Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

The Democrats in Washington are doing another one of their zillion-dollar smash-and-grabs.

This time, it’s Joe Biden’s scheme to forgive $10,000 in student debt for about 43 million Americans who’ve borrowed hundreds of billions of federal dollars to pay for college.

Of course, old rich Joe’s not giving his own money away.

It’s the taxpayers’ money – $330 billion or so. And it’s ordinary Joes who’ll ultimately have to repay it.

And as Nancy Pelosi knows – or at least used to last year – the president doesn’t have the power to forgive the federal school loans. Only Congress does.

But Joe and Nancy don’t care. They’re vote-pandering Democrats.

And Democrats are so desperate to prevent Republicans from flushing them down the congressional drain in November they’ll pass anything to attract more votes.

They know that by the time the Supreme Court decides that Biden’s immoral and fiscally irresponsible debt forgiveness plan is also unconstitutional – which it will – the midterms will be long over.

Maybe Biden’s blatant attempt to buy votes will backfire this fall.

After all, you don’t need a degree in ethics from Harvard to know that forcing plumbers, truckers and baristas to subsidize someone’s college loans is unfair.

But on top of benefiting college grads at the expense of the working class, the country’s already rich college industrial complex will benefit greatly from Biden’s fake generosity.

College administrators will do what they have always done whenever more government money or cheaper loans was given to prospective students – they’ll jack up their prices.

It’s a great scam, a total racket, that for decades has made colleges and their employees rich. But companies fatten up their bottom lines the same way.

For example, when Biden’s fraudulently named Inflation Reduction Act passed the other day it included tax credits of up to $7,500 if you buy a $60,000 electric car.

Ford and GM both denied there was a connection to the new tax credits, and they blamed inflation, but coincidentally they each hiked the price on their new e-vehicles between $3,000 and $8,000.

So who actually got the government e-subsidy – the car buyer or the car maker?

Out here in California, the Democrats who’ve been destroying this state for decades are passing a regulation that will outlaw the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

How this state will import enough affordable electricity from renewable energy sources to charge tens of millions of electric vehicles every day will be fun for my kids and grandkids to watch.

Nuclear and fossil fuel-powered power plants are almost extinct here already.

So unless half the state moves to Texas, which actually might happen, charging everybody’s electric cars is going to take a million wind turbines or some really long extension cords from Nevada and Arizona.

California’s zero-emissions madness and Biden’s school loan relief bill are both straight out of the Democrat Party’s founding playbook.

Forcing other people to pay for the government freebies they dole out to their constituents in return for political support is how they operate – and get elected.

I wish more voters understood what was going on with Biden’s debt relief scheme and voted accordingly.

While we wait – and pray – for the midterms to put an end to the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer war against our country, what’s the answer?

First, Americans need to wake up. We need someone ringing the bell – a Paul Revere type who can warn us and also lead us.

Donald Trump is OK on policy, but he’s toxic because every issue always becomes about Trump.

Plus Trump talks only to Trump people. We need someone who can talk to everyone.

Ron DeSantis isn’t it. He’s Trump lite and he’s already been branded by the mainstream media as a mean and dangerous guy.

But I don’t know if Republicans have a spokesman other than Trump – and that’s what puts the fear of God in me.

Where is my dad when we need him?

–

Copyright 2022 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 best news of the week for all Americans is that Liz Cheney lost.

Big time.

Her crushing demise in Wyoming’s Republican primary shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone – and she deserved it.

Congresswoman Cheney – despite voting with the Trump administration more than 90 percent of the time – had come down with a politically fatal case of the “I Hate Trump Syndrome.”

After she sold her soul to the Democrats running the House’s Jan. 6 show trial, the liberal media – who not-so-secretly probably hated her father more than they hated Saddam Hussein – had turned her into their favorite Republican.

Cheney was so honored, she apparently really started believing what they’ve been saying on MSNBC and CNN about her great moral courage in the defense of our democracy.

After she was rejected by the conservative Republicans of her very red state, she compared herself to Abraham Lincoln and hinted about running for president in 2024. Seriously.

Meanwhile, as the Biden administration is taking victory laps around the U.S. over the passage of its fraudulent Inflation Reduction Act, the country doesn’t care about our current president.

