You're Wrong About - Ronald Reagan and "The Welfare Queen" with Laci Mosley

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Laci Mosley (Scam Goddess) tells Sarah about Linda Taylor and the origins of the Welfare Queen myth ("the build the wall" of the 70s). They also discuss the origins of the Ronald Reagan myth, and how the latter used the former to become the "Beyoncé of the GOP." Here’s where to find Laci:Laci on Twitter Laci's podcast Scam Goddess Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSome articles referred to in this episode:http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.htmlhttps://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/the-queen-linda-taylor-welfare-reagan-podcast.htmlhttps://www.littlebrown.com/titles/josh-levin/the-queen/9780316513272/https://www.earwolf.com/episode/the-welfare-queen-w-ayo-edebiri/https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen Links: https://twitter.com/DivaLacihttps://www.earwolf.com/show/scam-goddess/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Here dirty old Hollywood man, put them lips on my baby, my fresh infant. No. Hello everybody, welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are talking about Ronald Reagan and the Welfare Queen, one of the great love stories of the 80s. This is the first chapter in a multifaceted look at the character of Ronald Reagan and the character of the country that loved him.

And I am so excited to be bringing you chapter one with our guest Lacey Mosley of Scam Goddess. I really love this conversation. I feel like this episode has more laughs per minute than almost any in this catalog, which is really saying something. And it just felt in this conversation like the truth was apparent in many moments. And I don't get a lot of that lately. The Welfare Queen is a mythological figure constructed around a real woman named Linda Taylor, who was a Chicago resident who inadvertently became key to Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign.

And we argue here to his eventual success in capturing the heart of the American people and becoming king of the USA. We're talking about Linda herself, but the conversation I think is much more about the narrative that became her legacy and how we're still living in the world that that story created. There has been a lot of amazing Linda Taylor and Welfare Queen discourse in the last 10 years. And a lot of it has been brought to us by Josh Levin who published the article, The Welfare Queen and Slate in 2013, which brought Linda Taylor to the attention of a public that was perhaps a little bit ready to reevaluate its relationship to this myth and to the very real woman at the center of it. And there are many other approaches to this story.

It's I think one of the really important ones. And so if you're interested in learning more about the Welfare Queen and Linda Taylor, check out The Queen by Josh Levin. There's also, of course, an episode of Scam Goddess, but Lacey did in the past. There's a lot of resources to check out. Take a look. All right, that is enough from me. Here's our episode. In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers

to collect food stamps, social security, veterans benefits for four non-existent deceased veterans' husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we do a pop-up video of a Reagan speech. Here with me today is Lacey Mosley of the wonderful The Criminal Scam Goddess podcast. Hey, is there? How are you? Hi, I'm so good. I'm so happy that you are now visiting my show. After you so wonderfully asked me to visit your show.

Oh, my God. What a lovely visit that was when you came on over to our show, girl. We loved it. The fans loved you. They want to scam you. They want to hang out with you. They love you. For people who haven't had the pleasure, how would you describe your show, essentially? Oh, I would say Scam Goddess podcast is a show all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it, except for we're not into the Copaganda. We don't live for the cops rifling through the trash and 12-hour stakeouts. We're not in the pursuit of the scammer. We're more praising the scammer.

I want to know what you did with the money. I want to know how many lies you told. Do you have a lie journal to keep up with your lies? How do you keep up with all of the fibs that you tell every day? I'm more interested in the day-to-day life of the criminal than I am in the pursuit of justice. And sometimes there are bad guys like Lou Pearlman, who was a hilarious scammer, but also an evil, dirty man. So they're not all people who are worthy of my adoration, but a lot of times, yes. Kind of the Scorsese approach, where it's like, yes, this is illegal and some of it is unethical, but it's not really that bad.

Isn't it fun? Right. We're having a good time. We rarely get into murder. It's like you can laugh about it and it's not going to be like what I normally say. It's not going to be some nice white lady getting murdered on her way home. You know what I mean? You can laugh and have a good time. The number one hobby for nice white ladies, if you believe the media and then a close second is menstruating. Yeah, I mean, not to make light of financial crimes because they're very serious and they affect people every day. But I feel as if one of my attractions to gangster movies is that there's often this theme of like,

are we really worse than the FBI? Right. And the reasonable answer is often like, hard to say, honestly, hard to say. And that's a very interesting theme and true crime, I think. And they bleed together a lot. Like they work together, cops have gangs. I won't even go down that hill with cops. But like, you know what I mean? Like the lines are all blurred and in a way that, you know, cops are just gangs for property and, you know, other gangs are gangs for whatever they're ganging about,

whether that be drugs or bootlegging or stolen property, you know. Right. Power is power. And corrupts. Yeah. So we're talking about the concept of the welfare queen. If I hear the phrase welfare queen, I see Ronald Reagan's face in my mind. So I think that that's a fantastic con that we have to talk about in some capacity for this. And that's one of my favorite cons to talk about.

Sarah, that's funny that you say you see Ronald Reagan's face. And I laughed in the beginning when you were like, oh, clips of Ronald Reagan. What an intro. Oh, you're in for a ride. And normally what I think, or at least what I was shown as a kid, and I grew up in Texas, so honey, they weren't they weren't teaching the critical race theories to us, even though when we had a, we had a book fair day. And I remember I was in elementary school and people showed up as like Clifford, the big red dog.

And then I came as a sojourner truth. That's wonderful. And then wait, but what outfit though, because that's really hard because you have to do a whole historical thing. I put on my grandma's salt and pepper wig and some penny loafers. I mean, I feel like we're giving like 80 hundreds. Like you got to give the girls a sweater and like a long like skirt. Don't give no ankle me, you know. Right.

And I wore penny loafers and I recited ain't I a woman to a class of school children. And I think that's so wonderful. That's like section adult moment for children to be having. They were like, what is going on? Judy B. Jones was just up and now the slaves. Like what happened? But I said that because when I saw welfare queen, when I was a kid in Texas was like the image was always painted of like a black woman, you know, chicken is nearby. Watermelon is on the premises.

