Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

It almost seems like the CDC wants to sink cruise ships.

Since the start of its war against COVID-19 the CDC – everyone’s favorite public health care bureaucracy – has been torpedoing the cruise ship industry with unnecessarily strict regulations that are only making it harder for the industry to survive the pandemic and its lockdowns.

As recently as Dec. 31 the CDC issued a statement warning all travelers – including vaccinated ones with boosters – to avoid cruise ships, which are really gigantic floating hotels with casinos.

The warning, which was triggered because the total number of COVID cases on the 92 ships that the CDC monitors had spiked to a high level in early December, was a warning we’ve heard many times before:

“The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads easily between people in close quarters on board ships, and the chance of getting COVID-19 on cruise ships is very high, even if you are fully vaccinated and have received a COVID-19 vaccine booster dose.”

After the CDC targeted the cruise ship industry, the media piled on by spooking the public with headlines about ships not being allowed to sail or having to return to port because of COVID outbreaks among passengers or crews.

Despite two years of scary publicity that kept many travelers on land and crushed the industry’s revenues, these days a cruise ship is actually one of the safest places on the planet.

Passengers and crews are 100 percent vaccinated. Masks are mandatory in public spaces except when eating or drinking.

Ships are not booked to full capacity. And there is a hospital with doctors and nurses on board.

As I’ve mentioned before, my wife is a travel agent who books people on cruises and I often tag along.

Last October when I joined her as she led a small group of brave seafarers around the Mediterranean, we couldn’t have been safer.

Though all 600 of us had to be vaccinated, we still had to be tested before we got on the ship in Athens and before and after we visited most ports.

On our boat the one and only person who tested positive for COVID was asymptomatic but was quickly quarantined.

The strict “COVID-19 risk mitigation program” that the CDC imposed on the cruise ship industry is not enforced anywhere else.

Not on airplanes. Not in hotels. Not in supermarkets. Not at Alabama-Georgia football games in front of 100,000 screaming and maskless college kids.

If the CDC did impose its cruise ship standards on hotels, no one would go to a hotel. No one would ride airplanes, trains and buses, either.

Today, with omicron racing across the country and infecting millions of the vaxxed and un-vaxxed alike, it looks like everyone on land and sea will soon get the highly contagious but virtually harmless variant – or has it already.

I guarantee that if you tested everyone who checks into a hotel or boards an airplane tonight anywhere in the world, someone will have COVID.

Ditto if you tested everyone for COVID in your neighborhood supermarket, or at an NBA game, or in a hospital emergency room.

It’s been clear for two years that the CDC’s tough COVID regulations were unfairly harming the cruise ship industry, its employees and stockholders – and that they should have been thrown overboard long ago.

But the harm is even more obvious now that we know COVID vaccines and boosters don’t protect you from catching omicron or prevent you from spreading it.

Amazingly, however, the CDC’s bureaucrats have suddenly come to their senses.

The CDC announced Wednesday that what it has been calling its “Framework for Conditional Sailing Order” will expire this weekend and from now on its COVID “guidance” for cruise ships will become voluntary. It’s up to the cruise lines to decide how to “COVID-proof” their ships.

You could say that this happy decision is a sign that after two years the CDC is finally getting its ship together.

–

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 was silly, but I was really hoping 2022 would be different.

A new year. A fresh start for America.

And an end – or at least a brief armistice – to the nasty political civil war that has tortured us for the last two years.

But after experiencing less than 12 hours of 2022, I came to my senses: On Jan. 1, I tweeted, “New Year, same BS.”

That’s how long it took FOX, CNN, CBS and the rest of the national media to show me that the only thing that was going to change about the year 2022 was the number.

Everyone in America is still mad at everyone else.

The country is still split into red and blue political camps. It’s still split into the vaxxed and unvaxxed.

And while the Biden administration continues to try its damnedest to wreck everything that still works in America, Donald Trump is still driving the Democrat Party and the media crazy.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris proved how much Trump’s ghost haunts them on Thursday morning when they delivered their equally awful speeches marking the anniversary of Jan. 6, 2021.

You remember “Insurrection Day”? Unless you’ve been in a coma for a year, how could you forget?

It was the day our Capitol building in Washington was burned to the ground by an armed mob of Trump supporters who killed dozens of Congress people, overturned the 2020 election and destroyed American democracy forever.

