what he said.

When he became president, I got a call from White House lawyer Fred Fielding. It was a simple conversation.

“You are going to be approached by many people who will want to use you to get to your father,” he said. “They will offer you all kinds of things. Please, before you do anything, pick up the phone and call me. Here’s my number.”

Anytime anyone would call me – and many people did – I’d call Fielding. I’d tell him I was approached by X, Y or Z and what they wanted me to do.

Most of the time, Fielding would say, “You’re calling me, so your gut is probably telling you it’s not a good deal. So go with your gut.”

That’s what I did – and still do – because the attempts to buy the Reagan brand have never really stopped.

In 2019, when Volodymyr Zelensky was running for president of Ukraine I was offered $100,000 just to fly to Kiev to endorse Zelensky.

It wasn’t because I knew anything about Zelensky or Ukraine, it was because of who my father was.

I didn’t have a White House lawyer to call for advice, but I had the knowledge I needed to make the right decision. I went with my gut and declined the Ukrainian offer, figuring it would not look good if I was ever hauled before a congressional committee.

Based on the revelations about the Biden family’s dirty operations, First Son Hunter obviously does things differently. So does his dad.

If I had called my father about endorsing Zelensky he would have told me not to do it, but he was a better kind of president.

He understood he was serving the country. He wasn’t asking the country to serve him – or his family.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Here we go again.

The first Republican presidential primary debate is less than a month away and the GOP is hell-bent on making the same mistake it made in 2015.

For its first primary debate back then Republicans had a herd of medium-caliber presidential wannabes that was so large the party had to split them into two tiers based on their polling numbers.

Fox News hosted two crowded debates back-to-back on one night that were more useless than usual.

In the main event, 24 million Americans watched a chorus line of party heavyweights – Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich – struggle to out-promise each other while they ganged up on Donald Trump.

In the preliminary debate Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore and George Pataki tried to do or say something memorable that might explain why they, their wives and their mothers thought they were presidential timber.

Today, most of those 2016 dreamers have disappeared from the scene, become answers to trivia questions or appear on Fox News every 20 minutes doing commercials for pain relief or sleep aids.

Those over-crowded Republican debates in 2015 were a waste of time and energy that did the party, the candidates and the country no good. Plus, except for the entertaining Trump Factor, like most debates they were boring and unenlightening.

Apparently, the GOP’s thinking about primary debates this year was, “Hey, let’s make the same mistake again.”

So far, seven of the 11 Republican candidates who’ve announced for the 2024 presidency have qualified for the Aug. 23 debate in Milwaukee.

They are North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and some rude former president named Donald Trump.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former Vice President Mike Pence are still trying to meet all the polling and fundraising requirements they need to be included.

Ditto for former Texas congressman Will Herd and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. Did I actually say the mayor of Miami? Really?

Other than Mayor Suarez, the Republican slate for 2024 is pretty impressive.

It’s a deep, diverse and accomplished lineup of current and former public servants who should be thanked for their service – and then urged to drop out and endorse someone who can win in 2024.

Realistically, except for Trump and maybe DeSantis, the other candidates are kidding themselves and their supporters.

They have as much chance of becoming the 2024 Republican presidential nominee as my gardener and don’t deserve to be included in a debate.

Meanwhile, our presidential debates are not really debates at all.

They’re become places where candidates duck hard questions and instead deliver pre-packaged, poll-tested, 90-second answers that no one remembers the next day.

In a better world, our political debates would be limited to three or four candidates who are competitive.

In a perfect world, they also would be conducted by unbiased, skeptical journalists and would allow plenty of time for candidates to answer important policy questions and challenge each other.

Unfortunately, we live in the real world. Which is why we’re going to continue to get overcrowded debates, poorly constructed debates or no debates at all from the major parties and the major media.

The GOP’s upcoming string of presidential primary debates will be another waste of time and energy.