And you know, several, several children and no father in sight. That was always what I was the image that was depicted of a welfare queen and what welfare meant into that image of like you're on welfare. You were in section eight housing. You definitely had a crack pipe or two and you ate chicken and watermelon and you had less kids. And it feels like there's this idea that you were engaged in a game of chicken with the government where you're like, he, he, he, I'll have so many children that you'll have to keep giving me more and more money. And that's my plan and I'm going to get rich on like $50 a month increments or whatever you get per child. I'm never going to work on balling out on whole milk and eight ounce cheese. Yeah, that's that's absolutely what was depicted.

And I think what a lot of Americans still believe today about welfare. So I'm really excited to talk about this because they're wrong about it. Sorry, that was nerdy. I was excited to do that. No, it's so fun. It's like live from New York or something. Yeah, it's like live from New York. You're wrong about it.

Yeah, because this feels like one of like the essential American myths, the sinisterness of receiving government assistance of any kind that I feel like has gotten worse and has helped get us to the point we're at, which is the country is just, I don't even know how to describe it. It's incredible. You guys, if you're listening in another time and place, it is like you just wake up every morning and you don't know what's going to happen. Oh, no, America's a developing nation with a Gucci belt. And we all know this, you know, I saw some commercials floating on on Twitter. I can't remember if it was in Germany or it was some country overseas. It's like Germany, Russia, somewhere over there where they had commercials that were like, if you donate, you can help feed an American child who's starving at school today.

And I saw the commercial and I was like, are you kidding? It was so embarrassing. For the price of whatever you eat in Belgium, you can buy this American child a school lunch. Yes. Oh, it's so sad. There's such a pride in being an American and purporting yourself as rich or purporting yourself as having money and getting assistance and help is looked upon as something that is embarrassing or like that you're lazy or that you're not very smart or very talented or you don't work hard enough. And that didn't used to be the thing with government assistance. I feel like there's a very distinct shift that we're going to get into where it became a negative that it wasn't prior to.

Where does this begin? Where do you want to take us? You know, I want to start right before just like a little precursor to like the energy that was happening right before we get into obviously the welfare queen, the woman herself who was labeled the welfare queen. But there was something really interesting when I was doing research and I covered this on my podcast a few years ago, but even just digging back into it, I found some stuff that made even more sense to how we got here. Well, welfare and government assistance has been around for quite some time. Proportionately, it's always benefited white people more and one that's because white people make up more of the general populace in the United States. But then also they were they are still like it's I believe it's 37% of people on snap right now are white Americans and then under that is 26% are black. So in the numbers kind of fall below that like 3% are Asians. So it's it's always been a thing. But for a while, it was very difficult for black people to have access to these social programs when obviously you can argue that they needed them the most. And this is like post need New Deal era. He had the Great Society, which like such a remedy the racial wealth gap. And this was like during the 1960s and the median income for a black family rose during that time 53%.

Wow. So this is pre Reagan. So this is Linda B Johnson. He was like, we're gonna get a girl's access to the welfare so that they, you know, they can come up to and get their white picket fence. And if you disagree with me, I'll yell at you with my big dick and my way. Exactly. So with that increase of, you know, access to these social programs, the poverty line before Linda B Johnson did this was like 55% for black folks in the 60s, and it went down to just 27% by 1968. So that's a huge shift. And you're talking about black folks getting more professional jobs like clerical work. Education median went up four years for black people. So this is a time where black people are starting to get access to the things that they have been denied that we're keeping them down. Whereas we have always been told in the media that black folks don't have anything because they don't work hard enough and not that white folks have systemically set up every system to make sure that they cannot achieve. So Linda kind of gave us a little wiggle room. Not a lot.

I feel like this is like if you have this house where every four years a new tenant is there and there's this garden and no one ever waters the tomatoes and someone waters the tomatoes one year. They get this radical idea. And then there are tomatoes and people are like, it's weird how that happened once, but we're never watering them again. That's crazy. So the nutrients and the water and the soil made this. How did that happen? Crazy. Like resources affect income? No. No, no. Let's just cut off all the water supply and see what happens. Tomatoes will probably come back. Right. And I always think of it like, did you ever watch Mad Men? No, it became this weird standoff where the more people told me to watch Mad Men, the more I couldn't watch Mad Men. So unfortunately not. But tell me about the thing though.

I appreciate that level of pettiness. I always remember this one episode of Mad Men and then, you know, that shows in the 60s, everybody's drunk at work. Everybody's smoking copious amounts of cigarettes. Right. At work. Just smoking and sexually harassing each other. Right. And like putting up with new Chrysler slogans. It's 8 a.m. turn up.

There was an episode where in towards the later part of the 60s, a black woman showed up as a secretary. And everybody was like, wait, wait, how should you get in here? Hold this woman in off the street and let her start typing briefs. What happened? And so, you know, you start to see that slow change and white folks seeing black folks starting to enter the workforce in positions that before that, we're not attainable to them. So that obviously anytime there's any progress, there's always going to be a little pushback. So I think that that's a good precursor to know like where we are when this whole welfare clean thing started starting up. Yeah. So Ronald Reagan, who used to be an actor.

Yes. Cannot be overstated. Did a movie with a chimp? Yes. He did a movie with a chimp and then he was like, you know what, it's time for me to be president. That's how it goes. You're like, all right, bubbles. See you later to the White House. Wait, did you see this is a red herring?

Did you see the discourse about Nancy Reagan? Oh, and that she gave great head apparently. I mean, I can't believe people were surprised by that because whenever you read a memoir of 50s Hollywood, it's like there we were giving blow jobs to each other all day long and occasionally making a movie. Time for the afternoon jobs. Right. That's just what 330, you know, I guess the fact that people are so scandalized by that. I'm like, everyone needs to read more old Hollywood memoirs. No slut shaming over here.

Yeah. And the Reagan's met because according to Nancy Reagan, she was accidentally named as a suspected communist because there was another Nancy, her last name, who was a communist at the time. And so she got in touch with Reagan, who was a big anti-communist. And so they bonded and fell in love over anti-communism and witch hunts. Wow. It was fun for them. What a subtle way to nag a man. What a way to feel like I'm not a communist.