In the real world, of course, it didn’t actually happen like that.

But Biden, Harris, the Pelosi-Schumer tag team in Congress and the media want to make sure 1/6 becomes a day that will live forever in infamy – like 12/7/41 or 9/11.

That kind of laughable rhetoric really helps to unite our politically divided country, doesn’t it?

So does insisting on calling 1/6 an “insurrection” instead of what it was – a peaceful political protest that exploded into a dangerous and disgraceful riot whose only fatality was an unarmed Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot to death by a Capitol police officer.

No one in politics with half a brain and an ounce of power was ever in favor of what happened in Washington on 1/6.

No one on the left, no one on the right. Not President Trump, not even Sean Hannity.

In fact, for the first time probably since 9/11, FOX and CNN were actually on the same political page.

Republicans and conservatives repeatedly have said the Capitol riot was a disgrace to America and that violently crashing the Capitol was wrong.

They’ve also said – repeatedly – that those who broke the law should be arrested and charged – fairly and equally – with trespassing, attacking police or whatever appropriate crime.

Unlike the left’s sympathetic and hands-off reaction to the deadly and destructive nightly riots in a dozen American cities in the summer of 2020, Republicans have been consistent on how to react to mob violence.

Republicans condemned it in those blue cities and at the Capitol on “Insurrection Day.”

But for the Democrat Party and its flock of parrots in the media, the “deadly” insurrection of 1/6 Trump supposedly fomented has become a myth they are never going to let the country forget.

1/6 is their new national holiday. A day they can memorialize – weaponize – each year for decades for purely partisan political reasons.

For now, Democrats know 1/6 is the only propaganda weapon they have left to distract the public’s attention from the Biden administration’s never-ending list of failures.

But ordinary Americans don’t care about marking the anniversary of “Insurrection Day.” They know a fake insurrection when they see one.

They’re more worried about things that are real and things that really matter to them – today. Things like the rising price of gas and hamburger and Biden’s bungled war on COVID.

Anyway, don’t tell the Democrats. But last fall ordinary Americans across the country started a real insurrection that’s long overdue – a worthy revolution by parents who aim to break the power of public school boards and the teachers unions and retake control of their kids’ educations.

–

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 New Year’s again and time to hope for a happier future.

Last year at this time we were hoping for a better year in 2021, but that sure as heck didn’t work out, did it?

Forget the damage done to the economy by the hapless and relentlessly clueless “Joe Biden” regime.

Forget the Biden-made disasters at the Mexican border and in Afghanistan.

The worst mistakes the Biden administration made were in its failed “War on COVID.”

Biden, Dr. Fauci, the blue state governors, the CDC and the government’s so-called public health experts were wrong about everything – the high cost of lockdowns, the efficacy and safety of vaccines, the protection provided by cloth masks, the benefits of social distancing, boosters, mask mandates, vaccine mandates….

What’s left?

Whatever it is, if it had anything to do with fighting the virus in 2021, the Biden administration and its panic-pushing cheerleaders in the mainstream liberal media got it wrong.

Whether you’re masked or unmasked, vaxxed or un-vaxxed, or holed up 24/7 in your basement, COVID or one of its variants is eventually going to get you.

I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do to stay safe. I wear a mask when told. I’ve been vaccinated. I’ll get my first booster next month.

But after two years of following the strict and ever-changing rules, I look around and see most public places in Los Angeles closing down again because of omicron, a variant that is more transmissible but not nearly as dangerous as the original strain of  COVID-19.

I also see long lines of people waiting to get a COVID test. I think to myself, they don’t look sick.

If you’re slightly sick, if you’ve got the sniffles and a cough and a little temperature, do you really need to get tested immediately for COVID – and possibly infect other people with whatever you have while you stand in line?

Shouldn’t you just stay home and take some therapeutics until you see whether it’s really COVID, the flu or, more likely, just one of about 200 cold viruses out there we can catch?

I’m no Dr. Fauci, but I do know a lot of people have lost their minds during our government’s losing battle against COVID.

The other day I was having lunch with my daughter in a restaurant and when they sat us down, a mother and her grown-up son at the table next to us just about had a heart attack.

We were wearing our masks. But they called over the manager and said, “We have to move. We’re too close!”

The son nodded to me as he left, signaling “My mother’s crazy. Don’t worry about her.”

But then the table next to them also moved away. Pretty soon there wasn’t a table within 20 yards of us.