Everyone in the media is still talking about Donald Trump and the ramifications of the FBI’s unprecedented and unjustified raid on his home, aka “The Fishing Expedition at Mar-a-Lago.”

This latest abuse of federal power by the Democrats in their never-ending war to destroy Trump’s future is another free topic for the news-and-opinion manufacturers in the liberal media industrial complex.

The facts are thin and the official charges against Trump are still unspecified and probably unjustified. Sound familiar?

But so what? The actual facts are always irrelevant to the anti-Trump media. The FBI raid was automatically justified – because its target was Donald Trump.

Turn on CNN and MSNBC and their pundits and the gang of partisan former FBI and CIA hacks they’ve hired are already virtually saying Trump should be executed for treason – or at least banned from ever running for office again.

Then there’s Joe Biden’s “historic” legislation to end inflation, the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act.”

“Isn’t it great?” so many people said. “No more inflation! The Democrats just passed a law to end inflation! God bless Joe Manchin!”

Really? What is it in the bill that makes anyone but Biden’s White House economists think it will actually reduce inflation – which has been caused by irresponsible federal fiscal and monetary policies?

The defenders of the bill claim with a straight face it will spend $800 billion the federal government doesn’t have to reduce the deficit $300 billion.

Sounds like Democrat Math 101 to me.

The Inflation Reduction Act is such a fraud that even the liberal media have had to admit it is not going to reduce inflation.

The media have decided that, despite its deliberately misleading title, it is really a climate change, health care and tax bill.

It’s a downsized, Manchin-approved “Build Back Better” bill stuffed with billions of subsidies for green companies, climate-change boondoggles and rich people who can afford to buy electric cars or rooftop solar panels.

Plus, it will fund the hiring of 85,000 new IRS agents, with gun training, to crack down on the country’s 721 billionaires, and it pushes the lie that families earning less than $400,000 a year will pay no new taxes.

Someday all Americans are going to realize that whenever Democrats want to slip an expensive and harmful federal bill past the American people, they just give it a nice sounding name like the “Inflation Reduction Act.”

Democrats never speak the truth about the big laws they pass – which is “Stick with us. We only want to raise your taxes, grow the government and limit your freedoms.”

–

Copyright 2022 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

If you weren’t fearful of government before this week, you should be scared to death by now.

This is the United States of America. Not Venezuela. Or is it?

Never in our history have we gone after a former president the way the partisans running the Biden administration’s FBI and Department of Justice just went after Donald Trump.

We’re not some fake democracy in the Third World where the ruling political party gets to use government power to punish its opponents – or at least we weren’t until an outsider named Trump came along.

Since 2015 he has been continually hated, defied, subverted and under bogus legal attacks by the permanent Washington establishment and the Democrats controlling Congress.

But raiding Trump’s home in Florida under the pretext of looking for classified documents that he allegedly should not have taken from the White House was something you’d expect to see in a banana republic.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, one of President Biden’s most reliable hacks, proudly said Thursday that he “personally approved” the decision to seek a warrant for the FBI search.

But unless there was proof Trump has been sleeping with 6-year-olds or making millions from secret business deals with China, there was no reason for two dozen heavily armed FBI agents to search the basement and closets of Mar-a-Lago.

The raid was not just another despicable act of highly publicized cheap political theater, like the FBI’s early-morning arrest of Trump pal Roger Stone, or when Trump advisor Peter Navarro was put in leg irons at the airport for ignoring a congressional subpoena.

It was so over-the-top un-American that even a few Democrats, like disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, felt they had to decry it.

But most Democrats – and their faithful propagandists and cheerleaders in the major liberal media – hate Donald Trump so blindly they didn’t criticize the raid, they cheered it.

“Maybe he really did something really bad this time,” they hoped yet again.

For his desperate enemies, no abuse of government power in their perpetual war on Trump is unfair, unjustified or unconstitutional as long as it might keep him from being re-elected or, better yet, might get him sent to prison.

Long ago the left allowed its “I hate Trump” mania to become such a cancerous tumor in their heads that they couldn’t see or think straight.

