Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

This week’s Republican National Convention was the best I’ve ever watched.

The locations and settings were great.

Melania did a fine job in the White House Rose Garden.

Vice President Mike Pence praised President Trump remotely from Baltimore’s Fort McHenry.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke from somewhere in Israel.

In addition, the GOP’s diversity quotient was off the charts.

The impressive speakers included Tim Scott (the U.S. Senator from South Carolina whose inspiring life story is summed up by “From Cotton to Congress”), Nikki Hailey (the Indian-American former governor of South Carolina) and young Daniel Jay Cameron, the first black attorney general of Kentucky.

Plus, there were so many women coming to the podium over the first three days you couldn’t count them.

Along with Trump’s daughters, Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway and rising star Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. There was also Kim Klacik, the dynamic young Republican running for Congress who filmed her remarks in the urban ruins of Democrat-run Baltimore.

Best of all were the speeches.

The speakers were not afraid to be political.

They slapped around Joe Biden and the radical Democrats who control him a few dozen times, and they stood up for unborn babies, school choice and strong borders.

But they didn’t deliver a string of cliched political sermons like the ones we’ve had to endure at past national conventions.

The RNC speeches were what good political speeches should be – mercifully short, tight, well-written and delivered like mini-Ted Talks.

Many were emotional personal stories told by ordinary Americans who had been helped by the Trump administration or who had positive things to say about the troubled country they loved.

My favorites included a lumberjack from Wisconsin, a Cuban refugee who appreciates the priceless gift of freedom and a good-hearted cop from New Mexico who adopted the baby of a homeless drug addict.

I mean, who knew a lumberjack from Wisconsin could be such a good public speaker?

The way the Trump campaign put their convention together was not only politically effective and first class all the way, it was actually great prime-time television.

Overcoming the limitations imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, the RNC used technology, the trappings of the presidency and a diverse line-up of great young speakers in many smart and entertaining ways.

The Republican convention was a fast-moving, upbeat circus compared to the Democrats’ draggy snooze-fest, which looked like it was shot in an airplane hangar and felt like a Zoom meeting of angry politicians and spoiled Hollywood celebrities.

I swear it was televised in black-and-white.

The contrasting conventions prove that what my father said decades ago about the difference between Republicans and Democrats is still true.

Paraphrasing him, he said with Republicans it’s always morning in America and with Democrats it’s always darkness – midnight in a rainstorm, I’d say.

The DNC was not just dull, boring and over-weighted with the dead ideas of socialism. It was a depressing and unrelentingly negative affair.

The ordinary Americans they found to speak came to tell sob stories about how evil Donald Trump was and how much his policies hurt them.

Based on how they portrayed themselves at their convention, Democrats must be the saddest human beings on the planet.

They enjoy all the great things that freedom and capitalism can bring, but they’re never happy.

Unlike Republicans who look to the future, they’re slaves to the past, guilty about America’s greatness, clueless about its founding ideals and fixated on its imperfections.

The Democrats proved at their convention they don’t have any fresh ideas or policies of their own to make America better. All they can do is repeat, “Get rid of Trump. Get rid of Trump.”

It’s the only strategy they have, but even with the corrupt liberal media’s help it’s not going to be enough to make Joe Biden president.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

I know you’ve been busy binging the exciting coverage of the Democrat National Convention.

But have you heard the latest bit of horrible news from the once golden state of California?

I don’t mean the 367 wildfires that are out of control and charring the hills of Northern California.

Or the heat wave and the rolling blackouts caused by the high electricity demand for air conditioning.

I’m talking about the possible disappearance from California of the popular ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft.

Both companies were planning to completely shut down their California operations at midnight Thursday rather than comply with a terrible state law called AB5.

AB5, which became law in January, was deliberately written by Democrats in the state Assembly who are out to destroy the future of Uber and Lyft in California by forcing them to reclassify their independent 1099 contract drivers as employees.

