Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former-feminist-turned-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf are under fire after comparing the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis to the condemnation anti-vaxxers are now seeing during the coronavirus pandemic. On Monday they falsely claimed people who contracted HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s were not subjected to “moralizing,” despite the founder of the Moral Majority in 1983 declaring AIDS was “God’s punishment for homosexuals.”
“Sometimes there are medical crises – typhus, cholera, you know, AIDS, polio – but we don’t moralize it, we just get through it,” Wolf, an anti-vaxxer, said on the Fox Nation show “Tucker Carlson Today.”
“We should be going back to American values in which we are responsible for ourselves,” Wolf declared. And she lamented, “now it’s all about, like, ‘What are the infection rates? Who’s to blame? Are the red states to blame or the bikers to blame?'”
Before she was banned from Twitter, Wolf infamously “tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of ‘vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time’; that the Moderna vaccine is a ‘software platform’ that allows ‘uploads’; and that due to face masks, children now lack ‘the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back’ and have ‘dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen,'” according to Media Matters.
Carlson then began talking about the early ’80’s, when HIV/AIDS was first identified and President Ronald Reagan refused to address or even acknowledge the crisis – much less mobilize – the federal government to combat the disease, while most Americans shunned and discarded people with HIV/AIDS.
Carlson falsely claimed that in the ’80s no one was “blaming people who are dying,” calling it, “like, the ugliest thing you could do,” and then asked: “Why now?”
Wolf replied, “if you don’t moralize it, you can’t gain control over an entire free society,” suggesting that’s why those who have been vaccinated are so outraged at those who refuse to protect themselves and others and are causing the pandemic to rage on.
“I think the AIDS crisis, HIV crisis, is a perfect model of how different the expectations are now,” Wolf claimed, “because I remember that time.”
Many are expressing outrage: