don't leave out his destruction of the media as a balanced source of information when he signed the veto that killed the Fairness Doctrine. fuck that guy so hard.
Don’t forget trickle down economics, we can also thank Ronnie R for that too! And ignoring the AIDS epidemic for years, because that only hurt “the coloreds and gays”.
I always hate the "time traveller kills Hitler" stchick.
Killing Reagan does not change the political climate that allowed him to rise to power. In fact killing him could have made things worse for the USA. See 9/11 for a recent example.
Killing Reagan does not change the political climate that allowed him to rise to power
You’re both right and wrong. While it wouldn’t change the circumstances that led to his election directly, he himself played a big part in CREATING those circumstances and perpetuating them to the point of the Trump cult eventually becoming all but inevitable.
Who knows? Maybe if we got rid of Reagan early enough, Bush the elder would work towards the “open borders” he argued for during the primary debate against him.
That’s just one of dozens if not hundreds of issues where Bush the elder becoming potus earlier would, while not great, be much preferable to 8 years of Reagan. Hell, who knows? Might have made a more left wing candidate than Clinton the next president!
PS: everyone seems to be forgetting that, on top of his OWN bad policy choices, the country was pretty much run by the throat goat drug demonizer Nancy and his favorite astrologer towards the end where the dementia had made him incapable of doing much himself.
I wouldn’t have killed Regan had I gone back in time, I would’ve gone a bit further back and after Rockerfeller got forced to sell standard oil, I would’ve offed him just before he was able to use the money he gained to form Chicago University and it’s dreaded Chicago school of economics.(home to the ludicrous idea that the free market will regulate itself) Which I think had even worse consequences than Reganomics, if not directly influencing it.
At the very least, it would’ve likely extended the 30 years worth of post Roosevelt economic prosperity that decreased wage gaps, and actively created the middle class at least a bit longer before some other rich butthole got the same or a similar idea as Rockerfeller.
The problem isn’t even free market concepts, it’s the idea that you can advocate for a free market in a highly regulated country. When the definition of corporation is controlled and liability is removed from individuals you can’t have a free market.
It’s called the University of Chicago. And yup, it continues to be a vicious pile of shit to this day, fucking over the vulnerable communities around it, providing substandard health care and sitting on a 10 billion dollar endowment that they refuse to use to either raise employee wages or lower tuition. (Fun fact: They’re projected to become the first university in the country to have six-figure tuition.)
I just had the same thought, then went down an entire rabbit hole of who would actually be too blame. You’re basically looking at social evolution, over millions of years, and trying to find the “start”. It’s impossible. Pick a spot, and pull.
Bringing it back to reality-ish - pick a spot? now.
Let’s consider, did all these people you’d want to go back in time to assassinate have anything in common? Did they have any traits that could be identified in living people?
My guess is the keystone trait we’re looking for is a distinct lack of empathy. Combine a lack of empathy with certain other traits and you get some real nasty combinations.
Example
Ambition with empathy = good person doing big good things
Ambition without empathy = bad person doing big bad things
That assumes you’re only pulling off one time-travel assassination. What if you just keep doing them until the lack of the relevant people shifts the political climate by itself? Like in the "go back and kill Hitler (or just push him onto a different life path at a young age, if you have time travel, you can probably remove someone as a leader without just killing them), sure, maybe a different fascist rises in Germany instead, but if you take out that one too, and the next one, and the next, eventually someone who isn’t a fascist will manage to get into office, or if you keep it up long enough, the german fascist movement will run out of viable leaders, and cease to be a major factor in the political climate of the time.
To be honest, going back and just taking Hitler or any similarly historically important person out of the equation is likely enough to do that, for most people, given the impact he had on the world, or at the least removes the reason for you to go back in time, so presumably if you’re seriously contemplating doing this, whatever time travel mechanism you have going on probably has to be one where you are shielded from the consequences of whatever changes you make anyway.
Basically, popularized the neoliberal economic policies that have systematically ground down workers rights, pay, and civil liberties in America all while adopting an extreme interventionist attitude that led to him directly supporting fascists across the world, especially in South America.
Ignored the AIDs crisis because it was killing gay people and drug users, so he loved it.
Started the War on Drugs, which in addition to the massive death toll and creation of massive criminal empires to supply the need turned American cops into a paramilitary force.
Like, we can be here all day. Guy sucked so hard in addition to all his outright evil he literally took scheduling advice for press conferences from a fucking astrologer. Just the dumbest, most malicious bastard to be in the office that we can’t prove owned slaves.
True, though Reagan passed en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986 which turned drug punishments from rehabilitative to punitive and was basically a way to lock up as many black people as possible for as long as possible. Another success for the “War on Drugs”. (Read: War on Black People)
After the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the number of black people sent to federal prison skyrocketed from approximately 50 in 100,000 adults to approximately 250 in 100,000 adults.
no one has even given you the worst stuff so far for some reason?
after receiving reports that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against his own people, Reagan funded… Saddam Hussein
and then after there was another attack on the Kurds, killing 5000 with a chemical weapon, Reagan swiftly went into action and… gave them more money and advice, AND vetod a UN resolution to condemn Hussein
he did make a law to make it illegal to do what he did in the last two points, but then not only continued to do it to break his own law, but broke it again in also selling weapons to Hussein’s enemy in Iran. So now he’s funding both sides of the war.
and then he did it again in selling weapons to Nicaragua
and then formed the Nicaraguan contra in order to help terrorists overthrow the democratic government
and did it again in Iran, which is what formed Al Qaeda.
One visited the Romans and saw what wonders the first Western Empire wrought. The other fella fully sold out everyone to the wealthy. Guess who gets shot!
He did a lot of shitty things, but IMO the biggest was that between him and Thatcher in the UK, they shifted the western world economy towards neoliberalism. The biggest problem with that, amongst many other problems, is that it prioritised short term gains over long term sustainability.
That bit about it not being sustainable is why everything has been getting gradually shittier since about 2010. It’s hard to look back on the last 40 years and not see the ideology as being much more than an asset strip of our public sectors and a carte blanche for bankers to fuck about without consequence.
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