Uber and Lyft, which were born in San Francisco barely more than a decade ago, became household names across the United States by providing quick, reliable, cheap, 24/7 transportation for millions of urban and suburban people in cities where government-protected taxicab monopolies had robbed the poor and the carless with high fares and horrible service for decades.

Until the COVID-19 shutdown in March crushed America’s economy and wiped out our social lives, about a million Americans of all ages worked for Uber and Lyft as full- or part-time independent contract drivers. More than 100,000 of them worked in California.

The ultimate “gig” workers, Uber and Lyft drivers use their own cars and work when, where and how much they want. They have no boss.

About 80 percent are part-timers who work fewer than 15 hours a week and can make a few hundred extra bucks.

But I’ve had drivers tell me they supported their families by ubering 50 hours a week and clearing $45,000 a year.

Obviously, California’s leftist Democrats don’t really care when gig workers lose their jobs. They only care about union workers – and unions hate gig, freelance and independent workers.

In fact, if unions had their way, they’d outlaw all 1099 contract workers and force every employee to be a full-timer with all the job protections and benefits known to the modern working man.

On Thursday afternoon, a California appeals court gave Uber and Lyft another five days to comply with a previous court order requiring them to show how they plan to obey AB5.

That made the stock prices of Lyft and Uber jump a point or two, but it’s only going to delay the inevitable showdown.

Neither company has yet to make a profit. And they know that complying with AB5 would force them to raise their prices, hire fewer drivers, reduce their service and make it even harder to make money in California.

That’s why each company has invested about $30 million to put Proposition 22 on the November ballot.

Prop 22 would override AB5 and classify app-based ride-hail drivers and food delivery people like those working for DoorDash and UberEats as independent contractors and not employees.

It’s my bet – and hope – that Uber and Lyft are so popular, so useful, and so much a part of the culture that the nutty liberal people of California will wake up and vote for Prop 22 and foil the evil scheme of the Democrats.

What the leftist Democrats are trying to do to Uber and Lyft – kill or cripple them to please their union bedfellows – is a frightening example of what happens in a one-party state that’s been run by corrupt politicians for decades.

Scarier still, it’s also the kind of abuse of power that the whole country can expect next year if Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer win control of Washington this fall.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

It’s the opening of fire season in California.

But the biggest threat to the people of the state right now is Gov. Gavin Newsom and his shifting rules about closing businesses and schools to fight the coronavirus.

Until last week, things were starting to look up out here, pandemic-wise.

Los Angeles County, where I live, has been the worst hit county in the state, by far, with 5,112 of its 10,813 COVID-19 deaths.

As in every other state between here and Boston, the already very sick and the very old accounted for most of the deaths. About 75 percent were over age 65 and 4,486 were living in nursing homes.

California was struggling to come back to life in mid-June when Newsom finally allowed dine-in restaurants, retail stores, bars, religious services and gyms in some counties to re-open under certain state guidelines.

More recently, deaths per day have been in a slight decline. So have new positive case numbers per day, COVID-19 hospitalizations and ICU admissions.

Those and other hopeful trends weren’t good enough for Newsom, however.

Last week, seizing on a spike in hospitalizations, he and his health experts again effectively shut down most of the state’s economic and social life.

Newsom forced gyms, houses of worship, hair salons, malls and other businesses to lock their doors again. He also outlawed all indoor dining and ordered the closing of bars, zoos and museums.

What’s worse, he decreed that public and private schools in 32 of the most populous counties must remain closed this fall and kids can only be taught via remote learning.

Preventing schools from reopening – even private ones – is Newsom’s most foolish and harmful mistake.

Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York knows how important it is for kids to get back in school – for the kids’ sake, the sake of their parents and the sake of society.

Californians are trying hard to survive Newsom and his fickle rule making.

In my neighborhood I see people getting manicures and pedicures on the sidewalks.

The other day, when I ate dinner at my favorite local Italian restaurant, my wife Colleen and I sat outside on the sidewalk at a table next to the grill of a car in a parking lot. Very romantic.