If that older woman was that paranoid – and clueless – about catching COVID in a restaurant, why was she even out of her house?

Likewise, if you’re that terrified of getting COVID on an airplane, why are you even on a plane? Get in your car and drive to where you’re going– or stay home.

In 2021 we learned many important lessons about what works and doesn’t work in the failed war against COVID.

As we enter 2022 filled with the hope that we’ve learned from our mistakes, we’ve recently discovered that COVID vaccines – originally touted (and pushed) by Biden, Dr. Fauci and the panic media as the magic medical bullets that would save us all – don’t actually protect you from catching the virus. Sometimes catching it twice.

At best, it appears the vaccines and their boosters only stop you from getting deathly ill.

In two years more than 800,000 Americans have died of or with COVID. We can safely predict that no matter what we do thousands of additional COVID-related deaths are coming in 2022.

So be careful. Stay safe. Don’t let the frightened people run or ruin your life. And have yourself a happy New Year – if they let us.

–

Copyright 2021 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 sick and tired of wearing masks.

I’m sick and tired of vaccine mandates.

I’m sick and tired of hearing the dire warnings and broken promises of politicians and incompetent public health officials.

For almost two years they’ve ordered us around like children and told us what individual freedoms we must sacrifice if we are to ever win the war against COVID-19.

Now a new variant, omicron, has knocked us backwards again.

Though it’s not as lethal or as transmissible as the delta variant, the media have rebooted their panic machines and America is masking up and locking down once more.

Corporations are telling employees to work from home. Broadway plays are being closed. Holiday parties are being canceled.

Without a vaccination card, you already can’t do some things or eat inside some restaurants.

The almighty Dr. Fauci even says if you invite your brother to Christmas dinner, you should make him show you his vax card before you let him in the door.

Dr. Science wasn’t kidding.

He, Democrat politicians and the liberal media have recently made our national COVID nightmare worse by dividing our already politically split country into two new warring camps – the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.

The vaxxed are the good people and the unvaccinated have become Public Health Enemy Number One. They are the bad, selfish and presumably Trump-leaning Americans who are preventing our total victory over covid.

It’s as if some people who have taken the covid shots carry a cross around with them and when they see someone un-vaxxed they bring it out like they’ve encountered Dracula.

If only every un-vaxxed person in America would give up their bodies and get the jab (or two) – even if they don’t need it or want it – they’d make Fauci, President Biden and the East Coast media nannies very happy.

Then, our leaders promise us, the threat from COVID-19 and its variants would disappear and all our lives could return to “normal” – whatever it is going to look like when we’re all still forced to wear masks and show our vax passports everywhere we go.

I don’t blame the un-vaxxed for the continuing pandemic. As I tweeted the other day, I don’t care whether someone is vaxxed like I am or not.

I don’t hate them, either. I realize I’ve hugged, shook hands and eaten dinner with dozens of people who haven’t been jabbed.

People tell me, “You could die.”

Yeah. I’m 76. I could die of a lot of stuff. But I stay healthy. I take all my meds.

So far, thanks to the thugs running China who created the virus, more than 800,000 Americans have died of – or with – COVID-19. Most, by far, were very old or already very sick or unhealthy.

About 1,100 Americans are still dying every day despite the fact that we’ve had vaccines for almost a year and we’ve done everything Fauci, government experts and politicians have ordered us to do.

Unfortunately, nothing they did worked to stop the pandemic.

First we were told we had to flatten the curve for a few weeks ….

Oops.

Then we were told we had to “shelter in place” in our basements for six months ….

Oops.

Then if you wore a mask indoors and outdoors – and while you played sports …

Oops.

Then if you got the vaccine, you’d never have to worry …

Oops.

Then if you get a booster – or two – you’ll really be protected ….

Oops.

Now these same geniuses want to give the vaccine to every kid five years old and younger – even though the science says they don’t need it.

The vaccine makers have done tests on some kids and they guarantee it’s completely safe.

But how will the vaccines affect the kids’ bodies five or 10 years from now, or during a pregnancy? And what about boosters – and more boosters?

The answers to those important questions are unknown but they might turn out to be some pretty horrible “Oops.”

Meanwhile, everyone have a merry Christmas and don’t let Santa down your chimney unless he’s been vaxxed – oops.

–

Copyright 2021 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

My daughter has a nice little house in a safe neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Until recently she never really had to worry about crime or her personal safety.

But now suburban places like hers in Northern California and Southern California are being hit by a crime wave that has never hit them before.

As you’ve seen on national TV, “smash-and-grab” gangs are hitting shopping malls like the one near her – the same one I often take my granddaughters to.

And now there are even young thugs who’ll follow you home from the mall and break into your house.

It’s no wonder my daughter is afraid to go out to her mailbox in the dark by herself.

She’s not alone. Many people in the multi-troubled state of California are living in fear.

It is bad enough that for almost two years the Democrats in charge of the state government have used the war on COVID as an excuse to expand their powers and abuse us with strict lockdowns, school closings and mandates.

But seven years ago the state’s so-called progressives brought us Proposition 47, a sentencing “reform” measure that among other things essentially decriminalized retail theft by making stealing anything with a value of less than $950 a mere misdemeanor.

If you combine that dumb idea – which the Los Angeles Times points out “was co-authored by then-San Francisco — now Los Angeles — Dist. Atty. George Gascón and strongly supported by then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom” — with the even dumber idea of defunding the police, you will understand why California is in the midst of a crime wave.

The 2021 crime stats for Los Angeles County tell the grim story.

Compared to 2019, homicides in LA through the end of October are up 75 percent.

Aggravated assaults involving a firearm are up 73 percent. Motor vehicle thefts are up 57 percent. Unlawful shootings are up 73 percent…

And, to show what happens when you defund the police, destroy the morale of your officers and threaten them with vaccine mandates that result in them quitting their jobs, arrests in Los Angeles in 2021 so far compared to 2019 are down 34 percent.

The criminals have gotten so bold that even progressives living in gated and walled mansions in Beverly Hills are starting to wake up and demand more police protection.

As we know, calls for more law and order by liberals are rare.

But that’s what happens when the nice shops in your nice neighborhood – the ones on Rodeo Drive, for example – get hit by the smashers and grabbers.

And it’s what happens when an 81-year-old philanthropist a few blocks away gets robbed and murdered in her zillion-dollar home – despite having an armed guard.

The state’s justice system has become a tragic joke. The 14 smash-and-grabbers police arrested here last week were probably back on the street before the police returned home.

Also, everyone knows these well-coordinated mobs of smash-and-grabbers are not stealing baby food.

They’re not poor kids. They’re sophisticated punks who’ve figured out how to steal $500 purses and terrorize people – and “woke” politicians and subversive district attorneys are letting them get away with it.

You don’t see these gangs operating in Florida. They’re a home-grown product of California and its irresponsible politicians like Gov. Newsom and DA Gascón.

Thanks to them, we have a lot of ordinary Californians who are afraid if they go to a mall or sit down outside at a restaurant a bunch of thugs will show up and rob or terrorize them.

Everyone in Los Angeles now knows by now that the city’s shrinking police force and upside-down justice system can no longer do the basic job of protecting them from California’s Crime Wave.

Which is probably why one sensible public servant, Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva, has been working extra hard to expand his department’s ability to issue concealed weapons permits.

–

Copyright 2021 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 world is still COVID crazy.

With their vaccine mandates, passports and mistreatment of the unvaccinated, free countries like Australia and Canada are turning into dictatorships.

Now we have omicron – a new variant of still unknown infectiousness and lethality that overnight panicked the world’s governments and stock markets.

The arrival of omicron was bad enough.

But it also meant that last weekend we were forced to watch the face of Dr. Fauci pop up on our TV screens like some Orwellian “Big Doctor” and tell us what we should do, what we should fear and whether it’ll be safe to invite our extended families to Christmas dinner.

Excuse me, but more than a year ago it became painfully clear to most people that Dr. Fauci is a dangerous, incompetent joke.

He’s been wrong about masks and vaccine efficacy and the benefits of lockdowns, mandates and closing schools.

After 19 months on the job, he’s still pushing the same “solutions” that wrecked the economy and failed to prevent new waves of deaths and hospitalizations in 2021 – vaccines for everyone and yearly boosters for every human of any age with a pulse, whether or not it makes medical sense.

Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci is not the only government quack we have to suffer. There’s also the renowned baby doctor, Dr. Sotomayor.

You might know her better as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

She’s not really an MD, of course, but this week she played one during the oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the potential landmark case that will decide the fate of Mississippi’s abortion-restriction law and may challenge Roe v. Wade.