Now, go out with me. Right. Okay, Nancy, I'm not knocking that hustle. That's how people met then. And also no slut shaming like Nancy, if you get your Reagan on, you get your Nancy on girl. Good for you. Now, where I will shame you is you are the original Trap Queen and I will never forget that crack. Nancy, we know what you did.

We know what you did. She was busy too. She had a busy eighties. Right. Oh, wow. Didn't everybody the eighties. But yeah, so this is like 76 and Ronald's out here, you know, shaking hands, putting his mouth on as many babies as possible and just trying to get them both. That is the single grossest way that anyone has ever described politics.

And I think it's perfect. People just handing over these infants with the weakest immune systems and like here. It's a weird thing to do. We're a reckless country. Here dirty old Hollywood man. Put them lips on my baby. My fresh infant. No.

Why? Why was that a thing? So yeah, he's trying to gain traction. It's not working. The new candidates there in the diners, the gymnasiums, they at the town fair. And then Reagan finally hit upon something, something so delectable, such a morsel. That was a real crowd pleaser. Think of like build that wall, but for the seventies.

So in Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. Reagan said she used 80 names, 30 addresses. 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veterans benefits for non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone was running about $150,000 a year in seventies money. But it's true. You could have bought like a city block for that kind of money then. Right.

So not all of them, but some of them. Right. And he's such a pillar of the GOP. Like the GOP loves them some Reagan. That was their Beyonce. Like they love to talk about him all the time, even to this day, you know, Reaganomics. Like, you know, the branding was strong. So it's interesting to see how much manipulation he did and how it still affects us today.

I think it's probably very tempting to feel in this dog Jeff for the Reagan era, but it's like, I feel like he was like a successfully functioning cowboy animatronic. And Trump is like this buggy, like clearly out of control CEO animatronic. He's like the Chuck E. Cheese ones. Totally that. Or I was thinking of like the scary little wind up robots and the great mouse detective. Either way, something that needs to be taken far away from children. But yeah, there one kind of seems more lifelike and warm and human, but they're both equally

in my point. Absolutely. Yeah. One just was more polished. Reagan was definitely harming black and brown people, but he did it with a pizzazz and a panache. You know what I mean? Right.

And there's like plausible deniability and at least tolerating him. Right. You could absolutely do that. Whereas with Donald Trump, he was like, yeah, we're right. Like it was just so blatant that you could not stand beside him. Right. Well, he still did, but right. It was like Reagan in the 80s didn't make it hard for his voters on the level of like,

I will help you as a fiscal conservative, but also I like literally will not say a bad thing about a Nazi. Can't alienate the Nazi vote. I'm dependent on them. Yeah. Dependent on it. So Reagan, you know, he coins this political trope, the welfare queen. The welfare queen is in reference to Linda Taylor, who in dramatic display we'll talk

about later. But yeah, they, they used this to stoke fears and anger amongst white people who were already a feared and a angry. Like I said, the madman thing, they've been showing up to work and they're like, who the hell let this niggerson here? How did she get in here? You know, and they're seeing this poverty gap closed. Maybe you're in a neighborhood where the neighbors are all of a sudden there's some melanin on

the across the block. You're worried about your property value. Like it works. Gosh, this is like, this so reminds me of the satanic panic because it's specifically about like pushback that becomes panic about people in the workplace where the satanic panic was like, there's too many women in the workplace. Like they're abandoning their children and they're going to work. So isn't it believable that the children are all being abused by Satanist right now because

they're working? Probably. Right. And just, yeah, this feels like a moral panic. Right. It never happened when the men went to work. But when the women went to work, then the devil bezel book himself. Yeah.

Apparently started putting the kids to bed every time these press reports are making assertions that she was raking in tens and thousands of dollars and Reagan repeatedly cited her six figure income on welfare. Hmm. I think that's so interesting because two folds. One, like we were talking about just like the metaphor to the satanic panic. We're talking about black people appearing in the workplace. We're talking about the poverty gap starting to close a little bit.

It's still huge. But also there's this myth of like the lazy black person or like the, you know, that black people don't, I mean, look at Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima literally was never a real person. She was on the box as a creature of comfort to white folks who could no longer afford to employ black help in their homes because they couldn't afford them. So it was like, oh, maybe a mammy is no longer making your pancakes, but you can buy this box and then you can still pretend a black lady is working for you as you make your own

pancakes. That never occurred to me. And like that feels so true. And then, you know, Uncle Ben is making the rice. Sam Jay is a comic. She has a great joke about Uncle Ben because she was like, my whole life I thought Uncle Ben was a rice tycoon. I thought he was a rice tycoon.

I think I kind of thought that because didn't they have him in ads? He would talk to you and you're like, there he goes. Good old Uncle Ben. No, Uncle Ben never made that right. And how is a kid are you supposed to keep that straight? Because there is a person called Papa John, but Uncle Ben is fictional and yet it obviously makes sense because Papa John is a crazy white guy with a terrible mansion who I think has scary political beliefs.

And he sweats a lot. You know, if you ever see somebody sweating that much in an air conditioned place, we should all be concerned. But yeah, so there is that the myth and even when we talk about in the today of things when black folks are talking about reparations and what, you know, we believe we deserve like people like slavery was so long ago. I didn't enslave anybody and y'all weren't slaves. So I don't understand why we're still having this reparations conversation.

And it's because America, the nation that we know now was built off the 3.2 million slaves who were taken here and built the wealth of this country. At one point, America was responsible for two thirds of the world's cotton. The world's cotton. Billions of pounds of cotton. That is money. That is wealth that was created on the backs of our ancestors. And then we're just disenfranchised.

And the gap just got further and further and further. So I completely understand why certain white people who are starting to feel like, well, the poverty gap is closing. All these things that we created to keep black folks down are closing. It's not surprising for them to cling to like, oh, the black people are getting handouts from welfare. And that's why we need to stop it. I'm curious.