Inside, the poor owner had put up plastic shields, sanitized everything and spaced out tables to make sure he met the governor’s earlier rules, but he is once again forbidden to serve anyone.

Up in Napa Valley I have a friend who owns wineries and has three wine tasting places. Only one is allowed to be open because it has outdoor tables.

So far this year, he’s down $8 million.

Business people like my friend across America are getting slaughtered by Newsom and power-mad governors like him.

It didn’t surprise me when I heard an industry spokesman say on TV that 85 percent of the country’s restaurants are going to go bankrupt.

We need to get some politicians with guts in California and elsewhere.

We can’t continue to have authoritarian governors shutting down a school system or an entire state every time there’s a spike in new COVID-19 cases.

We have to start finding ways to live with the coronavirus, not hide from it, because it’s not going away anytime soon.

Even when we get a vaccine we’ll still need to wash our hands and keep social distance and wear a mask.

Now that we’re into the craziness of a presidential campaign, the politics are going to make everything worse.

We already have Joe Biden and his new sidekick Kamala Harris blaming President Trump for a virus that started in China.

So far everything Biden says he’d do to fight the virus when he becomes president has already been done by President Trump.

But on Thursday Biden came out with a brilliant new idea – a national mandate for wearing masks outside. Apparently, Newsom is advising Joe’s campaign team.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

I’m happy to report I haven’t heard Nancy Pelosi’s name in five days.

I haven’t heard President Trump accused of being responsible for 159,000 COVID-19 deaths since last week.

And I don’t even know if Portland was burned to the sidewalks last weekend by its permanent mob of “peaceful protestors.”

I’m not in Heaven.

I’m in Newport Beach in a rented house by the sea.

My wife, kids and I are taking boat trips to watch the whales, cooking fancy meals for ourselves and watching the Pacific crash on the beach.

It’s called a summer vacation. For me, that means taking a week’s vacation from the news.

Since last weekend I haven’t been watching Fox or CNN or reading the Washington Post – or even the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

I haven’t been doing any TV interviews and haven’t even talked on the phone. I’m with my family – relaxing my butt off.

Relaxing is nice. You should try it. You’ll live longer.

I did hear the news about the terrible explosion in Lebanon. But whenever my son Cameron asks me if I had heard about this or that political outrage, I tell him, “No – and don’t tell me.”

Take it from me, becoming oblivious to the nasty partisan bickering and hatred that fills the airwaves every day makes you a happier person.

People listen to Fox to be PO-ed at the left. People listen to CNN and MSNBC to be PO-ed at the right.

At the end of the day, everybody in America goes to bed PO-ed. I haven’t gone to bed PO-ed at Nancy Pelosi once all week.

Before I went into my self-imposed news bubble, all I heard on TV was Democrats and Republicans arguing about who was going to steal the presidential election on Nov. 3

Democrats were saying if Trump lost he would refuse to leave the White House and would have to be removed by force.

Trump was saying the Democrats were pushing mass mail-in voting so they could pad the results and make sure Joe Biden wins.

That kind of talk made me realize that on Election Day I’m going to have to get the hell out of Dodge.

No matter who wins, I truly believe there will be major riots in the streets of many major cities, including Los Angeles.

If Biden wins, conservatives and the right will riot.

If Donald Trump is re-elected, the left will go apoplectic. The violent and destructive mobs we’ve seen in Portland, Seattle, Chicago and other big cities will look like St. Patrick’s Day parades.

The thought of what’s going to happen in American on the night of Nov. 3 scares the hell out of me.

If the election is actually determined that night, which is a big if, I think there’s going to be riots, gunfire and many people killed.

That’s how volatile and dangerous I think it has become in the USA.

I live in L.A in the San Fernando Valley and I’ve decided I’m not going to be home on Nov. 3 and the next few days.

I’m going to vote absentee as I usually do. But in time for Election Day I plan to move to a safe haven for me and family where they don’t have to worry.

