So often frank, so often right.

Forthright AOC explained in an interview how Republicans in general and Reagan in particular have used racism.

“One perfect example – a perfect example – of how special interests and the powerful have pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working Americans in order to just screw over all working-class Americans is Reaganism in the '80s," Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview [at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.]

In a TYT video on YouTube, the folks expand on the point, making reference to his campaign speech at Philadelphia, Mississippi, the county seat of Neshoba County notorious as the site of the murder of three civil right workers, a place at which he could have no other reason to speak than to send a very clear signal that white racists exasperated by the Democrats' support for Afro-Americans' civil and voting rights would be welcome in the GOP.

Per Wikipedia,

During his speech, Reagan said:

I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. 

I believe in states' rights. 

I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.

And what earlier Republican, an idol of Reagan's, had taken just this sort of tack?

Why, Barry Goldwater, of course.

AOC also referred to Reagan's diatribe against "welfare queens".

"So you think about this image, 'welfare queens,'” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “and what [Reagan] was really trying to talk about… 

"He's painting this really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, [who] were sucks on our country, right? … 

"That's not explicit racism, but it’s still rooted in racist caricature. It gives people a logical — a ‘logical’ — reason to say, 'Oh, yeah, no. Toss out the whole safety net.'"

Per Wikipedia,

The idea of welfare fraud goes back to the early-1960s, when the majority of known offenders were male.

Despite this, many journalistic exposés were published at the time on those who would come to be known as welfare queens. 

Readers Digest and Look magazine published sensational stories about mothers gaming the system.

Additionally, Ronald Reagan employed the trope of the "Welfare Queen" in order to rally support for reform of the welfare system. 

During his initial bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, and again in 1980, Reagan constantly made reference to the "Welfare Queen" at his campaign rallies.

Some of these stories, and some that followed into the 1990s, focused on female welfare recipients engaged in behavior counter-productive to eventual financial independence such as having children out of wedlock, using AFDC money to buy drugs, or showing little desire to work. 

These women were understood to be social parasites, draining society of valuable resources while engaging in self damaging behavior.

Despite these early appearances of the "Welfare Queen" icon, stories about able-bodied men collecting welfare continued to dominate discourse until the 1970s, at which point women became the main focus of welfare fraud stories.

The term was coined in 1974, either by George Bliss of the Chicago Tribune in his articles about Linda Taylor, or by Jet Magazine.

Neither publication credits the other in their "Welfare Queen" stories of that year. Taylor was ultimately charged with committing $8,000 in fraud and having four aliases.

She was convicted of illegally obtaining 23 welfare checks using two aliases and was sentenced to two to six years in prison.

During the same decade, Taylor was additionally investigated for murder, kidnapping, and baby trafficking.

Stories of her activities were used by Ronald Reagan, starting with his 1976 presidential campaign, to illustrate his criticisms of social programs in the United States.

I think nowadays we see a little better what that Bitburg visit was all about, too.

TYT also mentioned Reagan's removal of sanctions on the Apartheid regime of South Africa, a regime ardently defended back in the day by William Buckley and his National Review, and his bitter private opposition to the creation of Martin Luther King day, a measure he signed only because it was passed with veto-proof majorities.

When Reagan was reelected I was plunged into gloom for days.

See this for more.