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November 27, 2023

Cardona on Reagan: A video that will make you laugh out loud and then want to cry

By Andrea Widburg

Ronald Reagan had an extraordinary gift for distilling profound concepts into easily accessible, bite-size phrases that were always memorable and often amusing. The only other person I can think of who does that is Thomas Sowell. However, even the best ideas cannot survive the onslaught of leftism, which sustains itself in large part by erasing and perverting history. Thus, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona not only misquoted one of Reagan’s most famous aphorisms, he managed to reverse its meaning by a full 180 degrees.

One of the delights of Reagan’s presidency was his witticisms. I was too much of a Democrat and too young and stupid generally to appreciate them in real time. Still, I can look back at them now and see with what charm he made important points about constitutional and conservative ideas:

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”

“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.”

“As government expands, liberty contracts.”

“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”

“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.”

“Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Those quotations are the pithy little ones. Reagan could also rise to heights of profundity that no other politician has equaled since then:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

“Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.”

But perhaps Reagan’s most famous phrase was this one from a 1986 press conference:

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

No sentence more perfectly encapsulates Reagan’s understanding of the horrors that come from an encroaching nanny state. In a well-run world, people help each other. The government, however, entangles itself in the lives of people and communities and, like a vampire, it drains them of vitality, independence, morals, wealth, ambition, and self-reliance until they are destroyed. Once its job is done, it taxes the remains before handing them off to a crony who can repurpose them for a profit. That’s a lot of meaning in a single quip.

But leftism is all about destroying ideas and, as Orwell knew so well, you destroy ideas by destroying the words that express them. So it is that we have Education Secretary Miguel Cardona putting his leftist twist on Reagan’s famous aphorism and, in the process, not only leeching it of meaning but also putting it in the service of everything Reagan fought against:

Vivek Ramaswamy caught and retweeted the video. He also added a perfect prescription for dealing with both Cardona and the Department of Education, which has done nothing for American students other than serving as a powerful vector of bad ideas:

As for me, when I first saw the video, I burst out laughing. After that, I wanted to cry.

Image: X screen grab.

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