He’s become their political piñata – but he’s a piñata that doesn’t break, fights back and doesn’t give a damn about what his enemies say.

It’s a very scary time in the U.S. and the “Raid on Mar-a-Lago” proved it. But our country’s future is even scarier.

At the top we have an aged president who doesn’t know where he is half the time, averages a major gaffe per day and can’t put on his own sports jacket.

Next in line we have a cackling incompetent who’s become a national embarrassment.

And third in line we have a demented Speaker of the House who says she has always had a special connection with China because when she was a child she was told at the beach if she dug a hole deep enough, she could reach China.

Like I said, it’s a really scary time.

Regime change is about the only thing that’s going to save us from the likes of Biden, Harris and Pelosi – our homegrown Axis of Evil and Stupidity.

As I’ve written many times, though I voted for Trump twice, I’m not a diehard fan of Trump because of his unsavory personality.

But things have changed.

On Monday of this week – hours before I heard about the FBI raid – I told my son Cameron that I would vote for anyone except Trump to be the Republican nominee in 2024.

But after I heard about the FBI raid, I told him the only GOP nominee I’d vote for is Trump.

–

Copyright 2022 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

I’m a lucky American.

Thanks to my wife Colleen’s job as a travel agent, in the last two weeks I’ve been to Europe and back.

I was able to tag along with Colleen, as I often do, when she took a group of tourists to France’s Bordeaux wine country.

While I was gone things looked like they were starting to improve a little at home.

The Biden administration was still doing its best to cripple the economy, bankrupt the federal government and destroy our energy industry with their insane green policies.

But the stock market bounced up nicely.

National gasoline prices continued their slow fall towards $4.25 a gallon (except in California).

And Nancy Pelosi didn’t start World War III by visiting Taiwan.

While I was in Europe, a friend from Pittsburgh, an ex-newspaper journalist named Bill Steigerwald, drove from Western Pennsylvania to Montana with his wife and daughter.

It’s a 1,900-mile road trip – one way – but Bill’s used to driving across America and meeting strangers. He still thinks it’s fun at 74.

For decades he did what he calls “drive-by journalism” for the Los Angeles Times (in the 1980s) and two Pittsburgh daily papers.

And in 2010 for his book “Dogging Steinbeck,” he carefully retraced the road trip John Steinbeck made around the U.S. in 1960 and turned it into his iconic best-seller “Travels With Charley.”

Bill drove by himself, racked up 11,276 miles in about 40 days and met hundreds of Americans from Maine to California. Unlike many journalists, he liked 99.9 percent of the flyover people he met.

Bill still meets – and, as he says, “gently interrogates” – people all the time when he travels.

This week, in an email from the middle of barely populated Montana, he wrote, “Don’t be too worried about the future, Mike.”

“In the last week I’ve met half a dozen good, hard working ordinary people out here who prove that the politicians in DC can’t completely wreck America with their bad policies.”

In Lewistown, population 6,000, Bill said he met Brandon O’Halloran, an ex-school teacher in his 40s who owns and operates the Rising Trout Café on Main Street.

Brandon and his wife Mariah have three kids and live on a small all-organic ranch and wheat farm outside of town.

Three mornings a week he goes in at about 5:30 a.m., roasts his own coffee and makes a pile of cinnamon buns and breakfast sandwiches from scratch.

“He’s upbeat, friendly and apolitical, a sensible mix of liberal and conservative,” Bill wrote. “You’d never know the country is in a mess or that his wheat crop failed last year because of the weather.”

Bill is staying in his wife’s family’s log cabin in the dense forest near the former silver mining boomtown of Neihart, population now about 50.

In “downtown” Neihart on Highway 89, which cuts through mountainous Lewis & Clark National Forest and its sprinkling of still-active Minutemen silos, is “The Inconvenience Store.”

A cooperative, it’s run on a shoestring and owned and staffed by a dedicated crew of colorful and friendly residents.

The priceless store serves as an early morning coffee hangout for old-timers, a community center and is the only place for many miles where you can buy bread, milk and water.

Almost next door to the co-op is Bob’s Bar Restaurant & Motel.

The modest combo was bought about five years ago by a hardworking 40-something entrepreneur from Indiana named Janice who even cleans rooms herself (to make sure they’re done right).

