When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union formally collapsed in 1991, these world-shaping events were not the consequence of luck or some inevitable outcome. It was the result of strong, principled leadership from free world heroes — President Ronald Reagan along with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II — who orchestrated the demise of the USSR, set the global push for communism back generations, and brought liberalized democracy to millions. It wasn’t an easy feat, either. Bullets and bombs nearly took out these three leaders before their strategy to trounce communism could be developed and deployed.
Here’s the deal: Reagan didn’t defeat Soviet communists and their fatally flawed policies just so Americans could willingly hand the country over to them some 40 years later. Yet that’s exactly what Kamala Harris is asking Americans to do with their votes this November.
The story of Reagan’s triumph over communists and against the then-conventional political wisdom — and even concerns of his own advisors — is masterfully laid out in the movie “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid as the “great communicator,” coming to theaters at the end of August.
“Reagan” had its worldwide premiere Tuesday night in Hollywood, and the film tracing Reagan’s life and leadership based on books by historian Paul Kengor shows exactly what it took for our 40th president to bring freedom to Western Europe and prove the murderous Soviet experiment a failure.
Emphasizing his formative childhood years in Dixon, Illinois, — where a screening of the movie (hosted by this writer’s employer, Young America’s Foundation) is set to bring the community together to remember its favorite son this Thursday night — his time in Hollywood heading the Screen Actors Guild, faith in God and a greater purpose for his life, and lasting love with “Nancy Pants,” the movie traces the events that made it possible for Reagan to achieve what even the Soviets doubted could happen.
Decades since the fall of the Soviet Union that made the United States the world’s lone superpower and allowed the torch of freedom to illuminate the lives of millions formerly subjugated under deadly and disastrous communist policies, a growing chorus of voices are hoping that hyping up Kamala Harris and her supposedly contagious “joy” will trick Americans into allowing collectivist, statist, and communist policies to become the law of the land.
Ironically, “not going back” has become a refrain used by Vice President Kamala Harris in her canned campaign speeches since Democrats installed her — without winning a single presidential primary in her career — as their nominee. Yet, “going back” to the era of lurking communism threatening not just Europe but the United States is exactly what Harris has now proposed, if elected.
President Reagan rightly called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” yet the vile policies that crushed the human spirit and were allowed to spread like wildfire as the result of an America weakened by the failed policies of Jimmy Carter are now undergoing an attempted rehabilitation at the hands of Kamala Harris.
As Democrats furiously try spinning the fact that Kamala Harris’ lack of a clear policy agenda totally normal (don’t worry, one recently claimed, the media will explain why whatever she’ll do is a good thing the American people) the scant details Americans have so far received to judge her on are devastatingly bad.
Namely, the Harris campaign’s rollout of proposed “price controls” as one economic policy. If that’s her starting point, one can only imagine — because she’s intentionally keeping Americans in the dark about her agenda as this column explained last week — what all will follow. “Hope” and “joy” are, whatever those at the Democrats’ convention say, not a policy. Price fixing, however, is. And a bad one, tried and failed before, at that.
The Washington Post, even, ran a column noting that it was political and messaging idiocy to pledge the introduction of price controls in America, confirming former President Donald Trump’s attacks lobbed at “Kamala the communist” are right over the target.
Why, if she doesn’t intend to usher in anti-freedom, failed-before policies reminiscent of the communist ideology belonging to the ash heap of history, would Kamala Harris and her ilk threaten to implement the very policies exploited by Reagan and his crew of freedom fighters to topple the Soviet Union? What’s more, she picked Minnesota’s communist governor Tim Walz — who encouraged his state’s residents to tattle on their neighbors to the government during COVID lockdowns — as her running mate. Their goals are clear.
Harris made her ideology plainly apparent when she mounted her failed presidential campaign in 2019. Radically to the left of anything the supposedly “normal” Democrats were suggesting at the time, Harris was looking to drag a laundry list of at-best communist “lite” policies out of the trash.
Now, by rolling out price controls as her initial economic policy for her 2024 run, she’s confirmed that nothing has changed, she’s still if not even more radical, and America’s freedom, prosperity, and strength used by Reagan to triumph over communism isn’t safe.
It was the 40th president, after all, who warned us that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” and must be “fought for, protected, and handed on.” Some 40 years after Reagan fought for, protected, and handed a legacy of freedom to future Americans, now is not the time to willingly cast it aside and instead let America fall to communist ideals.