They will just be a series of TV tryouts to see who has the brains and guts to be Trump’s vice president pick – which makes Pence’s candidacy make even less sense.

I respect Pence, but he’s never going to be nominated for president by a MAGA Republican Party. He’d have 75 million votes against him on Election Day.

And anyway, he shouldn’t be in the primary debates because he’s already been Trump’s VP.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

“Sound of Freedom” is still going strong despite the efforts of the left to kill it.

In just three weeks the action-thriller, about a real-life American hero who went to Colombia to rescue one child from child sex traffickers and ended up rescuing 120 children, has racked up more than $100 million in ticket sales.

Millions of Americans – including my son Cameron and I – have now watched the true story of Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad who has devoted his life to fighting and exposing the trafficking of kids for forced sex or forced labor.

“Sound of Freedom” is a powerful, powerful movie that had people leaving the theater in tears.

But as someone who was molested by a pedophile as a child, and as someone who’s been speaking out about child sex trafficking since 1980, I didn’t need a good movie to tell me about the horrors of human trafficking.

As I said to Cameron, “Most people were shocked by what they saw, but I felt it. I know what kind of evil goes on behind closed doors.”

“Sound of Freedom,” as I wrote last week, was actually made five years ago, but all the major studios and Netflix did not want to distribute it.

It took a heroic effort by Angel Studios, which specializes in religious projects, to raise the money to launch the independent movie in more than 2,000 theaters.

While Angel was profiting greatly and doing the country an important service, the hacks in the leftist media tried to kill “Sound of Freedom” and dodged the issue of child sex trafficking.

Instead, focusing on politics, they’ve called it “controversial,” “divisive,” “a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms” and a piece of right-wing “propaganda” that feeds into QAnon conspiracy theories.

But the left’s attempt to cancel “Sound of Freedom” has not only failed, it has made the movie even more popular with the public – and had a sort of reverse Bud Light effect on its ticket sales.

By dramatizing the tragedy of human trafficking in an emotional way, the movie is having an impact on millions of Americans who’ve never heard of the problem or have no idea of its scope.

It’s hard to document with certainty because human trafficking is mostly illegal or underground, but according to the experts it is a global form of modern slavery that affects 27 million people, takes in $150 billion a year and makes $32 billion in profits.

Half of all trafficking victims are children under age 18 and about 80 percent are women and girls.

About a third of the women and girls are forced into the commercial sex business, and the rest are forced to work in legal and illegal industries like salons, restaurants, hotels, factories and farms.

Human trafficking is complicated. It occurs all over the world. It’s concentrated in Southeast Asia and Africa, but the United States is one of the most active sex trafficking countries.

“Sound of Freedom” tells a very small story about a shameful form of modern slavery that the media hardly cover and government and business don’t do enough to stop.

The movie itself doesn’t have an overt or in-your-face political message, but everyone who sees it gets the message anyway. Especially parents of young children.

One of the most powerful moments for me was when actor Jim Caviezel, who played Tim Ballard, said that the child sex trade was more lucrative than illegal drugs.

You can take a bag of coke and sell it to a person once, the actor explains, but you can take a five-year-old child and sell him or her five or 10 times a day.

The thought of one more child being sold into slavery and into the sex trade should sicken and enrage every American. As they say in the movie, “They’re God’s children. They’re not for sale.”

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Don’t thank Hollywood for “Sound of Freedom.”

The movie, about a former Homeland Security agent who goes to Colombia and rescues more than 50 kids from child sex traffickers, is an action-thriller – a drama.

But it is based closely on the true story of Tim Ballard and his personal fight against one of the planet’s most evil and profitable criminal activities – human sex trafficking.

“Sound of Freedom” was actually finished in 2018. But because it couldn’t get Netflix or a major studio in Hollywood to distribute it, it was independently financed by a Utah-based studio that specializes in religious projects.

Since it was released nation-wide on July 4, it has pulled in more than $50 million and become the surprise hit of the summer.