Her funky bar caters to tourists, locals, skiers and passing bikers and she just hired a new cook who specializes in prime rib and grilled salmon.

Janice has the only gasoline for sale for 40 miles and she knows locals depend on her.

“She charges $6.50 a gallon,” Bill reported.

“That’s steep – but fair. When her two old gas pumps stop working because of vapor locks, she gets out her equipment and hand pumps what you need herself.”

It’s the way America has always worked, Bill said – in the middle of Montana, anyway.

–

Copyright 2022 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

Lots of perplexed Americans are asking the question, “How did we get here?”

They ask how is it that a rich, powerful and generally happy country that was chugging along so smoothly in the 21st century has almost overnight become an economic, social and ideological train wreck.

It’s a fair question – and the answer has little to do with the pandemic and the collateral damage we’ve done to ourselves with lockdowns and the war on COVID.

Today, the country is divided into dozens of red-blue factions who argue bitterly about everything from federal spending and abortion to oil pipelines, gun control, vaccines and “corrective” gender surgery for 12-year-olds.

The major liberal media have become shameless lapdogs of the Democrats in power in Washington, D.C.

Comedians are being cancelled for being incorrectly funny. Future U.S. Supreme Court justices can’t – or won’t – define the word “woman.”

Our great and special country has never been perfect, obviously. For starters, ask Native Americans, Blacks, women and gays.

But 2022 America has gone mad – in every sense of the word. And the person we can pin much of the blame on is ….

Barack Obama.

In 2008 the sainted liberal from Chicago cruised into the White House on the ideal of hope and change, his powerful oratory and the promise of a better, colorblind and more equal future for all Americans.

But once in office, as his big dreams evaporated, he lit the fires and fanned the flames of much of the political insanity and negative feelings about America we are suffering with today.

For example, Obama was the first president, in my lifetime who openly criticized specific people in the population.

“You didn’t build that” he told business people who’ve started successful companies.

“The police acted stupidly” I think he said when criticizing the Boston cops who arrested professor Henry Louis Gates for “breaking in” to his own house.

The whole “hate the police” theme – which morphed during the Trump years into the “Defund Police” campaign – was essentially sparked by Obama’s attitude about police and his ignoring of the gang violence wracking cities like his hometown.

Meanwhile, Obama’s wife Michelle was the first First Lady to say publicly she was not proud of America.

And when Barack went off to tour Europe, he made it a point to publicly apologize for America’s past failings.

But it’s now clear that the worst thing Obama inflicted on the country in the long run was Joe Biden.

Instead of his many possible but now forgotten VP picks, Obama chose a long-time, washed-up, gaffe-prone, “moderate” hack Democrat and failed presidential wannabe from the who-cares-state of Delaware.

Sen. “Amtrak” was carrying around a career’s worth of bad bipartisan baggage.

Friend of KKK alums like Sen. Robert Byrd, foe of busing for school integration, plagiarizer, hawkish on wars in Iraq and other Middle East places, hard guy on urban crime, mis-handler of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings – Biden held a bunch of positions that simultaneously offended or embarrassed his friends and enemies.

Biden was the booby prize of VP candidates in 2008 – and we can thank Obama for making it possible for Old Joe to eventually become the booby prize of American presidents in 2020.

President Biden – who some argue is really the front man for Barack Obama’s third term – is a mouthpiece for harmful leftwing energy and environmental policies that the “Old Joe” of old would never push.

Sadly, we’re stuck with Biden for two more years, if he can last that long.

But there’s hope for America to become great again — again.

In the fall Republicans will retake Congress. Obama’s socialist ideas and negative attitude about America will die the political deaths they’ve always deserved.

And we’ll never hear of them again – until 2024, when Democrats put Michelle Obama of Martha’s Vineyard at the top of their ticket.

Yikes.

–

Copyright 2022 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.

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He’ll return with a new column on Friday, July 29.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Donald Trump is out there speaking and drawing fired-up crowds in places like Illinois.

It’s obvious that he’s still the most popular figure and dominant force in the Republican Party.

But I’m worried that despite his lasting popularity among most Republicans, he’s a liability to the GOP’s chances to retake the White House in 2024.

