Dennis Prager, a longtime far right wing columnist and radio talk show host on Monday falsely claimed gay men were never treated as “pariahs” during the height of the AIDS crisis, as he defended those who are refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 while insisting they are treated even worse than people living with HIV/AIDS.
After lying that President Joe Biden has “destroyed” the American economy, and falsely calling fear of global warming “irrational” and “sick,” Prager launched into what was actually a whitewashing of his own attacks on people living with HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS activists.
“During the AIDS crisis can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way that the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable and should have been inconceivable – they should not have been made pariahs but this is kosher this is okay. You can make the non-vaccinated” into pariahs, he declared on Newsmax. “It’s a different America.”
In 2007, and in 2014, as Media Matters detailed, Prager called heterosexual people contracting HIV a “myth.” He claimed that “heterosexual AIDS … has been entirely manufactured by the Left.”
In 2016 Prager continued his attacks on HIV/AIDS activists, as Right Wing Watch reported:
“The left has a monopoly, almost a monopoly, on hysteria,” he said. “And I will just give you a few examples of the hysterias of your lifetime. One was heterosexual AIDs in America. Do you remember that? when we were told by Time and Newsweek and The New York Times, remember when they said AIDS doesn’t discriminate? Well, that was a lie. AIDS does discriminate. It happens to attack in America—and I emphasize in America— overwhelmingly, gay men and intravenous drug users and his partners. You know the group least likely to get AIDS? Gay women. So it can’t be homophobic to say the truth.”
“Heterosexual AIDS in America was a hysteria,” he declared.