As the Federalist put it, Justice Sotomayor “gruesomely” compared “a child in the womb to being brain dead and questioned whether or not a physical response by the baby such as a foot recoiling indicates that he or she can feel pain.”

“There are spontaneous acts by dead-brained people,” Dr. Sotomayor said. “So I don’t think that a response by a fetus necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness.”

Sotomayor proved she is no doctor and also gave away her positions on abortion and when life begins.

Her gruesome remarks reminded me of one of the stories I tell when I speak to pro-life groups and adoption groups.

I tell them about four babies I know who were not aborted but adopted.

The first was Sarah Jane Maysfield.

Born in Missouri, her parents didn’t have enough money to care for her, so they left her on their neighbor’s porch. The neighbors adopted her and changed her name to Sarah Jane Fulks.

The second was Nancy Robbins.

Her father walked out on her mother the day she was born but her mother’s second husband adopted Nancy and changed her last name to his.

The third baby was John L. Flaugher.

He was born to an unwed mother from Ohio who came to California to give birth to him and then put him up for adoption.

Last, was Rita Mirembi.

Born to a 13-year-old bush girl in Uganda, she was put into an orphanage. In the 1980s a young California girl working for the UN fell madly in love with baby Rita, adopted her and brought her home.

So who were these four babies?

Sarah Jane Maysfield, who became Sarah Jane Fulks, you would know as Jane Wyman, the Academy Award-winning actress. I’d know her as Mom.

Nancy Robbins became Nancy Davis. You would know her as Nancy Reagan, the first lady. I’d know her as my stepmother.

Rita Mirembi became known as Rita Mirembi Reagan. Adopted by my sister Maureen, I’d know her as my niece.

John L. Flaugher, born in L.A. and adopted by Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman, became known as me, Michael Reagan.

After listening to Sotomayor’s offensive statements, it reminded me how lucky my family was that we had mothers who thought of us as viable and precious human beings and not brain dead fetuses.

–

Copyright 2021 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 other day, I ran into someone who was too discouraged to give thanks for much of anything.

He’s convinced the world is going to end and the USA – led by what the politicians running California are doing to ruin this once great state — is going to hell in a handbasket.

I admit I found it hard to disagree with him.

Thanks to the general incompetence and sabotaging of the economy by the Biden administration, the country has been thrown into chaos and disarray.

Inflation is spiking. The prices of gas and food and used cars and houses have already spiked. So have crime rates and drug ODs and suicides.

Our police forces and the judicial system have been deliberately weakened. And now we have organized smash-and-grab gangs brazenly looting shopping malls and Beverly Hills jewelry stores.

Meanwhile, there’s the serious harm that’s been done to America’s economy – and its basic freedoms — by the federal and state war against COVID-19.

Government mismanagement has destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, thrown millions out of work and split our already politically split country into two new camps — one that’s for vaccine mandates and one that’s against them.

But you know what, I told my friend, a lot of Americans felt exactly the way he does today at the end of the 1970s.

Remember the Cold War? The defeat in Vietnam? The long lines at gas stations? How about double-digit inflation and chronic sky-high unemployment?

Remember how disgracefully our returning Vietnam vets were treated? Spat upon? Afraid to wear their uniforms in public?

We had just as many serious ills during that miserable decade as we do now – plus bell bottoms, disco and a president named Jimmy.

But Americans have the innate ability to right our ship of state no matter how far it lists to the left.

That’s what we did in 1980 when we elected my father and put the country back on the right track.

Within a few years inflation was 3 percent, oil and gas were plentiful and America was back better and stronger than ever.

We were able to make that comeback because, thankfully, America has elections every two and four years that allow us to correct our worst mistakes in a short amount of time.

That’s what is going to happen next fall.

Just as the voters in Virginia righted their ship earlier this month by crushing the state’s Democrat incumbents, in the 2022 midterm elections the American people are going to sweep the Democrats out of power in Congress on a mighty Red wave.

Until then, let’s enjoy this Thanksgiving weekend by thinking of the many things to be thankful for in our great country.

Start with your family, as I always do.

Other than thanking each one of them for the good and loving people they are, I specifically give thanks to my wife Colleen for all she does for our family.

As I always tell people, if it weren’t for her, I’d be living in a tent under an overpass on the Hollywood Freeway.

