Blood Libel: The Left and Gay Mafia Lies about Ronald Reagan and AIDS

NRO: Reagan Did Act on AIDS

Good for NRO to address this.  I have been hearing this lie repeated again and again by idiots on the left for years. I remember when the AIDS crisis started and Ronald Reagan was not the cause of it and did act to stop it. To blame Reagan for not acting fast enough in response to HIV/AIDS a complete and utter despicable lie.

Correcting the record on Reagan and AIDS:

For the record, Reagan first mentioned AIDS, in response to a question at a press conference, on Sept. 17, 1985. On Feb. 5, 1986, he made a surprise visit to the Department of Health and Human Services where he said, “One of our highest public health priorities is going to be continuing to find a cure for AIDS.” He also announced that he’d tasked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to prepare a major report on the disease. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Reagan dragged Koop into AIDS policy, not the other way around. 

As for Waxman’s recollections about AIDS funding, he does an unusual thing for a politician: He’s forgotten the success he and other Democrats had in convincing Reagan to spend more money. The administration increased AIDS funding requests from $8 million in 1982 to $26.5 million in 1983, which Congress bumped to $44 million, a number that doubled every year thereafter during Reagan’s presidency. 

Finally, the claim that Reagan spoke about AIDS sufferers with “disdain” is simply a smear. Nothing like that ever happened, except maybe in the fictional “The Reagans” miniseries in which Barbra Streisand’s husband played Reagan as a bigot and rube.
In real life—that is to say in 1983, early in the AIDS crisis—HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler (accompanied by New York City Mayor Ed Koch, another Larry Kramer target), went to the hospital bedside of a 40-year-old AIDS patient named Peter Justice. Heckler, a devout Catholic, held the dying man’s hand, both out of compassion and to allay fears about how the disease was spread. 

“We ought to be comforting the sick,” said Ronald Reagan’s top-ranking health official, “rather than afflicting them and making them a class of outcasts.” 

“I’m delighted she’s here,” Justice said. “I’m delighted she cares.”

Hillary Clinton actually spoke the truth about this (imagine that) until the leftist Gay Mafia went nuts.  

Ronald Reagan was the scapegoat for many on the left for the AIDS crisis. AIDS was the price of promiscuity.   Robert Heinlein's TANSTAAFL applies to this to: There aint no such thing as a free lunch or free love. When public health officials tried to close gay bathhouses and sex clubs and promote safe sex practices, they were accused of homophobia.

AIDS is now a serious but cronic condition (at least in most of the West).  But we are seeing the denial all over again with opioid drug addiction. Drug overdoses kill more people now than automobile accidents, guns, AIDS at its peak.

Real Clear Politics: Correcting the record on Ronald Reagan and AIDS

Patty Davis on Ronald Reagan

Instapundit: Meanwhile Leftist trolls call for white genocide

TOM: Right To Your Money?, Cancel the Post Holiday Party! (for the Gay Mafia it's Mourning In America) and Queer Feminism vs. the Fragile Male Ego