Long before he evolved into president, during his time as Senator of California, Ronald Reagan seemed to be very much against civil rights.
Ronald was on record as opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
He also gutted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, fought the extension of the Voting Rights Act, vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act and initially opposing the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act which imposed economic sanctions on South Africa that could only be lifted when that country abolished apartheid.
He argued this was because he worried the sanctions would prompt the South African government to respond with "more violence and more repression.
His administration allegedly had a close relationship with the apartheid regime.
Congress overrode his veto.
There was a well-known belief that anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress were Communistic.
When Ronald was newly elected governor he sided with his political benefactors over Cesar Chavez.
Cesar Chavez led the movement to end the underpayment and inhumane working conditions endured by over a million Mexican-American farm workers.
During his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan served as an FBI snitch against members he suspected of Communist sympathies.
He required all officers to swear a "non-Communist pledge".
He also testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee against the "Hollywood Ten," and in doing so helped ruin a lot of careers.
Reagan financed, armed, and trained Islamic fascist Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
This cost billions of dollars, advanced the career of a Mujahidin commander named Osama bin Laden and led to the emergence of the Taliban.
He did all of this in order to curtail the Soviet Union's influence over Central Asia.
He also continued the war after the USSR's retreat.
This helped bring about bin Laden's ascendancy in the region.
Reagan illegally sold weapons to the unfriendly Iranian government to fund right-wing rebel forces in Nicaragua.
This leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.
Reagan's sweeping tax cut plan in 1981 had the opposite effect of what he promised.
Unemployment rose by more than 3% to 10.8% during the first half of his initial term.
His cuts to social programs, crippling of labor unions, and weakening of legal protections for the working class contributed to the growing income inequality that continues today.
Reagan does deserves credit for appointing Sandra Day O'Connor as America's first female Supreme Court Justice.
However, he had an outspoken opposition to abortion rights, appointed anti-choice judges and successfully pushed to remove support for the Equal Rights Amendment.
He didn't address the AIDS epidemic at all until the spring of 1987.
By that time, he had only a year-and-a-half left in his presidency and AIDS had already more than 20,000 lives, with thousands more suffering from infection.
Both as governor and president, he oversaw the massive defunding of mental health institutions.
Many mentally ill individuals have difficulty obtaining and holding down employment, so this significantly increased homelessness in America.
In the forty-eight years before Reagan became president, his eight predecessors increased the national debt by a total of $975 billion. Reagan wound up increasing the debt by more than those eight presidents combined, adding $1.86 trillion to the debt.
This was in part because Reagan claimed that you could cut taxes for the wealthy and expand the military-industrial complex without increasing our national debt.
Reagan's economic advisers were hoping that in order to shrink the size of government, while maintaining military expenditures and low high-bracket tax cuts, Congress would choose to cut programs that benefited lower income Americans over allowing the debt to explode.
