How Ronald Reagan's Regime Led To The Jan 6th Capitol Riot

The Capitol insurrection on January 6th was a long time coming. Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan's campaign was laying the groundwork for what would become Donald Trump's platform. They explicitly targeted Americans that bent toward authoritarianism and now we can see the results. This interview previously aired on Peacock on July 14th, 2021. Emma Vigeland discusses how the Ronald Reagan campaign sowed the seeds of the MAGA movement with Rick Perlstein.

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Rick Perlstein: Yes if I said to you that the Reagan presidential campaign in 1980 targeted people with authority authoritarian tendencies you might accuse me of you know slandering Ronald Reagan. but in this particular case, I literally have a historical document in which they pretty much say let's target people with authoritarian tendencies. so the document in question actually which I read about in advertising age magazine in an article about his pollster Richard Worthlin in an article about how he strategized for the Reagan campaign and won advertising ages ad man of the year which is kind of goofy and interesting in itself. one of the things that one of this guy Worthlin's aids told the reporter was that Reagan supporters quote obtain high scores on authoritarianism and a low score on egalitarianism and then they also discovered basically that European ethnic groups living in large cities followed the same pattern and hence they were a prime target of conversion. so and this is a quote that Reagan launched his campaign with quite highly visible visits to such neighborhoods. so literally they're like let's find people who you know are democrats right then democrats then and though we can turn into republicans and the way we're going to find them is to find these pockets where people are most likely to be authoritarians. and these were places like south Boston where there was a terrible controversy over bussing where people basically fought the police to keep their kids from going to school with black people. or Cicero Illinois which is a formerly all-white suburb of Chicago where Martin Luther King was warned by the county sheriff that if he held a housing march there he'd be committing a suicidal act. you know Milwaukee Wisconsin, which was the most segregated city in America, which was kind of undergoing a very big reckoning when it came to police violence against African Americans and this is literally you know where Ronald Reagan you know we know that Ronald Reagan opened his general election campaign right in the summer of 1980 in Neshoba county. Which is another great you know example of a place where you'd find a lot of authoritarians because of course, this was where Goodman Cheney and Schweiner were lynched in 1964 for registering African-Americans to vote. but this was actually the opening of his primary campaign. and so that's what they did and I found something else that was very interesting in this article and it shows basically in the most elegant way I’ve ever been able to come up with because this is a not really a complicated concept but I’ve never really found a really elegant way to kind of a hammer to really kind of get this across to people. the devolution of the republican party from Reagan to trump so yeah it's bad enough that a political party is saying let's find thugs you know so we can you know basically turn them into republicans so we can win a presidential election. that's really nasty in itself. but one of the aide who basically explained this to the reporter said well Ronald Reagan said he didn't want to do this anymore so we stopped you know going to these places. and I don't really know what he was talking about because yeah they you know never their appeal to authoritarians never really ebbed but what's fascinating about that is you know this expression of shame right this very admission.