I feel like you must have encountered this a ton. But something that I feel like has just popped up for me randomly reading true crime over the years is that people in the 70s, I'm pretty sure white people were obsessed with talking about the idea of a race war. And there's going to be this race war. There's a race war coming. That's where Build the Wall came from is that Mexicans will be the largest populace in America by 23,000.

You know, whatever, like all of these projections that have been put out about, you will not replace us because they really actively feel like they're being replaced. And I think a lot of that stems from the guilt of white folks know somewhere deep down. Pop Pop might have been sweet to you. He always had a peppermint in his purse or in his pocket for you. Granny will have one of her purse for you. But you also know Pop Pop might have gone to some lynchings. Like you also know that everything is systemically rooted in a lot of really terrible things

that white people did in this country, which is why we don't want to teach critical race theory, because we're worried it'll make white children feel bad. That's not what that's not what they're worried about. They're worried that if we start to point out how systematically this country has disenfranchised people, white people have done it. Then we're going to start looking at those white people and we're going to get angry with those white people and then the race war. And like, honestly, African Americans with 13% of the population, we're not trying to

fight the war with y'all. That just sounds exhausting. Okay. Most people just trying to live life, maybe ride a bike, go to Hawaii, have a home, you know, be able to leave something to their children when they die. But stoking that fear is how rich white people have been able to keep their foot on the necks of poor white people. Well, there you go.

Yeah. And this, this obsession when the race war idea feels to me like totally rooted in the idea of like, well, if white people become outnumbered, then like, we will have done to us what we've done to everybody. And that would be the worst thing in the world. And it's like, yes. So like there's an, there's an admission of guilt in that fear, right? Like you wouldn't feel there wouldn't be fear if there wasn't guilt.

Exactly. It's like, we don't want them to do to us what we did to them. And the same thing can be said about Black Lives Matter and organizing and social protests and even when it comes to like defunding the police, it's all white people being terrified of minorities coming and taking their things or even taking away the privileges that the violence has afforded them. You know, if my granny and pop pop did all that stuff to secure me a position in the world where I could just show up white and that was like a bachelor.

I want to be so quick to give that up either. And that's not to say that white people don't have hardships. It's not to say that white people aren't born into socioeconomic situations that are not favorable. It's just to say that everybody else and every other race experiences those same hardships, except for then they have this thing called race right on top of it, making it worse. We kind of look at Reagan and all these things and like the welfare queen and as history that's so far, so far past us so long ago, when in actuality, all of this stuff is still

on our doorstep and there's a lot of people who are alive currently who are around for these things. And presumably still like we're in politics then and still are because these people hang on until they're at death's door. I'm like, you don't want to go to retire in Florida. You don't want to play a few rounds of golf and get a pina colada. You know, you want to be in the Senate. Right.

Does that sound fun? Really? Go have fun. Right. But when you get older, like all that's really left is power. Right. So Reagan's basically saying that she's stealing hundreds and thousands of dollars. Right.

In reality, Linda Taylor, the welfare queen, the crooks of Reagan's campaign, a grand jury indicted her for receiving payments, adding up to a grand total of $7,608.02 that later increased to $8,865.67. I feel like I've paid that much in overdue bridge tolls. So. But how much did Reagan say she was making a year? 150,000 was it? 150 racks.

Whatever. Surrounding error. Yeah. Come on, Reagan. A few hundred percentages of exaggeration. But it worked. And her story eventually it fueled a case that cracked down welfare, you know, in the Illinois legislature, and basically it led to like an 88% bump in the budget for designated committee

and partnerships with the Chicago police. So as Illinois, they were like, we got to crack down on welfare because the welfare queen is making $150,000 a year. You know what we should do? Take that money. People who need it. They were like, our citizens are underpoliced here in Illinois. If our citizens are really hungry, you know what will help them?

The police. Those batons are actually licorice. You have to catch them in your mouth and then you can keep it. The boogeyman works and that worked for Reagan. Like you give people a look over there and then they'll look over there and they won't notice that the real issue is the rich getting richer and the gap between the rich and the middle class and the poor growing further and further apart, which is what Reagan was doing.

You want to call yourself fiscally conservative because I remember that phrase always being a badge of honor in Texas. Like if you were fiscally conservative or you were Republican, that meant like you had money. You had status. Because if you were voting Democrat, like you need the handouts. You need Mr. Government. Daddy Government, please give us a piece.

You're some kind of a professor or something. Right. You either went to a liberal college or you're like super duper poor and you need daddy government to give you your welfare checks. You know, there was a stigma. When in reality, if you're voting Republican and you're not like insanely rich, you're voting against all of your best interests, like every single one of them. But Reagan and the Republican Party has always been good at this is like a red herring like

someone else to blame someone else to look at. So for us, when Donald Trump was running, it was Mexicans in the wall for, you know, the seventies when Reagan was running, it was the welfare clean and lazy black people taking all your tax dollars and not working and just having a bunch of kids. So basically it feels like he's running on this platform of like vote for me because I will stop people from getting too much welfare money and I will do so by making sure that no one gets enough welfare money ever again. And also then I will take all that money and I will take other money as well.

The crazy thing is that the biggest problem of the system wasn't the welfare clean. It was that the system was cheating them. What? What? The system was cheating people who were on government assistance because Reagan did that. It was there was such an uptick in vigilante policing like the A F D C created, which like does snap and like all these programs, they even created a hotline, like a hotline where you could call and snitch if you thought people were taking welfare or abusing the welfare

programs. I mean, I would really question whether the amount of money it costs to staff that would cover the money that, because how much money are people possibly getting if they're running some kind of a welfare scam? I feel like it could, how many can there be and for how much money could you possibly ever do it? It just seems very theatrical. Right.

And it also just feels like you have to be the lamest person in the world. If you're at the grocery store, like you see somebody pull out their snap card and you see that they got like, look, how many fruit gushers they got over there, three, three jugs of milk. I'm calling the welfare police and soda. This is a matter for Uncle Sam soda. Let me call the government. Uh-uh.

You're calling the government. That'd be a very depressing law and order. Just petty crime. I don't know. I might, I might like law and order petty crime. That might be. It could be the best police procedural of all time. It really would depend on who is behind it.

