How Reagan, Thomas, Trump, and Putin Remade the World
Each has played a critical, if unconventional part, in a freer, more democratic 21st century
At first glance, one might not see the connections between the Gipper, Ronald Reagan, Justice Clarence Thomas, President Donald Trump, and Soviet President Vladimir Putin. Yet over a 40-year period, these four have combined to radically transform the world, ensure—-over time—-greater prosperity, re-establish national sovereignty, and elevate life and family.
I. RONALD REAGAN
Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 with the two-fold mission of restoring the American economy from the pre-Joe Biteme, the hapless Jesus Carter. In just four years, Carter took a bad economy and made it terrible; took relatively competent foreign policy and made it bumbling; and took American pride and self-image and dragged it through the streets of Tehran.
Carter’s military policies swung from canceling every weapons system in sight to moralizing against our allies. How’d that work out for him? Enemies such as the Ayatollah Khomeini laughed at Carter while holding Americans hostage for over a year. The Soviet Union ignored him entirely by invading Afghanistan. Soviet military policy actually began contemplating first strikes with nukes against American targets on the assumption that Jesus Carter was too weak and inept to respond.
It took Reagan less than six months in office to rectify most of these wrongs. He immediately announced production of the B-1 Bomber and a new “stealth” follow-on, the B-2; he deployed the MX missiles that Carter had dithered over for four years; and he (though not of his own doing) was able to put to sea the new Trident submarines, each capable of laying waste to the entire USSR by itself.
Whether it was Reagan’s election or not, the powers in Iran decided it was probably time to let the hostages go, and they came home as Reagan was entering the White House. With solid support from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and NATO, Reagan deployed a set of mobile missiles that offset the SS-20 missiles earlier put in place in the Carter years. The new Pershing II and cruise missile deployments had an immediate impact and the new Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, soon agreed to withdrawing both sides’ weapons and physically destroying them, the first time in human history an entire class of weapons was physically destroyed.
That result, which came from the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty in 1987, was a public display that the Soviets were in retreat, but their actual “Stalingrad” came four years earlier, when Reagan (to the surprise of his staff) announced the beginning of the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) program, labeled by the press as “Star Wars.”
It would take an entire column by itself to marvel at the foolishness of the Hoax News media in labeling SDI “Star Wars,” which merely made the R&D program accessible to ordinary Americans in a way they never would have appreciated otherwise.
Star Wars, as Reagan repeatedly said, would not be ready for decades. Yet it, almost singlehandedly, brought down the USSR. Why?
Because they all knew it would eventually work. The Soviets knew we could do it. They saw us turn out 95,000 tanks in WW II in just four years 311,000 airplanes; land outrageously vast numbers of men with even more vast amounts of supplies throughout Africa, Italy, Europe and the Pacific.
The Yankees, after all, put a man on the moon in less than a decade. Shoot down missiles? No problem. And they knew it. (Reagan helped them along by faking a test result in 1984!)
Gorbachev, brought in to fix the un-fixable Soviet economy, clearly understood he was beaten. When the Berlin Wall began to be ripped apart a year after Reagan left office, Gorby quietly stood by.
Stalin would have sent in tanks.
By 1991, the economic and military colossus that Dutch Reagan had released so buried the Soviets that they came apart at the seams. Gorby foolishly agreed to free elections, believing the Western media. He was summarily ousted by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin.
Communism in the USSR was over. Ronald Reagan had killed it. This ushered in the era of “globalism,” supposedly. With the “bipolar” world gone, now a “multi-polar” would (or as Reagan’s veep and successor in the presidency would say, a New World Order. By the way, he said that on September 11.)
Only the new order didn’t last long. Immediately a rogue Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein threatened the free flow of oil at market prices. As we clearly see today, you don’t mess with a man’s energy. (“Guido,” in “Risky Business,” would put it a little more coarsely.)
What the Gulf War showed, unquestionably, was that a) Reagan had created an international system beholden to the USA; that when we called in favors, services were rendered; that our military was still far beyond that of any other power in the world—-often by leaps and bounds; and that oil made the world go round (and still does.)