It won’t be here in Newport Beach or on Balboa Island, where I’ve noticed a lot of the largest yachts are proudly flying huge Trump flags.

Our Reagan family haven will be somewhere far out in the boondocks. Maybe Butte, Montana. Or maybe Napa Valley, where I hear they have a lot of good wine that will help us celebrate or dull the pain of Election Night.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

I have very good reasons to be worried about catching the coronavirus.

I fit the demographic profile for the most typical victim – I’m 75 and I have a serious medical precondition.

And here in Los Angeles, where about 4,500 of the state’s 9,000 coronavirus deaths already have occurred, the pandemic is still hanging around.

My immediate family members and I haven’t had so much as a sniffle or cough in four months, but the virus has claimed a few people around me.

The brother of our housekeeper died of the coronavirus in Guatemala. So did his son.

The guard at my wife’s office building told us his sister died of the virus in Iran.

On Thursday we heard the sad news about the death of Herman Cain, the upbeat business executive and author who ran for president in 2012. He lost his long battle against COVID-19 at age 74.

I didn’t need to hear about his death or see the headlines that COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. have passed 150,000 to be reminded to wear a mask and keep my social distance.

Those precautions are simply something that people like me have to close pay attention to.

I know wearing a face mask — like everything else these days – has become a nasty Red-Blue political issue.

But whether you’re a liberal or conservative, if you feel better when I’m wearing a mask, great.

I know it makes my family feel better, too, because if I’m wearing a mask they know they aren’t going to infect me.

COVID-19 still poses a serious threat to some parts of the country. Though the country’s daily fatality rate is much lower than it was in April, a thousand Americans are still dying from the virus every day.

But as deadly as it is to the very old and already very sick, and as fearsome as it is, the coronavirus is only a short-term national problem.

We’ll eventually get a vaccine – or vaccines – for COVID-19 that will defeat it or keep it under control like the seasonal flu that kills tens of thousands every year.

The biggest fear I have for the future of this country is not from the virus.

It’s from the violent anarchists and outlaws who have hijacked the mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protest movement and created mobs of mostly young white rioters who are intent on ripping out the hearts of some of our biggest cities.

Whether it’s in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle or Portland, the anarchists have been given free reign by leftwing Democrat mayors and governors to burn, destroy, occupy and terrorize at will for two months.

The nightly anarchy I see is absolutely terrifying to me.

What kind of America are my granddaughters going to grow up in when mobs are allowed to burn and loot without fear of being arrested or subdued by the police?

That future America is much scarier to me right now than any deadly new virus.

For months the people in charge and the national media have been telling us with one voice that we all have to stand together and defeat the virus.

But when it comes to fighting anarchy and violence in the streets, many of those same people in Washington and in states like Oregon refuse to stand up, do the right thing and defend their citizens from violence and destruction.

In fact, many left-wing Democrat “leaders” make excuses for the anarchists, pretending they are just peaceful protesters or blaming the police for starting, fanning or prolonging the violence.

There is no vaccine for anarchy. It takes strong and responsible leaders and the legal use of police force to stop it.

I’m starting to worry that while the coronavirus can kill us personally, it is the anarchists that will kill America permanently.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Build Back Better.

Build Back Better.

Build Back Better.

Try saying Joe Biden’s clunky campaign slogan three times fast without gagging – or laughing.

Biden is obviously cognitively impaired, he’s morphed into a Bernie Sanders lefty and he’s been making wrong decisions about race and foreign policy for half a century in Washington.

Yet his boosters and protectors in the liberal media would have us believe that if he’s elected president America’s serious problems will miraculously disappear.

The COVID-19 pandemic will vanish overnight.

Rioters and anarchists will no longer disrupt or destroy the downtowns of cities like Portland.

And, faster than you can say Barack Obama, young black males in Chicago will stop their tradition of killing each other at the rate of about 10 per week, turn in their Glocks and become school crossing guards.

The liberal media constantly tell us that everything wrong with America today including the sticky weather is the fault of President Trump.