But yeah, the, the, the whole system was already cheating people before Ronald Reagan started the welfare cream, like Queen thing, like 39 states were reported and this is the Associated Press in 1970 to be a legally denying poor people either due process or deserve relief benefits. And this is before Reagan even started on the campaign about welfare. So he's saying that the Queens are racking up 150 K and making it rain. When in actuality, people are being denied due process. They're being denied access to welfare.

These are white people too. And then they found that just 1% at the time of the annual budget that was allocated towards this was fraudulent. So 1%. That has got to be the most efficient thing happening in the government. Right. Like what? How can you make a whole thing up basically out of thin air if 1% of the entire budget

of, of everything that goes to social programs and welfare is fraudulent. And now you have everybody believing that all of these black folks are making, you know, three, four times their salary by sitting at home and making children. Which by the way, like that should be a well compensated job having and raising babies because my God, the work never stops. So is he saying essentially like, I know about this one lady and that means that this is a whole demographic of people and I'm going to stop them. He created that.

He created a whole trope and, you know, a fear. Which like how Donald Trump, at least Ronald Reagan found one real story and then decided to inflate it. Ronald versus Donald. Yeah. It's a real Goofus and Gallant situation. Ronald versus Donald. It's like D versus F students.

Right. He shushed it up a little bit. You know, make sure his name was at the top of the paper and the correct date. You know, he gave the girls a little effort. Yeah. You're like, look at that. You kind of tried to trick me. That's nice.

You don't think I am a complete fucking idiot. Right. I was just like, well, you know, the Mexicans, they're rapists and it's like, where are these? Do you have any facts, sir? No, you just. This term paper is a Domino's menu. Right. Right.

So again, it's like, well, Ronald Reagan at least had like this one person who existed and whose crimes he vastly exaggerated, but she was a real person. And then you're like, well, that's not better. The intent is the same and the intent is equally horrible both times. Exactly. And also in the seventies, like nobody had Google, like nobody could really go look up the facts. So that was a time where, you know, the news had a lot more credibility.

Politicians could really just be saying anything. I feel like we'll never get back to what news anchors used to be to America where it was just like, you just had to watch these people say what was happening in the world or you wouldn't know. It's incredible. And now the news has so many competing resources for people or rather like competitors to give the news. So you have Twitter, you have people with camera phones everywhere so people can provide

videos and evidence of things before the news even gets their hands on it. I see the thirsty ass news under people's viral tweets all the time like, Hey, do you mind if ABC seven can use this content? We will credit you. Right. That's happened to me. You take like a picture of a lake and then they're like, Hey, and you're like, calm down. This you're a TV show or whatever.

Hey, it's us. C-span. Do you mind? You're like thirsty to get the leads like at your own video, C-span, please you're like C-span, have some dignity. When Ronald Reagan became governor, California's welfare system was in such bad shape that the only hope seemed to be a federal takeover. When he left office, 340,000 fewer people were on welfare, benefits were 43% higher

and the system was a model for 11 other states. In California, the answer to the welfare problem wasn't more power for Washington. It was less. The closer programs are brought to the people, the better they'll work. It's time we had a president who knows how to make this happen. Linda Taylor was a real human being who actually had a really hard life. Yeah. Tell me about her.

When you know about her life, it makes it make a lot more sense. She was a scam artist, which I love. She cheated the system quite prolifically. Obviously, she had made up a lot of fake aliases and names. By the time she was 22, she had eight fake names. She was apparently a kidnapper and written books about her life suggest that she might have committed a murder or two. We don't know.

She was never caught for them. But Linda Taylor was a parable. She wasn't this huge figure that Ronald Reagan made her out to be. She was born from a poor family. Her mother was white. Her father was black. So Linda Taylor was born in 1926 and her name was Martha Louise White. So Linda Taylor is not even that was just a name that really blew up.

That was like her best choice. Yeah. That was her stage name. So her father was black. Her mom was white. Obviously, at this time, that was illegal. Right. Illegal for like the next 40 years, right?

Like, wow. Yeah. Because it's only been legal for 55 years. Loving versus Virginia was in 1967. So if you think about it, like 55 years, bro, there's not that much time. Right. Like my mom was in college. That's the part that makes it feel most recent to me because my mom and I are very close.

There's stories about her being in college that I've been hearing since I was a kid and I feel like I was there and it's like, I don't know, and it feels like we still live in that world, but it just has like some wrapping paper on it. Oh yeah. We absolutely still live in that world. Ruby Bridges was the first black child to desegregate a Louisiana school, elementary school and Ruby Bridges is 67 years old. Ruby Bridges has Instagram.

Can you imagine Ruby Bridges, TBT's? It's like if Moses had Instagram, it's like, it's like, hi, I'm one of the Israelites who wandered in the desert and this is my Instagram. TBT, me and the boys in the middle of the Red Sea, it's part of shout out to God. Right. It's not that long ago. Like posting make your own manna on Reels. Right.

Right. Oh my God. Yeah. It's not that long ago. That's what's wild is that people are always trying to be like, oh, these things haven't so long ago. They haven't. I'm like, no.

These people are alive, which means that segregation is very much a part of our lives. But yes, so she grew up to poor sharecropping family. She had her first child by 14. 14 is not an age for children. No. 14 is like an age for Twilight. Right. Which is a creepy book.

That's true too. You know what you ate seeing your boyfriend, 120. My mom the other day was like, how come every time I turn on NPR, they're unpacking something. I was like, you know, it's all we have now. Right. That's all we can do is just get the suitcase out and just try to unpack a little bit each day. All right.

So she has her first child when she's 14, which I believe is the age at which Oprah had a baby, which just it's that seems like a traumatic age to have a baby. That's what I think. Absolutely. Like being robbed of your childhood. And then back then they said things with this coloring. Like even when they talk about Sally Hemings, they'll always be like, Thomas Jefferson's lover.

