Tying together the Blacklist and the fraught circumstances surrounding the entertainment industry's labor unions in the 1945-50 time frame is a daunting task; they are mostly parallel tracks in a series of strange phenomena that quickly became tangled up together in a morass that affected too many lives of those who were not the "bad actors" in the situation. Himes' LONELY CRUSADE captures the some of the flavor of what was going on at the time from the labor perspective, which at times becomes almost as fraught as the entertainingly overblown scenes in THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 (originally entitled, of course, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST).

REAGAN the movie, from what I've read (haven't seen it, will wait for it to move from theaters to streaming...), is just barely about that time frame; its effort is mostly to venerate a man whose views on labor unions later "evolved" to the point where it is baffling to consider that he was once a leader of one. That seems to be the one of the key aspects of the movie that many critics writing about it see as a glossing over of some chinks in the armor of our 40th president.

More pertinent to us in the present-day, perhaps, is a more clear-eyed assessment of the policies imposed upon America by Reagan while in office, and how those dovetail with what is found in the latest blueprint for radical right-wing insurgency into the levers of government as manifested in Project 2025.

A recent op-ed essay in the Los Angeles Times does a succinct job of laying out those connections, while reminding us what happened when similar policies were implemented by the Reagan administration.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-08-25/project-2025-trump-heritage-foundation-election

Of course, whatever moral failings Reagan may had (still open to debate and discussion) are minuscule in comparison to the man who would amplify those 1980s policies into something far more damaging and catastrophic. But at this point it is not difficult to see Reagan's efforts as planting seeds (rather like those odd "pod people" that infiltrate unsuspecting bodies and minds in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS...) which clearly helped to spawn the precipitous situation in which we find ourselves as we enter the fall of 2024.