Did President Ronald Reagan say "Keep voting Democrat ... one day they will restrict your freedoms, restrict your history and restrict your safety"? No, that's not true. There is no record of the 40th president of the United States ever making that statement, which has erroneously been attributed to him. Two officials from his presidential library confirmed that those words were not said by President Reagan.
The claim appeared as a meme in a post (archived here) shared on Facebook on July 17, 2020. The text at the bottom of a photo of Reagan meme read "It's 2020. Does what President Reagan said in 1987. Look familiar to you today?" Above that, was a purported quote by President Reagan:
Keep voting Democrat...one day they will restrict your freedoms, restrict your history and restrict your safety. All in the name of professional victims that don't understand the consequences of their ignorance." Ronald Regan, 1987
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Jul 30 17:45:58 2020 UTC)
A glaring error is Reagan is misspelled in the post as "Regan."
There is no evidence that Reagan ever said those words.
Melissa Giller, the chief marketing officer at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute since 2001, told USA TODAY:
I have access to a database where I can search all of President Reagan's quotes. I searched the quote multiple ways using phrases from the post, and there is absolutely zero records of him saying this. This is not a true quote."
Michael Pinckeny, an archivist at the Reagan Library, told Snopes.com that it's not a real quote from Reagan:
This quote states President Reagan said this in 1987. We have all his official speeches and I could not find this quote for that year or any other between 1981-89."