Reagan deserves our eternal gratitude for ending the Cold War essentially without a shot being fired; for rescuing the American economy from the likes of Jesus Carter; and for rebuilding American prestige to levels not seen since WW II.
But he wasn’t perfect and he made several key errors. Most notably, he had three Supreme Court picks. His first, Sandra Day O’Conner, came as a result of his determination to put a woman on the court. O’Conner, however, proved entirely middle of the road and less-than-reliable on big-picture rulings. In 1986, Reagan more than made up for O’Conner with Antonin Scalia. Scalia became the “brains” of the court, writing the most thoughtful and best-researched opinions anyone could desire. The great pundit Rush Limbaugh joked that if he could have anyone’s brain but his own, it would have been Scalia’s.
Then came the disaster. Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, but inexplicably failed to anticipate the massive leftist response, largely organized by Senator Ted Kennedy, to the nomination. Reagan didn’t even begin calling senators until very late in the process. Bork proved highly unpopular in the hearings as well, criticizing other Supreme Court justices and occasionally lecturing the squidpickle senators (who deserved it). At any rate, Reagan’s team bungled the nomination and Bork was “Borked” in a massive PR campaign to make him seem like the second coming of Pol Pot. His nomination was defeated 58-42—not a narrow margin.
In Bork’s place, Reagan regrouped—-perhaps unfortunately—-and nominated one of the worst picks ever by a Republican president, Anthony Kennedy who proved to be the “swing” vote on the court (usually swinging left), especially after O’Conner retired in 2006. Kennedy had his day. But Clarence Thomas would have the last laugh.
II. CLARENCE THOMAS
Reagan’s successor, and the man who was supposedly going to usher in “Reagan’s Third Term,” was his loyal vice president George H. W. Bush. Let me state this as unequivocally as possible: no matter what one thinks of the Bushes as a family or of H. W. Bush as a president, he was unmatched in his support of Reagan as a veep. I have researched the Reagan archives, examining meeting after meeting where Bush, often alone against the rest of the cabinet, would hold fast to Reagan’s vision and policies.
But as president, Bush had his own Supreme Court picks. In baseball terms, with his first pick he not only struck out, but hit himself in the head with the bat by naming David Souter to the court. Souter immediately became a reliable lefty vote. With O’Conner and Kennedy, Souter ensured there would be no semblance of conservative change on the court.
Already there had been talk of “overturning Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision invented out of thin air in 1973. If Bork had been on the bench Casey would have been gone in 1992. Kennedy voted with the two of the liberals to perpetuate Roe.
Although outnumbered and outvoted, there was a new member of the court, also appointed by H.W. Bush, Clarence Thomas. Bush appointed him to the seat held by Thurgood Marshall in 1992. Thomas endured a “Borking” of his own by a former subordinate at the Department of Education, Anita Hill, who accused him (with no evidence) of “sexual harassment.” Thomas likened it to a “high tech lynching,” and he was right. Few at the time suspected that Thomas would give Scalia a run for his money as the top legal mind on the court. But where Scalia sought refuge in precedent and tradition, Thomas more often than not applied history, including the history of Reconstruction to cases involving the Second Amendment, individual rights, and the tyranny of government.
Thomas labored in vain so long as Souter, Kennedy, and the liberals constituted a RINO/Left majority (although Byron White, a John Kennedy appointee until 1993 often proved more conservative in some of his opinions). White was replaced by the Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a more solid-left vote.
When George W. Bush became president, he had two appointees and could have shifted the balance permanently right then—-but like Reagan and his father, W bungled one of the picks. He selected John Roberts to replace Renquist as Chief Justice, then named his White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Harriet Miers, to the seat. She proved utterly inept, causing at least one senator to say she needed to “bone up on con[stitutional] law.” A Supreme Court pick had to “bone up on con law!” Fortunately, the opposition to Meiers was so intense, she withdrew her name and in her place Bush stumbled into an All-Pro, Samuel Alito, who quickly rose to Scalian-Thomasian levels in his opinions.