No matter what Trump does or doesn’t do to fight COVID-19, resuscitate the economy or subdue the rioting and violence in Democrat-wrecked cities, he is attacked.

For example, every day the Monday afternoon quarterbacks in the liberal media fault him for not responding fast enough to the threat of COVID-19.

But if he had ordered a shutdown of the entire country in January, when medical experts like Dr. Fauci were assuring us the coronavirus was not a serious threat to Americans, Trump would have been declared a power-mad dictator by Nancy Pelosi and impeached (again).

And what, by the way, would the brilliant Pelosi-Bernie Democrats have done differently?

Would they have consulted their crystal ball and shut down the country last November?

Ordered industry to crank out a hundred thousand ventilators and tens of millions of face masks during the Christmas holidays?

Gotten Big Pharma to deliver a properly tested and safe COVID-19 vaccine over Super Bowl weekend?

Sure they would have – on some other planet.

Joe Biden said in that stupid speech he tried to read the other day that he knows how to defeat the coronavirus and build America back better. But everything he promised he’d do next year, President Trump has already done.

Meanwhile, the whole country has been turned upside down by the radical Democrats left-wing insanity, including the defunding or abolishing local police and completely closing jails.

The inept politicians ruining some of our greatest cities – all Democrats – have told their police to stand down while rioters and looters run wild, occupy several city blocks or threaten citizens with violence.

Rioters and looters suffer few if any penalties, even if they are arrested, which is rare.

Yet when homeowners like the McCloskeys of St. Louis arm themselves to defend their property from a passing mob, their guns are seized and they are charged by the local prosecutor with a felony gun crime.

It’s events like that that make me afraid of what will happen if Biden becomes president and invites leftists like AOC to take over his administration.

I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a socialist, “woke” country where the Second Amendment and the rest of the Bill or Rights have become null and void.

For more than two centuries America has been the great country that people from around the world seeking freedom flocked to.

Those people still love and understand America and want to raise their children here, but many of our own young people no longer like America.

In fact, thanks to our leftwing colleges, our kids are taught not to love America and its ideals of freedom and equality under the law, but to hate it.

They’ve been taught that they live in a nasty capitalist country founded by white racists that serves only the very rich and exploits the poor and working classes.

They’ve been taught that America’s past and present imperfections are the fault of privileged white people. But some of us know that white privilege is not the real problem. White liberals are.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Can we all agree that the kids living in our biggest cities don’t get a good education?

Can we all agree that it’s a travesty that upwards of 75 percent of the kids in our inner-city schools aren’t able to read, write and count at grade level?

Can we all agree that if we don’t open our schools this fall the group that will be hurt the most are the poor kids of every color in our inner cities?

I’m glad we all agree.

The trouble is, the teachers unions and the educrats who run the public school system in Los Angeles and elsewhere say they don’t want to reopen schools and will offer classes only online.

The teachers, who are currently being paid not to teach, have a bunch of lame reasons for ignoring the needs of the people they supposedly work for – school kids, the kids’ parents and taxpayers.

Despite evidence from Germany and elsewhere in Europe that children are virtually immune to COVID-19 and rarely if ever spread the virus to adults, some teachers and administrators say they want to skip school this fall because they’re worried about the health of “their” kids.

Some other teachers say they’re afraid for their own health. Maybe they’re right to worry – if they’re over 60, saddled with several medical preconditions or obese. Otherwise, COVID-19 isn’t going to hurt them much.

And some highly politicized and despicable teachers – specifically the ones who run their unions – are cynically doing the bidding of their masters in the Democrat Party who think keeping schools closed forever is part of a winning strategy for Joe Biden.

For example, the L.A. teachers union says, among its other purely partisan demands, that it won’t reopen schools unless police are defunded and there is Medicare for all.

Besides showing how little some teachers actually care about their students, the debate over reopening schools has proved what hypocrites and fakes liberal Democrats are.