I give thanks to my son Cameron and daughter-in-law Susana for having two wonderful grandkids, Marilyn and Penelope.

And I also give thanks to my daughter Ashley for being a great kindergarten teacher and for helping us in so many ways with our Reagan Legacy Foundation.

Look, it’s OK to be discouraged by all the things that are going wrong in Biden’s America.

We should be mad as hell at the evil political stuff that Old Joe and his progressive wrecking crew are doing to trash the country.

But this Thanksgiving weekend is not just a good time to get away from politics, sit down and watch your favorite pro or college football teams on TV.

It’s also a perfect time to reflect on the enduring greatness of America — and to be thankful that we can right our ship so quickly.

–

Copyright 2021 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

On Thursday afternoon, as the country was still awaiting the decision on the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial, the yahoos outside the courthouse in Kenosha were ready to riot.

Guilty, not guilty, hung jury or mistrial – it won’t matter to them what the verdict will be on the homicide charges against Rittenhouse.

The yahoos are going to make trouble in the streets whether they are enraged by the jury’s decision or pleased by it.

They’ve been taking photos of the jurors and threatening them to vote the “right” way – which means not acquitting Rittenhouse on grounds of self-defense. They’ve also been sending death threats to the judge.

The 500 members of Wisconsin’s National Guard that have been called in to handle the expected post-verdict violence will probably keep the yahoos from burning down what’s left of Kenosha.

But as we know, the National Guard has arrived a year and a half too late. The city of 100,000 will probably never recover.

Kenosha’s fate is to live on as the symbol of what happens to a town when spineless politicians and the deplorable liberal media allow, encourage and justify violent and destructive protests in the name of social justice.

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is the latest proof of how hopelessly the country is split between Republicans and Democrats on almost every issue.

Trump, the 2020 election, the so-called “insurrection” of Jan. 6, immigration policy, critical race theory in schools ….

Everything political is a 50-50 split and the biased mainstream media always take the progressive side.

The liberal media have never stopped cheering for the arrests and prolonged imprisonments of some of the Trump people who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6.

But you never heard the media call for the arrest and prosecution of the “peaceful” rioters who burned Kenosha and repeatedly rioted in a dozen other cities like Portland last summer.

And if any clown in the liberal media – Joy Reid of MSNBC comes to mind — has expressed outrage at the yahoos for threatening the jurors and the judge in the Rittenhouse case, it’s flown under my radar.

The big liberal media are so blinded by their hate of flyover country people, Republicans, Trump and kids like Rittenhouse they don’t care that President Brandon called the 17-year-old “a white supremacist” just two days after he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz on Aug. 25, 2020.

Ever since last summer, the media have done their best to make the public think that Rittenhouse was a junior white nationalist, that he was illegally carrying a rifle, that he had no right to be in Kenosha where his father lived and that he was a vigilante looking to kill protestors.

The liberal media deliberately spread those lies and slanted their journalism for more than a year — until the televised Rittenhouse trial showed America the truth.

How long did it take for you to learn from the media that Rittenhouse’s victims all were white?

Or that one of the dead ones was a convicted pedophile with a serious violent streak? That the other fatality was a felon convicted in a strangulation case who was recently accused of domestic abuse?

Or that the guy who got his forearm blown off had drawn a loaded Glock from his ankle holster and pointed it at Rittenhouse’s face?

If you only watched MSNBC and CNN and didn’t watch the trial, you’d have thought Rittenhouse’s victims were good guys with families who cared deeply for social justice.

The liberal media never questioned what the yahoos were doing in the burning streets of Kenosha, but they all agreed Rittenhouse didn’t belong there.

Maybe he didn’t belong there. Maybe he should have stayed home and watched Kenosha burn like most of the adults in town did.

But the reality is, if you tell the cops to stand down, you can be sure some people will stand up.

Someone had to try to defend the city from the yahoos.

The tragedy – and the main reason Kenosha burned and two people died – is that because the adults in charge of the town hid behind their locked doors, kids like Rittenhouse had to go out to do their job.

–

Copyright 2021 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

Did you and your family celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall on Tuesday?

Didn’t think so, but it’s not necessarily your fault.

“The Fall of the Wall” was a geopolitical earthquake in 1989.

As any child of the Cold War knows, it signaled the beginning of the end of the evil Soviet Empire and led to the liberation of millions of Germans, Poles, Czechs and others who’d been held captive under communism for almost half a century.

The fall of the Wall 32 years ago – the symbol of the collapse of communism – doesn’t get much attention these days.

I didn’t see a word in the media this week marking its anniversary and I’m sure it was never mentioned in our sorry public schools.

Of course, our schools don’t teach our history anymore.

They push politically trendy crap like Critical Race Theory and tell our kids how bad America is, or was.

They sure don’t educate our children about the importance of preserving and expanding our hard-won and fragile freedoms.

In 1967, when my father was elected governor of California, he talked in his inaugural address about how important it is for each new generation to protect and refresh the freedom they’ve inherited.

“Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

It seems pretty obvious today that our generation is not fighting hard enough to defend our freedom – or even define it for our kids.

When I speak about freedom to 250 college students at the Reagan Ranch Center in downtown Santa Barbara, Calif., I’m going to tell them what I told 150 high school kids at the center earlier this week.

I’m going to take them back to Aug. 12, 1961, and tell them the story I like to tell about the young boy in Berlin who went to dinner at his cousin’s house across town.

He decided to stay overnight at his cousin’s when it became too late to return home and when he woke up the next morning the border between East and West Berlin had been closed and the Wall was going up.

That young boy didn’t get home again until Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Think about that. If you lived in East Germany at that time, or anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and you’re 32 years old today, you’ve only been free for that long.

We Americans are lucky. We were born into freedom. But we need to remember to fully honor those men and women who risked or lost their lives to keep us free – every day of the year.

We need to remember the World War II veterans who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. And the vets who fought and died in the jungles of Vietnam and those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But since we can’t depend on schools to teach our kids about the value of our veterans or how and where they fought and died to defend our freedom, it’s up to parents.

When I was writing this column on Wednesday my son Cameron called and said he was going to take my two young granddaughters to a military cemetery on Veterans Day.

Then he said he planned to take them to the annual Veterans Day events at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, where all branches of our military are honored with ceremonies and military bands.

My son is doing it right. It’s up to fathers like him to teach our kids to honor vets at a very young age – the same way my dad taught me.

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Copyright 2021 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

Well, what do you know.

Donald Trump finally did the right thing.

He shut the hell up, encouraged his supporters to flood the polls and stayed away from Virginia.

By keeping his powerful big political butt out of this week’s elections in Virginia, the ex-president actually made a huge and positive contribution to the devastating losses Democrats suffered there on Tuesday night.

Trump’s absence turned out to be a key for the Republican Party’s shocking success.

Instead of showing up and making Virginia’s elections about himself, stealing all the media attention or rehashing how the 2020 election was stolen from him, Trump stayed home and allowed Glenn Youngkin to win by running his own brilliant campaign.

Youngkin, who did surprisingly well among Latino males and suburban soccer moms, was able to deftly thread the needle and hold on to hardcore Trump voters without scaring off independents.

He and his diverse statewide Republican running mates – a Latino attorney general and the Virginia’s first black woman lieutenant governor, ex-Marine Winsome Sears – won because they were able to hammer away on burning local issues that mattered most to voters.

They were able to focus on the teaching of racist theories in public schools. And they were able to look forward, and talk about the future, not the past, which is how you win most elections.

People have been calling me a Never Trumper on Twitter because I’ve argued that it’s fine for Trump to intensely involve himself in Republican state primaries but that he should stay away from general elections in the fall.

Virginia’s results, thank you very much, proved my argument is sound.

It’s been obvious for a long time that in important general elections – for instance, Georgia’s special Senate races last December that gave Democrats control of the Senate — Trump’s personal and political “charms” can suppress the Republican vote turnout and hurt the GOP’s chances.

He can cause some squeamish old-school conservative Republicans to stay home on Election Day.

And his presence can turn off many independents and moderate Democrats who’ve come to their senses about the threat the progressives in Congress pose to America.

Trump is famous for not taking advice or giving bad advice.

But by shutting up his mouth, stifling his ego and not visiting Virginia he finally did exactly what I’ve been telling him to do for a year in my tweets and columns.

Maybe he’s been reading my columns. Where do I send the bill, Donald?

Just kidding.

To paraphrase what my father liked to say, “It’s not about who gets the credit, it’s about getting the job done.”

And what happened in Virginia this week shows what local Republicans can get done when the party’s Mr. Crazy has the good sense to shut up and stay home.

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Copyright 2021 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.