Yet where Thomas should have emerged as the lynchpin of the Court, he did not because Roberts became the new “swing vote.” Kennedy, by that time, voted as much with the left as with the conservatives. In the key Obamacare decision (National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 2012) Roberts literally rewrote the law to turn Obamacare into a “tax” and uphold the program. It dawned on all that he would not be a reliable vote on any key issue, which he promptly demonstrated in the Obamacare decision. That still left Thomas often in the minority.
III. DONALD TRUMP
Donald Trump promised, with much skepticism, to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Indeed, for many voters, judges were the sole issue on which they voted for Trump. As President, Trump and his advisors first and foremost sought out judges who would make war on the Deep State. Steve Bannon told me, as I referenced in Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and their War with the Swamp, that their first criteria was the judges’ responses to questions about the Chevron case, which dictated that that, unless an agency's interpretation of a statute is clearly erroneous, courts should defer to that interpretation because the administrative agency has more expertise in that specific area than do courts.
Kavanaugh and others were not picked because they were social conservatives, he told me, though that is what they turned out to be.
Trump immediately banned abortions on federal properties abroad and issued executive orders on other pro-life measures. In a short time, he had far exceeded what either Reagan or Bush had done to curb abortion.
Beyond that, though, Trump began to withdraw the U.S. from international entanglements such as the Paris Accord and the TPP agreement. He threatened China with tariffs for using predatory pricing due to its slave labor. In short, Trump began to upset the Globalist Apple Cart from day one.
And when the fight came to confirm Brett Kavanaugh—-the hardest of the three of his nominations due to the last minute Thomas-like hit job concocted by DemoKKKrats about a college party to which there were no witnesses—-Trump stood by his man even though most other presidents would have urged Kavanaugh to withdraw from consideration. In three short years, Trump filled one-third of the Court. When Ruth Ginsburg died, it created a firestorm of venom against DemoKKKrats from the left, who argued she had stayed long past her shelf life and had destroyed any chance Zero (Barack Obama) had of replacing her. At any rate, it proved a Godsend for Trump. Barrett, by becoming the 6th “conservative” on the Court, ended any hope Roberts could again be a “swing” vote. This could be seen in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, wherein Roberts, in a lengthy concurrence to the majority opinion, made clear were he in charge there would have been a much more mushy, pro-choice decision. But confronted with a majority who didn’t need him, he figured to get his licks in via the concurrence.
Meanwhile, Alito delivered a meticulously argued decision for the majority relying heavily on history and exposing the utter dross that was the Roe and Casey decisions. If anything was clear after the last week, it was that this is not the Roberts court. It is the Thomas and Alito Court.
Just the previous day, Thomas delivered a tour de force on gun laws in America in overturning New York’s requirement to have a special permission to carry a firearm.
There is one more “big” case lurking—-the EPA case that promises to severely hamstring the Deep State, which has already been wounded (perhaps fatally) by the Fifth Circuit in Jarkesy v. SEC which held that SEC administrative proceedings are unconstitutional. Lawyer Robert Barnes said that decision may have been the “death knell” for the Deep State. We will know on Monday.
IV. Vladimir Putin
On the surface, the inclusion of Putin into a group of American presidents and justices may seem incongruent. But it is not. Putin has been working from the outside to dismantle the Globalist Deep State even as American heroes fight from within. And here is where we come full circle: Putin exists only because Ronald Reagan ended communism. Indeed, as I have argued many times, Putin and Russia are only hated today by the left because they represent a communist-less Russia! Recall that up until 1991, the Soviet Union was loved and cherished by leftists everywhere. Ted Kennedy tried to sabotage arms talks between Reagan and Gorby. Indeed, it must have doubly hurt that it was Pootie-poot, not St. Gorby, who remade Russia into a mostly capitalist country—-exactly what Gorby was predicted to do, and what he failed to do.
Putin’s speech to the international economic forum was a victory lap over his recent defeat of George Soros an the internationalist Globalist cabal. He laid out Russia’s interests in Ukraine, particularly the Donbas, in ways that Ronald Reagan may have used to justify intervention in Grenada: it’s a nearby state whose occupation by forces hostile to us is unacceptable.
