ALL PB
why are [they] pickin on swordy lately?
swordy just posts memes and news
o7
>attacks will intensify
long ass article, but very interdesting
The Plot to Out Ronald Reagan
By JAMES KIRCHICK
05/27/2022 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/27/gay-history-paranoia-conspiracy-reagan-kirchick-excerpt-00035193
https://archive.ph/kVFU8
It was 3:15 on the morning of June 26, 1980, and Congressman Bob Livingston was extraordinarily drunk, hiding in the congressional gym beneath the Rayburn House Office Building, petrified that a team of highly trained right-wing homosexual assassins working on behalf of Ronald Reagan was about to kill him.
With his new book, James Kirchick offers a window into an era when “the fear of homosexuality, or even the mere accusation of it, destroyed careers, ended lives, and induced otherwise decent people to betray colleagues and friends.” In this exclusive excerpt, he reveals the extent to which whisperings of a conspiracy from California to Washington, when met with political opportunism and overblown anxiety over the potential presence of gay people in positions of power, nearly altered the course of history.
To the extent that the Louisiana Republican is remembered today, it’s for the brief but sensational role he played in America’s most infamous political sex scandal. On the same day in December 1998 that Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about his affair with a White House intern, Livingston, then the House speaker-designate, shocked the nation with his own admission of adultery. Preempting a journalistic exposé that had dredged up evidence of his past relationships with women not his wife, he not only refused the speakership but announced his resignation from Congress altogether.
What people don’t know is that nearly two decades before this bit part in the Clinton impeachment drama riveted the nation, Livingston was at the center of another scandal involving politicians and illicit sex, one that, in his own words, had the potential to be “world-shaking.” Most explosive about this whole terrible intrigue, and what tied it all together, was the nature of the sexual activity involved.
For most of the 20th century, the worst thing one could possibly be in American politics was gay. The mere insinuation of homosexuality was sufficient to destroy a political career, and things could get particularly vicious between intraparty adversaries. The first outing in American politics, of the isolationist Massachusetts Sen. David Walsh in 1942, was perpetrated by interventionist allies of fellow Democrat, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While public attitudes have become far more open, the insinuation that someone is gay — whether true or not — remains a potent weapon (as elements of the campaign against North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn recently illustrated), especially in socially conservative milieus.
This account of the alleged “homosexual ring” that controlled Ronald Reagan, and the efforts to expose it on the eve of the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated him for the presidency, is compiled from interviews with several of the surviving participants and documents uncovered in the papers of former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee. Appropriately for a story involving what was once considered the gravest sin in American politics, it has never been told until now.
>continued on site
>excerpt from article
McCloskey asked his legislative assistant to retrieve the sealed envelope. Written across the flap was Best’s signature and, below it, the words: “To be opened only by Pete McCloskey.”
Inside was a one-page statement, dated January 9, 1976, which read, in part:
I, William H. Best III, discovered, as a function of a homosexual approach being made to me on November 17th, 1975 by Peter Hannaford of the Ronald Reagan Campaign that Peter Hannaford was bisexual.
In 1967 I had indicated to the Governor’s office that there were homosexuals in his office. Two were fired. From 1967 to 1975 I assumed that there were no longer any homo, or bi-sexuals associated with Ronald Reagan.
When Peter Hannaford made his advance on me in his room at the Madison Hotel on the night of November 17th, I became aware, because of the completely agressive [sic] nature of his actions toward me that my pervious [sic] assumptions were wrong.
After thinking about the matter for some time, I concluded that there was a remote possibility that Ronald Reagan might, and I repeat, might be bi-sexual. Because of the potential implications in matters of national security in the event he becomes President of the United States, I felt, since I assume I am the only person who knows, or was willing to say anything about the matter, that it was in the national interest to have a careful examination made of the possibility …
I hope andprey[sic] that this letter is never opened, but if it is, fight the good fight for truth, justice and honesty.
>PRAY vs. PREY
perhaps the [sic] really wasn't a typo?
The crux of the document was encapsulated in point 32: “Bill [Best] expressed extreme concern about the danger of a former Hollywood actor in fact being the‘Manchurian candidate’and spoke at length on thenature of the Hollywood movie industryand the fact thatan actor is in the hands and under the manipulation of studios, producers, directors, etc., and that he must carry out orders in order to survive.He felt that Reagan had been manipulated all of his life, and thathe was essentially ‘in bondage’ to those around him.” Ronald Reagan as the ventriloquized pawn of shadowy and sinister forces — his “Kitchen Cabinet” of California millionaires, his wife Nancy, Nancy’s astrologers, the Mafia — has long been a motif in assessments of the 40th president, and what McCloskey’s contribution to the genre might have lacked in plausibility, it more than made up for with originality.Controlling Reagan in this scenario was a “network” of homosexuals who “shared an almost religious zeal against communism and [on] behalf of right-wing causes.”
Q15
They never thought they were going to lose control of the Presidency (not just D's) and thought they had control since making PAST MISTAKES (JFK, Reagan).