And it's like, no, she was a child that he'd like targeted. Like what are you talking about? They didn't have a, it's not an affair. No lovers under 18. It's just a good rule. Don't try to dress that up. Don't try to put some gowns on that. Some beautiful gowns.

That was bad. So she around that time when she was 14, she had her first baby. She left home and she started trying to make her life. She moved to a neighborhood in Oakland, California with Sayi. She made attempts at formal employment, but she didn't have any education. She came from sharecroppers and then also racisms, you know, and she tried to use her white identity because she was obviously her mother was white and her father was black. So she was probably a fairer skinned person.

So she tried to use that identity to like pass as much as she could. But eventually she started perpetrating welfare fraud. She would show up to offices describing hardships she hadn't had, veterans she didn't know, children she had yet to bore. But they were coming. So, you know, whatever. They were all the way. I mean, look, women are born with all their children in us.

So technically. Right. That's a good point. She's not wrong. Yeah. It's a quantum. They're called eggs. They're each half a baby.

So you could at least get benefits for half of the number of eggs you have. I stand firm on that. That is half a baby. You're right. You're absolutely right. I mean, she committed welfare fraud a lot, but obviously not to the extent that Ronald Reagan was saying that she did. Because that would be a boring story.

They're like, we have one woman who did a small petty crime. And that's not going to get the girls going, but that was Linda. That whole thing still endures today. Like you still kind of associate welfare with black and brown people, even though the greater percentage 37% of and that's 37% of 76% of the population, you know, the greater percentage of people on welfare and government assistance are white. And also like, my God, is it hard to get by these days? I mean, I'm curious about sort of what has happened to this idea since Reagan put it

to good use. So like, does the phrase welfare queen still appear because I wouldn't be surprised if politicians are using it in speeches today. It's not really an age of subtlety. Don't I don't hear it as often. I will say the same sentiment though. It's most, you know, just like other dog whistles, how we go from, you know, one overtly racist thing to something more subtle.

How we went from, you know, the inward to thugs, you know, you'll see thugs being written a lot about black and brown people, especially if they're the victim of police brutality instead of or no angel if you want to be really classy or, you know, even the subtlety of if there's a mass shooting, you know, we're going to see a photo of a young white boy, you know, playing croquette. We see a picture of a white man who murdered his family. That famous meme. He's gonna be on a jet ski with the family that he murdered.

And that's the photo they're going to use. Or he'll be graduating probably. He's like on its way to a bright future. But if you see like a black person who's gunned down, then we're going to see the most ratchet photo they can find or even just you look at menacing or they'll darken even the O.J. Simpson trial. Right. Listen, the evidence is there in child, so I'm not even going to happen to that.

You know, I concur and it's not just because he wrote, I did it in his own blood at his ex-wife's house or anything. Right. I'm not going to say everybody's innocent when the racism happens to them, but it's still going to happen regardless of if you're innocent or not. There was a magazine cover with O.J. where they darkened his skin on purpose to make him look more guilty. I mean, he was guilty.

We didn't even need all that. We had evidence, but you know, they're going to do that to you regardless if you're not white. So I think that those things still exist. And it's the same way with affirmative action, when in reality affirmative action, the number one, the number one minority that benefits the most from affirmative action is white women. And when you hear about affirmative action, it is Tyrone got the promotion.

Damn, Tyrone. It's never like and so a new day dawns for Debbie. It's like a writer's room and they're like, oh, Craig, you're so lucky you're black. It's so hard for me to get a job as a writer now because, you know, like nobody wants to hire white guys. And it's like, this industry is predominantly white men. What are you talking about? It's like, you can't be like the one black person who managed to get in the room stole

your job. Like, go beat the other white people in the room. Right. Because I'll get on Twitter and I'll see people like defending billionaires, people who I know, like I'll go to their profile. Sometimes I'll go to their LinkedIn. I'll do a deep dive on random people on Twitter sometimes because it's fun for me. And I'll go and look and look them up and I'm like, OK, I know they don't make that

much money, but then I'm watching them on Twitter and they're like, see, that's the thing is like billionaires. They're not buying chains. They're not buying all of the stuff to show their wealth. They invest their money in stocks and they do this, this and that. And I'm thinking like, how do you know what they do? You don't know what they do and why are you defending them? They are hoarding resources that you so desperately need.

David one, five, two, seven, three, nine, four. And do you think that that's like identifying as a future billionaire, like a sense of identification with people you have nothing to do with? That's the American scam. The White Picket Fence is the longest enduring American scam that there is. And the reason that the welfare queen, you know, notion thrived for so long and the reason that, you know, build the wall and all of our new versions of these coded racial, you know, white panic things they endure and they last

because the American dream is rich people who were born rich, who had way more access to resources and things that you couldn't even imagine telling you that if you break your back and work hard enough, you will be just as rich and affluent as them. And of course, you can cherry pick a number of stories where people, you know, people love to be like Steve Jobs. He started it in his garage or rather Bill Gates. He started it in this garage.

You know, like they love to show like a rags to riches moment, but they don't want to show. OK, so what kind of collateral situation was Bill working with? Who are his parents? Where, you know, when did he grow up? He dropped out of college. How did he get to college? Who was paying for the car?

You know what I mean? Like no one wants to show the steps and the privilege that are involved in making that money. They just want to show like you can have nothing and then make something out of nothing in America. Right. Also, like we just we love stories where people make a lot of money. Like I think the Elizabeth Holmes story is a great example of this. Love Elizabeth there knows where, you know, the system is so scammy

that I feel like she was scammier than everyone else. But like not apparently by that much. And the whole thing where she got so famous without a viable product. And it's like, what did she make? Why do we care? And it's like she made a lot of money. It's very exciting. She made the tiny thing. And that's why I'm always like, I don't understand why the poor people why poor people in this country and people who are disadvantaged,

why we can't all link up together and do what they don't want us to do. Right. Instead, they keep us divided because you're thinking one day maybe you'll be a billionaire. So you have to protect the billionaire class because one day you're going to be up there and you're going to need that. And it's like, no, girl, you're not going to be a billionaire. Do you know the statistics of you being a billionaire? You're more likely to get hit by three buses concurrently.