They tell us over and over they care deeply about the poor, the working class and Black and brown people – their party’s core votership.

Well, whose children do they think are going to be hurt by keeping the public schools closed?

Not people with money.

Not the elites in Manhattan, the six-figure swamp rats in Washington, or the virtue-signaling liberal creative community in Beverly Hills.

People with lots of money can send their kids to private schools. Or they can hire tutors or homeschool their kids. Plus, they have computers, white boards and whatever else they need to educate their kids at home.

Poor people and minorities who live in big cities have none of those advantages and if their city schools stay closed they’re the ones whose kids will end up with no education – and maybe no future.

Their kids will be the ones who drop out and end up in the deadly street gangs that terrorize their communities, murder thousands of young black men each year and kill innocent bystanders and children.

It’s hard for me to blame a Black or brown kid in Chicago or Baltimore for getting a gun, joining a gang and launching a career in crime.

Those city kids who are senselessly killing each other every weekend don’t know it, but they are victims of decades of the bad ideas and failed welfare programs of liberal Democrats.

They were born into a grim, segregated world of urban poverty, street crime, too few fathers and too much government dependency.

We know their public schools are often second-rate and do a lousy job of teaching them how to read and write and think.

But reopening them this fall might keep some kids from starting down a path that ends with him shot dead on the sidewalk at age 17.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

The other day I mentioned to my son Cameron something I heard the great economist Thomas Sowell say.

Sowell had reminded the Black Lives Matter protestors who were indiscriminately toppling statues and defacing monuments around the country that a lot of white people were instrumental in ending slavery.

Not just Ulysses Grant, Abraham Lincoln and the hundreds of thousands of Northern soldiers who died in the Civil War, but also many abolitionists who were fighting to end slavery long before the shooting started.

“That’s funny,” Cameron said, “I’ve been doing research on Mom’s side of the family. You wouldn’t believe how famous and influential they were.”

“Really? The Sterns?”

“Oh, my God, Dad,” Cameron joked. “Your father was just president of the United States. Mom’s family founded the United States.”

Cameron, 42, is a stay-at-home dad with a lot of time on his hands.

He was discovering a lot of information we didn’t know about my wife Colleen’s historic family, the Sterns, who trace their origins back to the English immigrant Isaac Stearns.

Isaac Stearns, who had an “a” in his last name, was not only among the original Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He and his two brothers came over in 1630 on John Winthrop’s boat, the Arabella.

Cameron told me Charles River in Boston was named after Isaac’s brother Charles Stearns when he fell overboard into the unnamed channel.

“You’re kidding,” I said, not knowing that all of America’s Stearns/Sterns, poet T.S. Eliot and some guy named Richard Nixon are direct descendants of Isaac Stearns.

Cameron was only getting started, however.

Next he told me about Charles Luther Stearns, an American superstar who built a fortune as a merchant and industrialist in the Boston area and in the 1840s became a prominent leader in the North’s anti-slavery movement.

Stearns was no limousine abolitionist.

He financed the settlement of anti-slavery homesteaders in Kansas. He turned his estate into a stop on the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves get to Canada. Harriet Tubman was a regular visitor there.

Stearns was also a member of the “Secret Six” that supplied radical abolitionist John Brown with weapons for his failed attack on Harpers Ferry.

And during the Civil War he pushed for the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union Army.

Working with his state, he recruited the black infantrymen for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments featured in the movie “Glory.” He also provided schools for the kids of the soldiers and jobs for their families. In his spare time founded several magazines including the Nation.

After emancipation, Stearns pushed hard to advance civil rights for blacks until he died at age 58 in 1867.

It’s no accident that his friends included Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his eulogy.

Three decades later Booker T. Washington, the most famous black man in America, honored Stearns by name at the dedication of the spectacular bronze sculpture created for the 54th Regiment Memorial in Boston Common.

As Cameron quipped, “Ronald Reagan who?”

It’s been great to learn that my wife’s ancestors played such an important part in the birth of the country, the history of Boston and the fight to abolish slavery and help the freed slaves.