The good news for Republicans is that this fall, thanks to Joe Biden, it looks like nothing is going to prevent a Red wave from flushing Democrats out of power in the House and probably in the Senate.

Trump’s energetic stumping will no doubt boost the Republican rout in November.

He’s been blasting Biden and the Democrats for all the obvious and correct reasons – 9 percent inflation, soaring gas prices, spiking crime rates, etc., etc.

But the bad news for Republicans is that Trump won’t stop talking about how he was cheated in the 2020 election.

That claim may please the hardcore Trump faithful, but it is an immediate turnoff to the independents and moderate Democrats whose votes the Republican Party will need to retake the White House in 2024.

Republicans who want Trump to run in 2024 need to understand some big numbers.

We know from the 2020 election that 75 million people around the country voted for Trump and recent polls in places like Arizona say 92 percent of Republicans want him to run again.

But not so fast.

Although there is a huge number of Republicans who still love Trump for who he is and what he accomplished, there’s an equal or greater number of moderate Democrats and independents who hate his guts.

Their hatred of Trump is so absolute that for many Democrats and independents it trumps their anger and disappointment at Biden’s 18-month string of blunders.

In fact, a recent poll found that despite Biden’s serial screwups, 92 percent of Democrats would still vote for him in 2024 – but that’s if he was running against Trump again.

I bet 92 percent of Democrat voters would support California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Hillary Clinton or any Democrat without a prison record – if they were running against Trump.

All this makes Donald Trump big trouble for the GOP’s future.

Unless he pulls a political miracle and gets a whole lot of unhappy Democrats and independents to stop hating him by 2024, he’ll lose again because registered Democrats and independents far outnumber Republicans.

On the other hand, if the GOP nominates someone other than Trump, I think that the percentage of Democrats voting for Biden (or any other Democrat) in 2024 could be as low as 50 percent.

We’ve already seen reports that the Democrat Party is shrinking and Latino voters are abandoning it in shocking numbers.

If the GOP picks a presidential candidate like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, millions of disgruntled or dismayed Democrats and independents who truly want to fix the country will be happy to vote Republican.

My biggest worry about the GOP is that we could blow it in 2024 by nominating Trump.

There are a dozen Republican senators and governors who could beat whomever the Democrats choose in 2024 – but Trump would lose.

It doesn’t matter that his record is a thousand times better than Biden’s or that a return to his sensible economic and immigration policies are what the country needs to regain its health and security.

Trump polarized the entire country once and he’d do it again.

If he runs in 2024 one of the most important elections of our time would be reduced to a 24/7 TV reality show about Trump and his personality.

I’m not a never-Trumper, but I plan to support someone else for the GOP’s nomination in 2024.

Trump showed the Republican Party a better road to take in 2016. Now we need to find someone else to do the driving.

–

Copyright 2022 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

It’s so predictable, maybe we should start calling it “Gun Control Day.”

Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” it happens again and again after a mass shooting, like the one at a July 4th parade near Chicago that killed seven people and wounded two dozen.

The professional anti-gun mob – i.e., liberal Democrats and the major media outlets – immediately spring into action and exploit the tragedy as much as they can.

As they did this week, they automatically blame guns, renew their calls for stricter gun reforms or dream about completely outlawing the private ownership of guns.

It doesn’t matter if the mass shooter was crazy, a terrorist or just plain evil, the gun-control nuts are as unrealistic and dishonest as they are predictable.

If we’d only outlaw handguns and “weapons of war” like the semi-automatic AR-15, they cry again and again, these bloody mass killings and street shootouts would virtually disappear.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

But in the real world, the one we 330 million Americans live in, there are nearly 400 million guns in the hands of private citizens.

Guns of all kinds are virtually in every corner of America, thank the Lord.

About 44 percent of U.S. households contain at least one, according to the 2021 National Firearms Survey.

About 32 percent of those over age 18 own a firearm – that’s 81 million people.

About 42 percent are female, 58 percent male. About 25 percent of blacks, 28 percent of Latinos and 34 percent of whites own guns.