Right. No, it's it's so funny. It's and it's funny, too, because like people want to be celebrities, but they're not empathetic towards stars. So I don't know, do with that. What you well, what happened to Linda? So Linda. So obviously, the welfare clean trope became a way to demonize black women as if we needed more ways to be demonized.

Good Lord. Taylor is such a phantom that even her race is a matter of debate, which obviously she had a mixed race parentage. She was listed as white on the 1930 census, white and Mexican on the 1945 arrest report and Hawaiian in a 1946 arrest. So even her race started to become debatable. But from what we know, her mother was white and her father was a black person. She spent most of her life changing her race, along with her name and no matter her background, Taylor did monstrous things while she was alive.

She did. Now, look, I'm not saying Taylor is a good person. I'm not saying Linda Taylor is somebody we should be looking up to. I'm just saying that she is one person who does not represent an entire race of people or an entire class of people. She was a victim of many things, including racism, family, cruelty, possibly mental illness, but, you know, she's one person. So Linda Taylor or whatever her name really was, she died in 2002 in a care facility near Chicago.

She died in 2002. Long life. So like she was about 75, 76, a lot of scams. I'm glad she got a care facility at the end. Seems like she got some some creature comforts. But yeah, she did crime. Basically, that was her whole career, which for a lot of people it is. So there's an episode of you're wrong about that. I think we did like three years ago called Gary Hart,

but it's really about the whole 1988 presidential election. And it occurs to me that in 1980, because if the welfare queen is kind of what Reagan is using to whip up Americans and learn how to sell his position to voters and the lead up to the White House, then we can give the 1980 election to her. And then in 1988, we had famously Bush with the Willie Horton ad, where he essentially was able to clinch the election. Partly with the help of doing an ad that encouraged voters to be terrified

of Dukakis being soft on crime and therefore allowing black criminals to come do crime. So, I mean, two elections, one by two individuals. It's very impressive, really. Right, truly. Clinton actually also closed up the welfare situation. He brought the accessibility to welfare down a lot, which was not necessarily good. I think it was like 75 percent of people were eligible.

And then by the time Clinton's administration was done, it was like in the third. Oh, wow. Yeah, it dropped. He did a lot for welfare reform. It does make sense to me that fear is a very strong emotion. And if you can hit on the best fear to animate your constituents, then you can get them to ignore the fact that you're screwing them the entire time. But like, I feel like the Obama campaign is the only example I can think of

of trying to get people to feel a positive emotion and vote for that race. It was like vote for vibes. And we're like, yeah, we want vibes. Vote for joy as opposed to voting for fear. It was an interesting choice. That was a fun time to go to the polls. Whereas I feel like with Joe Biden, it was like that we were back to fear. We're like, no more of the scary orange man.

I'm so cold. I've never seen my hands shaking a voting booth. Like I was double triple checking. I was like, make sure I hit all the OK. All right, like I don't vote for this. And you're like, what if the whole country comes down to one vote and it was me and I accidentally voted for Trump? It could happen. Weirder things have happened this year.

Listen. Fear has been a very strong motivator to get people to the polls for a long time. And obviously it will continue to be. And the welfare queen was someone who worked out for Reagan, you know? He tried it once and the girls went up. They started gasping and he said, this is going to be my thing. Wow. Yeah. It's funny because I blame the politician, but I also blame the voters.

It's like, well, God, that worked for you guys. Right. It makes me sad for the voters, honestly, because there's so much that needs to be improved upon in this country. There's so many things we need when it comes to our unhoused people, health care. I saw a tweet like yesterday that I wish I remember who tweeted it, but it was like it's actually very predatory that we force children to legally attend school, but then make them pay for their own lunches. I mean, this feels like it connects to the power of the welfare queen idea

where like that wouldn't work on people if at least Reagan's potential constituents didn't have a massive complex about the idea of paying their own way. You know, there are societies that seem to be functioning arguably better than ours, where if you have a baby, you don't have to like pay potentially tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of having a baby. Yeah, AGS, a baby running eight stacks, easy. When it comes to the resources that our tax dollars go to,

it's only when it's targeted against the individual, like you were saying in these different campaigns where an individual or a idea of an individual or several individuals basically grifting you or taking your tax dollars or benefiting off of your hard work. When they, you know, in this imaginary space have not worked at all. It's only then that people are like, Oh, well, I don't want to give my money to that or I want to vote against that. Whereas traffic lights, roads, infrastructure,

all of these things come from our tax dollars. This is all of us pooling our resources. The daddy government shakes down from us every year so that we can have these shared resources. And I've never seen people like, Oh, don't stop at that red. How much money are you making? Like, you know what I mean? Nobody's like, you can't drive on this road.

You didn't pay for that stoplight, right? I love that. Nobody seems to care when it's up that they can visibly see us for the greater good. But when it comes to things like education or housing people or, you know, making sure that the the wealth gap is not how it is, then we think that other people are being lazy and that all of our hard earned money is not benefit of society when it's like you're going to pay for that. Anyway, people go to the hospital and they can't afford to pay their hospital bill.

Guess who pays for that? You you're already paying for socialism. You're just begrudgingly doing it in a way that harms so much of our society. It benefits us to educate people. It benefits us to, you know, have people be contributing members of society and not like their only way out is crime. All of these things benefit you when we're helping society. But we all look at it when it comes to the individual is like, I work so hard

and you're not working as hard as me. You don't deserve to have a share of. But it's like, what are you talking about? Like the government at one point spent nine hundred million dollars on trying to see if they could make a tie, a triangle tire on a tank. Like they wanted to make a tire. I swear to God, look it up. They want to make a circular tire turn into a triangle

so that it could go over rougher terrain. We are literally blowing money on reinventing the wheel. No. What? I feel like this all connects to the fact that we're so obsessed with the idea that work is what makes us valuable. The idea of work is a form of worthiness feels so connected to this American idea that like

like work is what makes us good. And also as long as I'm working, I can't die. And what is your dream job? But I don't dream about labor and I think that covid for, you know, all the horrible things that it did to our society. One of the great things was is a lot of people, not all people, because a lot of people were essential, had the opportunity to disconnect from the hamster wheel

and realize that the world does not stop if you don't make that deadline. The world did not stop because you couldn't go into the office. And then it was like, wait a minute, grass is outside. And oh, I'm going to take a walk. And who I am is not tethered to what I produce. And that is what our country has taught us. And that's why the Welfare Queen works so well is because if someone is not producing something,

then they have no value. Right. And so it's like, OK, well, if these valueless people have welfare, then that means welfare is bad because they're not working. They're lazy. And if we say all of these things, we can suddenly separate the fact that whiteness is the number one factor to black death, suffering, pain, trauma, incarceration.

It is whiteness. And so if we can blame them in some way, then we can absolve ourselves from the guilt of the sins of our forefathers and the complicity that we have today. And I get it. I get if you're a white person, you're like, that's a lot to take on because as a black person, you know how hard it is to take on the trauma of just being a black human being every day. So I can imagine that on the other side of that, there is this onslaught of guilt of like, how do we get away from this?

And it's how do you get away from guilt? You blame the victim. I hope that we can get to a point as a society and I think it'll take forever. Maybe we'll never come where the value of who we are as human beings is not tied to what we do to make a living or put a roof over our heads. We're obsessed with labor and we love to demean labor. And the classic terrible outcome is like pay attention in class

or you'll be flipping burgers for a living. And it's like, you know, and also that's code for like, you're going to have to work in a minimum wage shop where your employer will abuse you and pay you as little as is humanly possible and that will suck for you. So like we're not actually talking about the flipping of the burger. We're talking about the idea of being part of a laboring class that is going to be abused for ever and ever.

Instead of thinking about why is it that we allow people to abuse the laboring class? Everyone's talking about the great resignation when in reality is that people don't want to work for scraps and be, you know, work to death for nothing. Right. And Simon, with the welfare queen herself, she has long complicated life. Lots of deeds aside from the welfare scamming, because focusing on the welfare scamming, I guess to me, maybe the reveal here is like, who cares? Who cares if some woman somewhere once in Chicago scammed welfare? And like, it seems like this is a distraction from the real crime,

which is welfare scamming everybody else. Absolutely. And also just to piggyback off of that, I'll take it one step higher. And this is news. I might lose all of you. The welfare queen, Linda Taylor, was working. Scamming is a job. Yes. It is an employment. It is a profession. Bernie Madoff was a whole career criminal. Charles Ponzi walked so Bernie Madoff could fly in the PJ. OK. And do you think that man was not working every single day of his life?

Yeah, he was doing crime. It was still a job. Linda had to show up to the offices, had to get there early, because you know, they open early and they close early to get there. What is her new alias coming up with creative new names, ethnicities, identities, new social security, you know, like, it's not like she could just walk in there and be like, give me money. She had to do some work for it. And she only got eight thousand dollars.

Right. The amount of labor that goes into each dollar seems significant. And it's a job, just like there are other jobs. Essential to the welfare queen image is like she looks good, right? Like her hair looks nice. She has a fur coat on maybe. She's got a nice car. She's got nice nails like she's fully taken care of herself. Isn't that just self care?

Absolutely. And hopefully this is one thing that can be undone. Welfare is not negative. It's not bad. You know, a lot of college students use it to get by a lot of people with families who come upon hard times. I hope at least the pandemic has taught us all that there's unforeseeable circumstances that can happen to anybody for any reason, no matter how hard you plan. That might have you reliant upon the system that we created

that is supposed to be here to uplift us when these circumstances arise. So hopefully people can start looking at welfare and government assistance as a way of society bettering itself and giving everybody a leg up and an opportunity rather than something that's shameful or derogatory. It feels almost like like Reagan pointing the finger at someone who is doing something else that was in the scheme of things totally reasonable. Like this person went to a hospital and got $100,000 worth of medical care.

And it's like, well, they were sick, so I don't know what you expect to happen. Like that if we stigmatize something completely natural, then yeah, I can just help poison the culture against people actually getting what they need to live healthy lives. And yeah, like it shouldn't be radical to say that people deserve to be fed and have a nice, safe, pretty place to live and to put on a nice outfit when they're not working. Right. People deserve to be happy.

And if we continue to condemn the social programs and the things that can help create a better society, all we're doing is allowing for scammers and rich people with way more resources to exploit those industries. Just like you just mentioned, health care. If you get a hospital bill and you have insurance or whether you do or not, read that hospital bill, call the girls back, start asking about some of those charges and watch that bill shrink.

Because if they expect you not to look at it, they expect you just to build the insurance company. So they put all types of bandaid fees, cotton swab fees, all types of little fees on your health care bills, assuming that you're not going to go through it with a fine tooth comb. And if you do, I promise you those medical bills shrink. It makes everyone's life better when we improve the quality of living of the most disenfranchised people in our country and on the planet.

Hmm. It's hard to see that sometimes because we're in such a scarcity mindset. And I feel like we have this idea of like, what if I extend kindness or what if I extend empathy to someone who, you know, doesn't deserve it or they're bad or something? And it's like, well, it's just it doesn't matter. It's free to give because you just have an endless supply of it. And it's you're just going to immediately refill with more.

It's going to be great. I like that. This was so wonderful. I feel like I feel full of optimism for some reason. It's nice. Where can people find more of you? Where can they find your work? Oh, guys, if you like scams and you're interested in them, scam goddess pod, wherever you get your podcast,

if you want to see my tweets and nonsense, DIVA, LACI, DVALACI on all platforms and Instagram. If you want to see me on TV, Black Lady Sketch Show, Keenan, episode four. I, Carly, first seasons out on Paramount Plus, and we just finished the second season. Don't know when it's coming out yet, but 2022. That's awesome. Just be everywhere, just be in all of the media.

And I that's what I want to see. And that was Lacey Mosley. Thank you so much, Lacey. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, producer and editor extraordinaire. We have bonus episodes for you over on Patreon. You can go get a membership or go buy a candy bar, whatever you want to do with that amount of money.

See you in two weeks.