But my story about the proud history of Colleen’s family has a sad ending.

On June 3, exactly 123 years after Booker T. Washington dedicated it, the 54th Regiment Memorial was painted with four-letter words and phrases like “Black Lives Matter,” “No Justice, No Peace,” and “Police are Pigs.”

Like the statues of Ulysses Grant, Frederick Douglass and other forgotten abolitionists who fought for the freedom of blacks, the 54th Regiment Memorial was desecrated by a mob of white and black protestors and professional vandals.

It would have been nice if before those social justice warriors defaced the memorial and roughed up 15 other statues on Boston Common they had studied a little history. They’d learn it’s not as black-and-white as they think.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will return with a new column on Friday, July 10.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

There was even more yelling and screaming than usual in Washington this week.

I’m not talking about the “peaceful” demonstrators in Lafayette Park, who were putting ropes and chains on the statue of Andrew Jackson and trying to pull it down.

I’m talking about in Congress, where there’s always a lot brave yelling and screaming about “We gotta’ do something about this” and “We gotta’ solve that.”

This week it was the police reform bill proposed by Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Called the “Justice Act,” it included incentives for police departments to ban things like chokeholds and no-knock raids, plus grants for body cams and a commission to study the social status of black men and boys.

Everyone – especially the Democrats – has been clamoring for police reform for a month in the wake of the George Floyd killing by police in Minneapolis.

Scott’s proposal, designed as a first draft subject to bipartisan debate, went nowhere.

Though Democrats and Republicans agreed on probably 75 percent of its content, Democrats in the Senate wanted much more, so they killed the Justice Act in its cradle.

You can understand why ordinary Americans are so frustrated by the people in DC.

They posture. They bloviate. They sling all this BS – and then do nothing till after the next election.
Meanwhile, across the country young demonstrators continue to use Floyd’s death and what they claim is systemic racism by police as excuses to riot and mindlessly tear down or threaten the statues of American heroes like Abraham Lincoln.

Dozens of cities – all run by Democrats and many with black mayors and police chiefs – have done virtually nothing to protect their statues or property owners from the mob.

It’s long past time for Barack Obama, Basement Joe Biden and Blue State political “leaders” to condemn the lawlessness of the street protestors, the statue destruction and the takeover of several blocks in downtown Seattle.

Yet even as people die, buildings burn and gangs of looters and violent professional agitators roam their streets, Democrats and the liberal media keep calling it “a peaceful revolution.”

But the mass of the American people knows better. For a month they’ve been watching nothing being done to stop the destruction and violence.

Is it any wonder gun sales to whites and blacks are going through the roof?

Of course, if you take up arms and defend a statue from the mob, you’ll be the one who ends up in jail.

This is where we’re at in upside-down America. The good guys are the bad guys and bad guys are the good guys.

The sad thing is, nothing is going to change anytime soon.

The Democrat appeasers are not going to get tough on the street mobs. They see the wave of lawlessness and disorder as a weapon to defeat President Trump. It may backfire, however.

Democrats are so foolish they actually think if Joe Biden becomes president things will get back to normal.

I’m sure the Poles thought the same way when they were taken over by Soviets after World War II: “If we just act nice to these bad guys, it’ll all be OK.”

But Democrats have learned nothing from history.

You don’t appease mobs, especially destructive mobs. You don’t take a knee to vandals. They only get more violent and demand more power.

The young Americans mindlessly tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant and demanding that police departments be defunded or disbanded are historical illiterates, but that’s not all.

They’ve been brainwashed by their college teachers into thinking that America is a terrible country built on racism.

Are there racists in America? Sure. But racism is not systemic the way it once was for seventy years in the Jim Crow South by law and in fact in the North.

Institutional racism, even if it existed the way Black Lives Matter and the demonstrators claim, is no excuse for destroying the country. It’s time for all of them to grow up, quit breaking things and start studying history.

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Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
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