The average gun owner owns five firearms. Handguns are the most common type, but 30 percent of gun owners – 24.6 million individuals – have owned an AR-15 or similarly styled rifle that looks like an assault weapon.

About 20.7 million gun owners have a permit to carry a concealed handgun in public and that number is growing, notably among black women.

The gun-controllers like to mock conservatives who say guns don’t kill people, people do. But last time I checked, Glocks and AR-15s don’t pull their own triggers.

Fewer than .005 percent of America’s 400 million guns were used to commit a murder in 2021.

Only about half of the year’s 20,000 homicides involved handguns – and far more people were killed by knives, fists and rocks than rifles of all kinds.

We know who – not what – is responsible for most of America’s gun violence.

It’s not law-ading gun owners. It’s criminals, gang members and other lawbreakers who laugh at the idea of abiding by any tougher gun law.

The liberal media are generally quiet about the gang-related gun violence that kills dozens of young black men each weekend in cities across the country.

They don’t give us Monday morning body counts from deadly places like Chicago – where 70-plus people were shot on the July 4th weekend and eight died.

In case you haven’t heard, over the holiday weekend at least 220 Americans were shot to death and about 570 were wounded, according to the GunViolenceArchive.com, which documents each incident.

It’d be nice if the country’s top journalists would do their jobs and challenge the gun-control mob when they say they want to rid America of guns.

“Whose guns will you take away exactly?” the media might ask. “Everyone’s?”

“And how do you plan to do it? Are you going to go to the south side of Chicago or South-Central LA, knock on doors and take people’s guns away?”

“Who will actually take the guns? The National Guard? The Marines?”

“Realistically, how many of America’s 400 million guns do you think you’ll collect?”

It’s a certainty that a whole bunch of good Americans will refuse to cooperate with the totalitarian dream of the gun-control mob, but my son Cameron has a deal he wants to make with them.

“As soon as they disarm the inner city neighborhoods of Chicago, St. Louis and East LA, the rest of us will all turn in our guns. Let us all know when you’re done with that.”

–

Copyright 2022 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

It’s been a fabulous week for conservatives, Republicans and millions of ordinary Americans.

I cheered all of the Supreme Court’s recent blockbusters – for moral, political and personal reasons.

I’m 100 percent pro-life. I believe adults should be free to own and carry guns. I believe there should be more prayer in schools, not less.

And I don’t want unelected federal bureaucrats writing laws about the environment or anything else that Congress should be writing.

But the Court’s 5-4 decision last week to overrule Roe v. Wade and send the “regulating” of abortion back to the states, where it always belonged, was doubly pleasing to me.

This week when I spoke about abortion and adoption to a group of teenagers at a Young Americans Foundation event, I repeated something I’ve written and spoken about many times before.

First, I asked the young conservatives to imagine what the world would be like if the person sitting next to them had never been born.

Then I told them the story of Sarah Jean Maysfield, whose family could not afford to have a child and literally left her on the doorstep of a neighbor.

I told them how that neighbor took her in, legally adopted her and changed her name to Sarah Jean Faulks.

I told them about Nancy Robbins. On the day she was born her father walked out on her mother because he didn’t want a child. Nancy was later adopted by the doctor who had married her mother.

And then there was John L. Flaugher. He was born to a young woman from Ohio who had been impregnated by a married man. After she gave birth to John alone in California, she gave him up for adoption.

So, OK, I asked the kids, what’s the big deal with these unknown “unwanted” babies?

Well, Sarah Jane Faulks was Jane Wyman, an Academy Award-winning actress, the first wife of Ronald Reagan and my mother.

Nancy Robbins, who would be adopted by her mother’s second husband, Dr. Loyal Davis, became Nancy Davis, the actress, second wife of Ronald Reagan and first lady of the United States.

And John L. Flaugher, the baby put up for adoption in California by his un-wed mother, is actually the author of this column.

So, I asked the kids, imagine what life would have been like for the Reagan family – or the world, for that matter – if these three babies had been aborted instead of adopted?

During the half-century of abortion on demand that Roe made possible in 1973, an estimated 63 million future Americans were snuffed out.

Disproportionately black and brown lives, no one knows how much good they could have done for themselves, their families and the rest of us if they had been given a chance to live.

