Talk:Ronald Reagan#rfc 2F4A168

I wanted to add the opposite picture to the article; but I thought that it had already been deleted.

File:Ronald Reagan in Dixon, Illinois, 1920s.jpg, 1920s]] Hamid Hassani (talk) 06:22, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Can we get a level-headed, fair user to look over the edits I have made since yesterday and identify any problems? I have directly explained that these edits specify vague, clunky wording and scrap unnecessary and unsubstantiated conjecture, but for some unclear reason it keeps being removed by two users. If needed, I can justify line by line. Thanks! Jaydenwithay (talk) 17:34, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:Make it 3 users. I especially don't get the removal of what his supporters have said about his alleged use of the so-called "southern strategy". (Other than POV pushing.) Rja13ww33 (talk) 17:54, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

::Good to see you're still kickin it. Reasoning: historical appraisals of the subject's perfection of the Southern strategy (which is not "so-called" and is the basis of the past sixty years of American politics, as even a remedial high school history class will teach you) don't need to be countered by the views of political allies who are a product of said political strategy. Clutters the page with irrelevant commentary. Jaydenwithay (talk) 18:13, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:::Sorry but there has been alternate views raised in RS about Reagan's use of this "strategy". What you removed was well sourced to RS.....except for maybe the NR article. I could see a case for removing that....but the RS cited that one anyway, so having a link to it cuts out the middle man. We can't exclude alternate POVs raised in RS just because somebody doesn't want that POV included. Rja13ww33 (talk) 18:18, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

::::See edit summary. Jaydenwithay (talk) 18:42, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

:::::I'm going to place these edits in again seeing as apparently no one has any objections. Jaydenwithay (talk) 00:17, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

:::::: No, your assumption is incorrect. Please do not reinsert again wording that multiple editors have viewed as problemaric. When I responded to your most recent reinsertion of the material by rephrasing some of the details, I viewed it as movement toward compromise wording. Did you not see it that way? If not, I apologize for not clearifying my motivation and intent here in this discussion. Drdpw (talk) 00:58, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

:::::: I thought this was resolved with your edits on 6/11 and a few follow up edits around that time. I don't follow what the new issue is.Rja13ww33 (talk) 01:01, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

The second sentence of the civil rights subsection currently reads,

"[Ronald Reagan] initially opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, alluding, in response to a reporter's question, to claims that King associated with communists during his career, but signed a bill to create the holiday in 1983 after it passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof margins."

This sentence should be improved to 1. clarify that decades of F.B.I. surveillance found zilch on Dr. King and communism, and 2. that the suggestion harkens back to rhetoric employed by segregationists in the South and reactionary conservatives, like Reagan, who opposed both the CRA and the VRA. These are not biased statements, these are facts any middle schooler would learn. They are so unbiased, in fact, that both of these facts are in the very article linked in the above sentence and in Political positions of Ronald Reagan, respectively.

I amended the sentence to read,

He initially opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and used decades-old segregationist rhetoric to allude to claims that King was a communist during his career, but signed a bill to create the holiday in 1983 after it passed both houses of Congress with veto-proof margins."

There are a handful of editors who come out of the woodwork to edit war and revert anything that may portray Reagan in a non-hagiographic manner. The fact of the matter, however, is that [[Wikipedia:Neutral point of view|Wikipedia has a policy of neutrality]], not allegiance towards the subject of an article. Some people inappropriately remove any content that is not laudatory, even when it is relevant, and insist that it must be discussed on the talk page. Usually, I'm not interested in further debating the point, but I've grown tired of this strange stonewalling and will go to the talk page if necessary. All this is to say, I'd like a level-headed, impartial editor, to look at this. Jaydenwithay (talk) 00:49, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

:The problem is: the claim that "decades of F.B.I. surveillance found zilch on Dr. King and communism" isn't exactly accurate. Even CNN (not exactly a right-wing rag and a source on our RS list) put it this way: "While King did have associates who had been members of the Communist Party, by all accounts they severed those ties when they started working in the civil rights movement. What's more, the FBI bugs never picked up evidence that King himself was a Communist, or was interested in toeing the party line". [https://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/#:~:text=Kennedy%20added%20a%20proviso%20%2D%2D,and%20to%20the%20attorney%20general.] Furthermore, that is a lot more generous than other RS puts it. IIRC I am the one who (I guess in one of my trips out of the woodwork) added that link to the MLK article section that hashes all this out. Mainly because I thought it was too complex to hash out here. (And a fair (for the most part) treatment was given over there.)

:If you want to have the part about "harkens back to rhetoric employed by segregationists in the South"....that probably needs to be sourced to something and attributed. (Before it was cited to Cannon's book and that statement isn't present.) It would need to say something like "[so and so] considered this a appeal to a bygone era of segregation yada, yada, whatever..." Rja13ww33 (talk) 02:42, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

::Perhaps the whole sentence ought to be replaced. The current passage, {{teal|...alluding, in response to a reporter's question, to claims that King associated with communists during his career;...}} takes an off the cuff response ("We'll know in thirty-five years, won't we") to a reporter's question about Sen. Helmes opposition to establishing the MLK holiday{{snd}}he, Helms, alleged that King was a communist sympathizer (an accusation often lobbed at pro-integration activists by white Southerners), and turns it into an statement of why Reagan opposed the legislation. The phrasing also gets us all tangled up in the nature of the accusations leveled by Helms against MLK. Here is a proposal for a revamped sentence which moves us beyond all that:
{{green|He initially opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, believing that the momentum for establishing the holiday was "based on an image, not reality,"}}[https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/22/us/reagan-s-doubts-on-dr-king-disclosed.html Reagan's Doubts on Dr. King Disclosed]. (The New York Times, 10-22-1983). {{green|but signed a bill to create the holiday in 1983 after it passed both houses of Congress...}}.
I will be adding this to the MLK Jr. Day article, replacing the (unreferenced) sentence: "President Ronald Reagan originally opposed the holiday, citing cost concerns." Drdpw (talk) 02:53, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

:::I wouldn't have a issue with that....but my fear is: we'll get months down the line and have the same debate all over again. Rja13ww33 (talk) 03:07, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

:::I like this sentence. But I would like to note that that NYT article you linked says that Reagan admitted he was being mendacious when apologizing to Coretta Scott King. Jaydenwithay (talk) 23:15, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

::::You may wish to do so, and may see his response in that light, but Reagan made no such admission to CSK. Drdpw (talk) 00:14, 2 July 2025 (UTC)