Variety’s critic called it “a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.”

But predictably, leftwing places like Rolling Stone, the Guardian and Slate have ripped “Sound of Freedom” for political reasons.

Instead of addressing the movie’s serious issue, they’ve discredited and smeared its deeply religious star, Jim Caviezel, who in 2004 played Jesus in “The Passion of Christ.”

They’ve charged Caviezel with parroting and/or agreeing with the conspiratorial ideas of QAnon, the rightwing fringe group that believes there’s a global cabal of elites in politics and business who traffic in children so they can sexually molest them.

In case you think trafficking humans for sex or forced labor is not a real-world problem, here’s what the United Nations’ web site says:

“Human Trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit.

“Men, women and children of all ages and from all backgrounds can become victims of this crime, which occurs in every region of the world….

“Human trafficking has many forms. These include exploitation in the sex, entertainment and hospitality industries, and as domestic workers or in forced marriages.

“Victims are forced to work in factories, on construction sites or in the agricultural sector without pay or with an inadequate salary, living in fear of violence and often in inhumane conditions.

“Some victims are tricked or coerced into having their organs removed. Children are forced to serve as soldiers or to commit crimes for the benefit of the criminals.”

Human trafficking affects millions. It’s a $150 billion global industry that disproportionately affects women and girls under 18 – more than half of whom are forced into the sex trade.

But the left and the liberal media have no desire to find out why the U.S. has become the world’s largest consumer of human trafficking “products.”

They don’t want to learn how much of that shameful distinction is a result of our wide-open Southern border or our horrible foster care system, which has become a pipeline to human trafficking of every kind.

And it’s been clear for several years that the mainstream media aren’t interested in exposing the rich and powerful men who were frequent flyers to Epstein Island or who go on expensive junkets to foreign countries to have sex with kids.

As someone who as a child of 8 was molested by a pedophile who also took photos of me, I’ve done as much as I can as an adult to fight against the sexual abuse of children.

I’ll definitely see “Sound of Freedom” and I don’t care what the left says.

By focusing on the filmmakers’ conservative origins and openly Christian spin, they are trying to discredit an important film about victims of sexual trafficking by attacking the people who made it.

I also don’t care what the actor playing the hero believes or says.

I care that the real hero – Tim Ballard, the founder of Operation Underground Railroad – is spending his life saving the innocent lives of real children in the real world.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

What a welcome home.

A topless trans person proudly flashing a party on the White House lawn.

A mysterious bag of cocaine turning up in the West Wing.

A news report saying that Hunter Biden was being investigated by the Justice Department for violating the Mann Act by transporting prostitutes across state lines – and being investigated by the IRS for writing off the costs on his taxes.

Thanks to my wife’s job as a travel agent, I missed these latest national embarrassments by spending most of the last two weeks in sunny Egypt.

Instead of watching the liberal media pretend not to notice the Biden Family’s daily string of gaffes, blunders and scandals, I was exploring 4,000-year-old tombs, gawking at the Pyramids and being amazed by what I didn’t see in the streets and markets of downtown Cairo.

No homeless people living on the sidewalks.

No beggars or open drug markets.

No shootings or car-jackings outside my hotel – nothing to remind me of my homeland or hometown of Los Angeles.

The friendly and hard-working Egyptians have plenty of serious social, economic and political problems, including occasional acts of terrorism.

Their ancient country also has too much pollution, hardly gets any rain all year and has plenty of poverty.

But after four or five thousand years of bloody history, the Egyptians have – for now, anyway – figured how to put together a fairly prosperous and civilized Muslim society of 109 million people, including 10 million Christians.

Egypt is the safest nation in Africa and everything is really cheap if you are a tourist or an expatriate paying in U.S. dollars.

I learned a lot about Egypt’s past and present on my trip.

