Did Ronald Reagan’s Son Just Write the Dumbest Op-Ed Ever?
Are protections for trans youth like communism? Is California on the verge of fascism? How stupid are these people?
by Evan Urquhart
In the course of fact-checking anti-trans propaganda, sometimes you come across something to stupid it’s necessary to stop for a moment and just point and laugh. Case in point, an op-ed for the Las Vegas Review-Journal today by Michael Reagan, whose profession seems to be that he was one of Ronald Reagan’s five children. Reagan has a problem with two proposed laws in California. One is AB 957, which would direct judges take into account whether parents are supportive of their trans children in custody disputes, among other factors. The conservative reaction to the law has been called misinformation by the Associated Press. The second is almost certainly AB 665 (though Reagan refers to it as AB 65). This would allow minors 12 and older to consent to mental health treatment and engage with services for runaways.
Reagan’s problem is that these laws are just like Naziism and communism. How? He doesn’t say. He just says these things are like each other.
screenshot from the Las Vegas Review-Journal
What Reagan is describing in the screenshotted passage is the general concept of a child welfare: The government can hardly step in to protect children when the parents are abusive or neglectful if there’s no concept of a child’s best interests ever being different from their parents’ wishes. There are loads of complexities to the child welfare system, and tons of places where such a system can be abused… but of course Reagan hasn’t engaged with them. Instead, he’s arguing against the concept of the government making any attempt to determine what’s best for children and act on it, and he’s saying that to do otherwise is indistinguishable from totalitarianism. To do this he tells a story about his friends Sandy and Karl.
screenshot from the Las Vegas Review-Journal
What does Sandy and Karl’s experience coming to America in the 1980s have to do with conservative parents in California in 2023? Well, Sandy and Karl are sympathetic and fled government oppression, and conservatives would like to be associated with that. There are no conservative parents facing 25-year-sentences for failing to support their transgender children, so they need Sandy and Karl to stand-in for it.
There’s a lot of talk about authoritarian hellscapes and the descent into fascism lately for reasons that feel obvious. Not to be outdone, conservatives like Reagan ape the style of concern over fascism’s rise without the substance. Still, it is probably confusing for a lot of people to have both sides constantly yelling about fascism. So, as an exercise, let’s look at what a real argument that a state government is descending into fascism in their child welfare practices would look like.
In Texas, the Republican governor and attorney general declared providing children with gender-affirming care was child abuse. The state then commenced investigations into families who’d sought such treatment for their trans children. This happened outside of any process to determine the best interests of children and ignored the masses of evidence that gender-affirming care is safe and healthy for children diagnosed with gender-dysphoria. It ignored the fact that the mainstream medical establishment supports gender-affirming care, meaning that the parents being accused of child abuse were only following mainstream medical advice on the best treatment for their children.
This was authoritarian because the governor and attorney general were substituting their personal authority for any fair process of determining the best interests of children. It was arbitrary and sudden, penalizing parents for behavior that wasn’t only legal but believed by the parents and all major medical organizations to be in their children’s best interests. It had fascistic undertones because it involved ginning up unreasonable fears about a minority group, targeting them for punishments that were completely outside the norm for other families. As in the USSR and Nazi Germany, it resulted in families fleeing their homes out of fear of governmental persecution.
Reagan and others on the right would be welcome to make the argument that something similar is happening in states seeking to protect trans youth and their families. Doing so would involve marshalling evidence that families who are acting in the best interests of their children are being subjected to sudden, harsh, unreasonable punishments and fearing for their safety. Of course, they can’t show that. So instead we get essay after essay vaguely putting modest child welfare proposals next to communist Czechoslovakia as if that means anything.
There are certainly people on the left who overuse terms like fascism, or who unfairly call people who are merely Nazi-adjacent or weak on Naziism, Nazis. However, the conservative “side” of the transgender “debate” is all this sort of thing: Wild accusations, non sequiturs, insinuations, often actual lies, piled one on another to make up for the underlying weakness of the arguments. Reagan’s essay probably isn’t the dumbest op-ed ever written, or even the dumbest one we’ll read this week. They’re all like this.