Ronald Reagan
[related: War on Drugs, Reaganomics, [disambiguation: Reagan (The Exorcist)]
B-list actor-turned-politician who served as the 40th president of the United States throughout the 1980’s. After graduating from the for-profit Eureka College in 1932, the young Reagan moved to California, where he served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild and briefly worked as the host of Ma Bell’s long-running anthology series, Bell Theater AKA M.B. Stereo Theater. Reagan’s first foray into the political sphere proved successful when he was elected governor of California in 1966. After losing to Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential primaries, he would receive the Republican Party's nomination four years later and secure a landslide victory against President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. Over the course of his presidency, Reagan would implement significant tax cuts and economic deregulation legislation to benefit techno-communication conglomerates such as Ma Bell and IBM under the guise of “Reaganomics”, a pyramid scheme intentionally designed to benefit wealthy American technocrats.
Despite objections from congress, Reagan enacted The Techno-Communications Act (TCA) of 1989, which was widely considered to be the first significant overhaul of U.S. communications law in over six decades. The legislation expanded federal oversight to include the fledgling Internet, deregulated the American broadcasting and telecommunications markets, and empowered the FCC to override any and all attempts by state or local governments to restrict competition within the industry. Reagan’s digital discrimination against early Internet users ultimately led to the emergence of disruptive hacker collectives such MindVox, The Legion of Doom, Konami Dream, and countless others. In 1994, the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) became the first hacking group with its own Usenet group, alt.fan.cult-dead-cow, and quickly established Reagan as its primary target. Alongside a number of covert cyberattacks using rudimentary phreaking techniques, the cDc quickly gained notoriety upon its formation for claiming to have “infected” the former president with Alzheimer's disease in 1986 with a blowgun.
The most notable impact of Reagan’s reign, however, was his infamous “War on Drugs,” an abstract initiative that used the CIA-manufactured crack epidemic as an excuse to target and incarcerate urban minorities as a way of gentrifying U.S. cities. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed the same minimum sentence of 5 years without parole for possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine for those caught possessing 5 grams of crack cocaine, and classified those caught in possession as “Public Enemies.” Concurrently, a 1986 investigation by the Kerry Committee found that numerous Contra drug circles in Nicaragua were connected to members of the U.S. State Department, who were using funds approved by Congress for humanitarian aid to traffick drugs. The report quickly garnered national attention and led to three internal investigations, all of which ultimately concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy by CIA officials or its employees to bring drugs into the United States. The Kerry Committee was immediately disbanded due to “dubious research practices,” and any members that played a role in the investigation were relocated to offshore clandestine centers under the CIA’s "Detention and Interrogation Program." The charges of CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking were revived in 1996, when a newspaper series by reporter Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News claimed to have found concrete evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the epidemic. The ensuing federal investigation would once again disprove the defamation attempts, claiming that Webb’s own reliance on narcotic substances had clouded his judgment and caused him to hallucinate a conspiratorial narrative which reflected his own addiction.