For example, I learned that one of the reasons it turned from a Christian nation to a 90% Muslim one after it was conquered by the Arabs long ago was tax policy.

After the cruel Muslim governments stopped killing, persecuting or enslaving Egypt’s Christians, they incentivized Christians to become Muslims by putting heavy taxes on them if they did not convert to Islam.

I also learned that Egypt’s people laugh at Americans for paying people not to work. They think we are crazy for encouraging unemployment, which we are.

Hearing this kind of criticism is why traveling to other countries will make you a better and smarter American.

You not only get to see other cultures and get to hear what foreigners think about America, you also get to see that other countries are doing things we either should do or once did.

When I went to Kenya, for example, I was surprised to learn that Kenya’s official language is English. I saw children in a school in the middle of a huge slum learning English and wearing uniforms.

Why do Kenyans understand English is “the language of success”? Why can’t all of us Americans?

When we try to put uniforms on our public school kids, some of us complain like it’s Nazi Germany all over again.

Sometimes I think the people making our laws never go anywhere.

If they traveled more overseas, they’d see how many people are trying to become what we are – or what we were.

Our current leaders have been doing great damage to our society, the economy and our institutions – violating the basics of law and order, destroying the value of the dollar, ignoring the Constitution, discrediting the Supreme Court ….

But it’s still true that there’s no other country in the world like ours – or greater than ours.

If you want to learn about the greatness of America, I say, travel. Go visit another country.

What you’ll see and hear will quickly make you appreciate the U.S. and explain why people are still willing to die to come here.

If you don’t believe me, go to Cairo and ask an Egyptian.

–

Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Barack Obama told a good joke the other day.

He said he thought that the level of disinformation and misinformation online has gotten so dangerously high in the U.S. that we need to develop “digital fingerprints” so ordinary citizens can tell what’s truly true and know who’s not telling it.

We?

Did he mean “We the American people” or “We the politicians with all the power”?

The ex-president of us all didn’t specify what government agency or allegedly nonpartisan public watchdog group he thought should get to decide what is the “truth” or how or if it would be enforced.

He told his former senior advisor David Axelrod that he is most concerned about “deep fakes” that use digitally manipulated images, audio or video to spread lies and mislead people – especially voters.

But Obama said people are going to have to know how to spot misinformation that “can still be used, for example, to discourage people from voting by characterizing the system as rigged and corrupt.”

The punchline to Obama’s unintentional joke is his concern that misinformation can “oftentimes advantage the powerful.”

And, he said, “I am worried about that kind of cynicism developing even further during the course of this next election.”

Gee, President Obama, why would half the country’s voters – the red-colored half – be cynical?

Could it be that for seven years they’ve watched the president they elected in 2016 be abused by a continual disinformation campaign carried out by Democrats, the FBI, government intelligence agencies and the partisan media?

Obama and lesser pontificating phonies like my lying congressman, the recently censured Adam Schiff, don’t actually care about the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies – as long as they get to spread theirs.

For almost four years, the Democrats and their pet media pushed the Russian Collusion Hoax and other minor hoaxes and lies about Trump or his family.

The liberal media, of course, swallowed and regurgitated every claim without question while Big Tech’s biased “moderators” and “fact checkers” made sure to censor, hide or kill “disinformation” that challenged or discredited the hoaxes.

The Mueller Report found there was no Trump-Russia collusion before the 2016 election, yet we still have James Comey, the disgraced FBI head and fiction writer, pushing that Big Lie on TV.

Per usual, there are no tough questions or criticism for Comey from the liberal media. His lies are still treated as gospel and he’s treated as tenderly as the lying Bidens or Hillary Clinton, who’ll never pay for her role in using the FBI to hobble Trump before and after he was elected.

And there’ll be no harsh words from the media for the 51 former intelligence experts who knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real but still signed a statement before the 2020 election saying it looked like an act of Russian disinformation.

Meanwhile, Democrats are always trying to make the country believe that it was the Republicans who’ve been doing all the lying.

