Snoop Dogg wore his Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr. hat during his keynote speech at SXSW in Austin. “When Reaganomics kicked in, certain things were taken away,” says the 43-year-old rapper about former President Ronald W. Reagan, the 40th POTUS (1981–89), who also served as the 33rd Governor of California (1967–75) before his presidency.
He faults Reagan for gang violence in East LA in 1980s – for drugs and guns showing up in the neighborhood.
“When Reaganomics kicked in, certain things were taken away, after-school programs and things of that nature. Guns and drugs were shipped into the neighborhood. So it was a shift of having fun and playing football to selling drugs and shooting at each other. To me it was a system that was designed, because when the Reaganomics era began, that’s when this began,” he describes life after a successful decade, in the 1970s, when “everything was beautiful because we had ways to have fun and communicate, and those who were underprivileged, the low economic side of life, the government would provide for us, which helped us get by. It was a society and we all needed it and we all had it and we all helped each other.”