More interesting was Putin’s use of the terms “entrepreneur” or “entrepreneurship” at last a dozen time. When was the last time you heard any DemoKKKrat, particularly the Demented Rutabaga in the White House, refer to entrepreneurs as people to be cherished. Before his speech, Putin had said that the goal of every Russian family was to have a “dad and mum,” anathema to the Globalist-backed single-mom/welfare mother goal. He has repeatedly derided homosexuality. In short, Putin’s speech would have been 100% in line with the opinions of most Americans prior to 1970 and in line with the strategic assumptions of most American presidents about their own country as late as George W. Bush in 2001.
The most important point here is that Pootie-poot won. To achieve their globalist agenda, the dark powers had to remove Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Putin. They may have temporarily removed Trump—-who is almost certain to make a comeback and, in anything like a fair election, win in a massive landslide—-but Benji appears headed back to leadership of Israel. And Putin? Despite the Rutabaga’s threat to remove him, he not only survives but has seen Russia come out of the international sanctions no worse for wear. Indeed, Pootie-poot has reoriented Russia away from Western Europe and into a rough alliance with the “Southern Nations,” including China, India, Brazil, and virtually all of South America and Africa, none of whom support the Euros’ sanctions.
V. The First Steps of Victory
Again, a Russia that is even mostly free, and even somewhat operating as a free market was unheard of prior to Reagan. He set the stage. Once there was a free Russia, then the Globalists had a problem.
And now, they have an even bigger problem. Trump, Thomas, and the rest of the Court are in place when the Red Wave hits, starting (but not ending) this November. There isn’t the slightest thing the DemoKKKrats can do to escape it. Their wails in the Atlantic and Politico, combined with near-begging from long-time consultants such as Doug Schoen, James Carville, Mark Penn, just to mention three of dozens who have been warning about the coming massacre, have fallen on deaf ears or stupid brains.
But it’s not just in pure political victories that the Globalists have lost big; or in their defeat in Ukraine; but in the unrelenting torrent of scientific data now emerging showing that the China Virus vax dangers were known all along; that the lockdowns did nothing to curtail the Virus; that the vaxxes themselves pose a bigger danger to a person’s life than the Virus; and that virtually every scientific protocol conceived was violated in order to foist this on the world population.
Trump eventually will be required to do a mea culpa on this issue. He can. He was thoroughly besieged and hoodwinked by “experts” who uniformly predicted Armageddon if he did not lock down the country and come up with a vax. Truth be told, I really think most of the Globalists didn’t think we could do it. That is, despite the horrid side effects and/or efficacy issues with the vax—-which were concealed for months—-they really thought that Trump would not have any solution and could be blamed for the deaths of tens of millions. Make no mistake: that was precisely what they wanted.
So Trump will, I think, at some point pivot on the vaxxes. “I did what I thought was right at the time with the info I had at the time.” His voters will be forgiving. But they will not be forgiving of the outright fraud and lies the medical and drug industries propagated to peddle the vaxxes; or of the ham-handed enforcement by most politicians. (Those who think otherwise might want to look at the Georgia GOP primary where Brian Kemp shocked everyone with his margin of victory over David Perdue. When the question arose as to why, one had to look no further than the fact that Kemp was alone in lifting the lockdown requirements in his state, even with criticism from Trump himself who called it “premature.” The voters rewarded him for his policy.)
Whatever Trump’s failing on the vax, you can bet that conservatives and evangelicals of almost every type—-barring the shorthoarders at NRO and the neverTrumper goatherders whose pathetic grifter publications are all but comatose—-will see the Trump who appointed the three justices who ended Roe. They will also see the rock known as Clarence Thomas who slapped the snout of the leftist gun-grabbers. And some, perhaps not all, will consider that it was Reagan’s policies in the 1980s that allowed a non-communist Russia to battle the Globalist Buffoons from the outside while Trump, Thomas, and the rest of us fought them from the inside.
Larry Schweikart
Rock drummer
Film maker
NYTimes #1 bestselling author
Political pundit
For even more truth-based current events, politics, and history content + resources, check out my VIP membership below
https://www.wildworldofhistory.com/vip
One of your best, Larry. Putin is helping lead the world away from globalization. In a generation oil won’t matter as much but gas will.
Well worth the read, and I'll pass on.