But who told the whoppers about the origin of the COVID-19 virus being from a bat cave or a wet market in Wuhan?

Who kept telling us the lies that COVID vaccines were absolutely safe and prevented infection and transmission long after they knew otherwise?

Who has been dis-informing us – for the last sixty years, at least – with the lie that Republicans are going to throw grandma over the cliff by getting rid of Social Security and Medicare?

The answer for all of the above is Democrats.

But now we’re supposed to take advice about stopping the spread of disinformation from President Obama?

Isn’t he that smooth young black guy who promised to work for a unified and colorblind society but ended up re-igniting the race war in the United States?

Yep. And you can electronically fingerprint me for saying that, Mr. Ex-president. But it’s still not disinformation.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The Democrats and the liberal media were back in Trump Heaven this week.

When Donald Trump was indicted on 37 charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, they couldn’t contain their joy or hide their biases.

When Trump pled not guilty and walked free, the hopes of the permanently “Deranged Ones” at CNN and MSNBC were once again dashed.

They wanted to see Trump put in shackles and leg irons and thrown into a jail cell for the next several years.

During their saturation coverage of Trump, the unbalanced and unfair “journalists” and the openly partisan pundits of the liberal media forgot to remind their disappearing viewership that being indicted means you have been charged by the state with a crime, not that you have been found guilty and deserve to be immediately guillotined live on Rachel Maddow’s show.

But of course, such legal niceties as innocent-till-proven-guilty are irrelevant to the Deranged Ones.

For them, Trump has always been guilty of every charge they or Democrats can dream up, whether it’s sleeping with Vladimir Putin or trying to destroy American democracy.

The classified documents charges are just the latest example of how Trump is being unfairly singled out for prosecution by Democrats.

Lots of presidents have mishandled or held on to classified stuff after their time in office, whether by accident or on purpose. Even vice presidents like Mike Pence and Joe Biden have done it.

Trump is being indicted for one obvious political reason – to keep him from running for president in 2024.

Democrats are willing to use any means necessary to stop Trump.

That includes weaponizing the justice system, as they did with the Russia collusion hoax, or changing the rules in Congress, as they did in the Senate in 2013 when Democrats dropped the required votes to get their judges confirmed from 60 to a simple majority.

They were warned at the time that if you change the rules, it’ll come back and bite you – and it did in a big way.

Republicans and Trump were able to use the same simple-majority rule in the Senate to successfully appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

Democrats still don’t understand that Republicans will someday get their turn to use the same power tools they happily give to their Democrat presidents.

As I’ve said dozens of times, I don’t like Trump’s boorish style and his personality.

But only the deranged ones in Washington and the liberal media actually think he would ever deliberately do harm to America.

What Trump did wrong in keeping classified documents deserved a slap on the hand, at best.

If he had already served two terms, the classified documents “scandal” would have never occurred, a swat team would never have raided Mar-A-Lago and he would never have been charged with a petty crime.

By weaponizing the federal government to legally harass Trump for political purposes, Democrats have opened up the floodgates that will drown us all.

For the rest of our lives it’s going to be tit for dirty partisan tat in Washington. Republicans and Democrats will take turns siccing their FBIs and CIAs on each other.

For example, what if Trump or Ron DeSantis become president in 2024?

Will they order their justice departments or IRS to target Democrats? Will the Biden Crime Family be fully investigated by a Republican-led FBI? Don’t be surprised.

Yet no matter what happens in 2024, from now on the American people will suffer. Our presidential elections and our politics will get uglier, if that’s possible. We’ll look to the rest of the world like a Banana Republic.

Democrats have already started us down this dark road.

They hate Trump so much they are willing to abuse the powers of government, violate the rule of law and threaten the fabric and foundation of America.

In their rage to bring him down they are foolishly and tragically breaking the windows in my father’s shining city on a hill.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.