By Michael Reagan
ItÂ’s been a rough week for conservatives, Republicans and all Americans.
The torture started Sunday evening with the Academy Awards ceremony, which sounded like it was produced by the AOC/Stacey Abrams wing of the Democrat Party.
I say “sounded,” because I didn’t actually waste three hours of my life watching Hollywood millionaires patting themselves on their backs for their awesome talents and even more awesome woke politics.
As IÂ’ve done in past years, I waited for the media highlight reels to find out who won what and which stars made the biggest fools of themselves.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to skip the latest episode of “Oscars Death Spiral.”
Fewer than 10 million Americans watched – the fewest ever and a far cry from 43 million viewers in 2014.
One of the big deals this year was that Chloe Zhao, a Chinese-born filmmaker, won the Best Director award for “Nomadland.”
What made it a such big deal, at least according to those who are fixated on race, was that Zhao was the first female person of color to win for directing.
“Person of color”? Really? I didn’t realize Chinese people have been officially designated as persons of color.
The hardcore movie masochists who watched the Oscars to the bitter end were shocked when Chadwick Boseman didnÂ’t win for Best Actor.
The great actor who last fall tragically lost his battle with colon cancer at age 45 was expected to win for his secondary role in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
Instead, Anthony Hopkins – an old male person of the white color – won for playing the demented patriarch in “The Father.”
Hopkins was the right choice.
But apparently everyone in La-La Land had figured the fix was in for Boseman, the sympathetic choice, and his loss raised a few new charges of institutional racism in Hollywood.
Of course, if there were racists to blame, they were among the 9,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Speaking of phony theatrics and leftwing virtue signaling, on Wednesday night I watched President Biden give his speech to about 200 vaccinated, socially distanced and unnecessarily masked Congress-persons in the nearly empty Capitol.
I admit I didnÂ’t last more than 45 minutes.
But whoever wrote the speech should be investigated by the Justice Department for theft of political property rights.
I swear President Biden – aka, FDR 2.0 – repeated every Democratic cliche, promise, platitude and excuse for more spending, more taxing and more Big Government programs that IÂ’ve heard in the last 60 years.
He droned on and on, taking credit for winning the war on COVID, absurdly calling the Jan. 6 “insurrection” the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” and reciting the Bernie Sanders’ socialist playbook without any of Bernie’s passion or intensity.
His speech was almost as embarrassing as the masks that were plastered on the faces of Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi sitting behind him.
At times Biden raised his voice or whispered at us as if he was AmericaÂ’s grandmother in chief and we were all six-year-olds who believe the Democrat fairy-tale that federal money grows on trees.
He acted like we couldnÂ’t survive to adulthood without the free government goodies that he and his progressive allies in Congress were going to dish out.
Trillions for families. Trillions for infrastructure and schools and federal freebies for all.
Free pre-K … free college … free elder care… free Instant Pots and Netflix subscriptions.
Make the rich pay their fair share. Make corporations pay higher taxes. Raise the national minimum wage to $15…
I stopped watching long before Biden started boasting how tough he was going to be on Putin and China. But my son Cameron bravely hung in there for the entire 6,000-word ordeal.
By the time the president finished listing all the things he was going to have Big Government do for ,Â’ and to ,Â’ us to make America more like Europe, the only thing Cameron said he learned was that Biden would have supported Britain in the Revolutionary War.
So true, so true.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Staff Report 