Again, I’m proudly pro-life. But I’m also really, really, really pro-adoption.

In post-Roe America, it’s going to be incumbent on those of us who are pro-life to support adoption in every way possible.

We have to be there with our love, our time, our money and our political clout to help all single mothers keep and raise their “accidental” babies. Especially if they are our own daughters.

If the mothers decide they can’t keep their children, we pro-lifers have to work overtime to make sure they will be adopted and don’t end up being victims of our horrible foster care system.

Most important, we pro-lifers need to use our political powers in Red and Blue states to get rid of the overly strict and complicated adoption laws that often make it more difficult and expensive to adopt American babies than foreign ones.

Getting those state laws changed to make adoption easier and more common is the responsible, moral and practical reaction to the end of Roe.

It’s not time to sit back and party because we won the constitutional fight over Roe.

For pro-lifers, the work to bring more babies into this world alive – and love and care for them – has just begun.

–

Copyright 2022 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

I cry to see what’s happened to Disney.

When I was growing up – and until not that long ago – you knew you could trust Disney to make entertaining movies you could take your entire family to see.

The Walt Disney Company became rich and powerful by being Hollywood’s most family-friendly corporation.

Its earliest string of animated movies, classics like “Pinocchio” and “Bambi” in the 1940s, are rated G by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

But most of the animated movies and features made these days by Disney and its subsidiary Pixar, including Pixar’s current release “Lightyear,” are not so 1950s wholesome.

They’re rated PG – Parental Guidance suggested.

In a PG-rated product the MPAA says some material “may not be suitable for children. Parents urged to give ‘parental guidance.’ May contain some material parents might not like for their young children.”

The MPAA doesn’t say whether the on-screen kiss between two gay cartoon women in “Lightyear” is something an unwoke parent or grandparent might not want to have to explain to a six year old.

But the kiss – which has caused Disney a lot of grief and given “Lightyear” a lot of free publicity – has become the latest example of how corporate wokism is spoiling our culture.

Conservatives pundits and many parents are complaining that “Lightyear,” which is the “origin story” of “Toy Story” character Buzz Lightyear, has been politicized by a cell of LGBTQ propagandists working at Disney.

The kissing scene was originally cut from “Lightyear” but was then reinstated after Disney and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a feud over Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill, which banned public schools from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3.

It’s satisfying to see that Disney’s creepy propagandizing is causing it financial pain at the box office, here and overseas.

“Lightyear’s” opening weekend in the United States was a critical and financial bust for a movie that cost $200 million to make.

About because of the gay kiss, about 15 Muslim countries have banned it so far, and China – a major market for Disney – reportedly has asked Disney to cut the scene before allowing it into the country.

There’s lots of humor in Disney’s descent into blatant wokism in its movies and at its theme parks.

For example, “Fox Across America” host Jimmy Failla tweeted that Disney should rename its Disneyland ride “Snow White and the Seven Genders.”

But mostly what has befallen Disney is terribly sad.

From “Pinocchio” all the way to Disneyworld, the Disney Channel and Disney+, the company Walt started was all about entertainment – G-rated family entertainment.

Now it’s also about pushing woke ideas on little kids and making many parents uncomfortable – or angry.

My granddaughters – age 4 and 6 – love going to these animated Disney/Pixar movies, but there’s no way my son Cameron is going to take them and have to explain in the middle of the movie what’s going on between the two women.

Once upon a time, when you went to a movie made by the Disney Company or watched its shows on TV you knew you were going to be able to escape the grim, sordid or politicized stuff polluting our society.

You knew you’d be able to laugh and enjoy the show for a couple hours.

And you knew that your kids were not going to be indoctrinated or confused by values and ideas about sex, politics and lifestyles that deliberately undermined yours.

It’s outrageous what is going on at Disney. I’m 77. I’ll be gone in the not too distant future, but what about my grandchildren?

Their parents shouldn’t be afraid to take them to a Disney movie or let them stream “Toy Story 12.”

We’ve already had six sci-fi movies from Hollywood based on the “Transformers” franchise. Will next year’s blockbuster be “The Transgenders”?

For my grandkids’ sake, I hope not.

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Copyright 2022 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.