 Alright folks, we're going to talk about Dennis Prager and before we get started, I want to preface this conversation by saying that there is two things that every single American needs to know about Dennis Prager. He's stupid and rich. He's a rich idiot. Now you might think, how are those facts if you're just insulting his intelligence? Isn't that an ad-hobbinom attack? Well no, I would argue that calling Dennis Prager stupid is actually a statement of fact considering this is someone who just a couple of weeks ago admitted that he purposefully tried to get infected with COVID-19, also he can get immunity from the virus that you can get immune from by just taking a vaccine that is incredibly safe and widely available. Somebody who does that, somebody who tries to get infected with a deadly virus at his age is a few fries short of a happy meal if you ask me. But I want to talk about the latest stupid thing that he said because he's back on this anti-vax kick. I mean, he is refusing to get the vaccine and hence why he got the virus because he wanted immunity. Anyways, he's refusing to get the vaccine and he's going to say something about anti-vaxxers and it really proves that conservatives really want to be victims. They want to be perceived as these marginalized groups in society or as marginalized as if not more marginalized than historically marginalized groups in society. And he's going to compare anti-vaxxers to one historically marginalized community, but he's going to take it even further than that. Take a look and then we'll dissect what he has to say when we come back. No, what she found funny was that she doesn't have a magic wand, but somebody in her party has a magic wand. The reason we're paying so much is because the magic wand of the Democratic president was to destroy the energy independence of the United States of America. With one magic wand, the man ruined our economy, ruined the ability of the lower and middle class to pay their energy bills. As in Germany, by the way, this is not just unique to the United States. Anywhere that you have people who are governed by fear of global warming, an idiotic irrational sick fear of extinction of the biosphere, I mean, do you understand the nonsense that we live with? If we survive this as a free country, historians will just ask, how did this happen? How did people get governed by irrational fears, whether it is of the non-vaccinated, who are the pariahs of America, as I have not seen in my lifetime, any pariah group like this? During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users were the vast majority of people with AIDS, had they been a pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are, but it would have been inconceivable, and it should have been inconceivable. They should not have been made pariahs, but this is kosher. This is OK. You can make the non-vaccinated. So it's a different America. OK, lots to unpack there. So the first thing that I want to talk about before we get to his comments on the AIDS crisis is that he claims that if you believe in climate change, like the overwhelming majority of sane people and scientists, then you have an idiotic, irrational sick fear. Now, it's weird that he says that as a conservative, because the totality of conservative politics is to be irrationally fearful of things. Be fearful of the unknown. Be fearful of marginalized groups. Be fearful of immigrants. Be fearful of societal changes. That's conservatism. But yet he's saying that it's everyone else. It's liberals and leftists who are irrationally fearful and that that's sick. I mean, I think this is projection and it's already been confirmed through science, which he doesn't believe in, by the way, that conservatives are more fearful because there are differences between the brains of conservatives and liberals. At least there's evidence that that's the case. So a university college London study actually looked at MRI scans from liberals and conservatives, and they found that conservatives actually had increased right amygdala sizes, which kind of confirms that, yeah, you guys are the ones that are fearful. And it's no surprise that you're basing all of your politics on being fearful, but moving on from that, I just thought that that was incredibly stupid. But he compared anti-vaxxers to gays during the height of the AIDS crisis. Anti-vaxxers today are bigger pariahs than gays during the AIDS crisis. Now, for him to say something like that, which is just a historical, is bizarre considering the fact that he was alive during the AIDS crisis. But nonetheless, he says that can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users had they been pariahs the way non-vaccinated are? It would have been inconceivable. It would have been inconceivable. Were you living on a different planet during the AIDS crisis, Dennis? He also said that never in his lifetime has he seen a pariah group like the unvaccinated. It's got to be like a kink that conservatives want to be the victims. And I'm not here to king shame anyone, but he genuinely wants people to think that conservatives are the most hated marginalized group in society. And I don't really even know how to respond to what he's saying right off the bat. But just at face value, I think that Mary Ann Williams had had the best response and saying, my God, man, were you not there? Exactly. Now, there's not really a way to debunk what he's saying. It's just it's laughably stupid and you don't have to debunk it. But for those of you who were not alive during the AIDS crisis, I want to show a 1982 news clip. This is from NBC Nightly News where they were learning about HIV and AIDS. And they didn't really know what was happening. But they knew that this was a virus that was exclusively, almost exclusively affecting gay men. Take a look. Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. Robert Bazelle now in Atlanta. Bobby Campbell of San Francisco and Billy Walker of New York both suffer from a mysterious newly discovered disease, which affects mostly homosexual men, but has also been found in heterosexual men and women. The condition severely weakens the body's ability to fight disease. Many victims get a rare form of cancer called Kaposi sarcoma. Others get an infection known as pneumocystis pneumonia. Researchers know of 413 people who have contracted the condition in the past year. One third have died and none have been cured. Death didn't scare me, it was living with this for a long time. That's more frightening than death. Investigators have examined the habits of homosexuals for clues. I was in the fast lane at one time in terms of the way that I lived my life. And now I'm not. The best guess is that some infectious agent is causing it. Today, researchers here at the National Centers for Disease Control said they had found several cases where people who had been sex partners both had the condition. The scientists say this probably means they are dealing with some new deadly sexually transmitted disease. The investigators see this as a serious public health problem. From an epidemic point of view, there have been more deaths from Kaposi sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia than have occurred with all the cases of toxic shock syndrome and the Philadelphia outbreak of Legionnaires disease combined. Researchers are now studying blood and other samples from the victims trying to learn what is causing the disease. So far, they have had no luck. Robert Bazelle, NBC News, Atlanta. OK, now let's try to put all of this into context. So you see this news report and it's the early 1980s. You know that, you know, there was this Stonewall riot and there is a burgeoning LGBTQ plus movement in the United States. But you don't know anyone who's gay at this time. Many, if not most gay people weren't out of the closet because it just wasn't socially acceptable to come out to your friends and your family members. So you learn that, you know, not only are gay people this new thing that you've never heard of before, but on top of that, there's this gay plague of sorts. And this is happening at the same time when Ronald Reagan's moral majority emerged when there was this reactionary pushback against this growing LGBTQ plus movement. So all of this kind of combined and to say that gay people at this time weren't as big of pariahs as anti-vaxxers are today is just bad shit, fucking insane. And that's not taking into account the fact that the gay community, they saw sometimes more than a dozen of their friends die and they didn't know why this was happening. They didn't know why it was happening. So let me show you or tell you about the response that the government had to gay men back in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis. So as NBC News reports, after the Stonewall riots in 1969, LGBTQ activists across the country made significant civil rights advances and secured some municipal and state level protections against discrimination and public employment. Roughly two dozen states had decriminalized sodomy by 1980 and some activists were already talking about the next frontier, legal recognition for marriage, almost at the exact time that HIV cases first began to pop up in Los Angeles and New York. The LGBTQ rights struggle faced a reactionary backlash led by figures like Anita Bryant and Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose moral majority invade against giving rights to gay people. As the anti-gay reaction gained esteem across America with the election of moral majority ally Ronald Reagan, activists found their demands for attention for a growing medical crisis were ignored. The march for LGBTQ civil rights ground to a halt after more than a dozen states repealed sodomy bans in the 1970s, just two jurisdictions, Wisconsin and the Virgin Islands decriminalized sodomy in the 1980s. In 1982, Larry Speaks, press secretary for Ronald Reagan, laughed when asked about whether the president was tracking the spread of AIDS. It's known as gay plague, the journalist asked. Some people in the room chuckled, I don't have it. Do you speak snapped back as the room erupted in laughter? Do you? You didn't answer my question. How do you know? In other words, they're gay. We don't care. Let them die. That was the response from the government. Now, compare that with COVID-19 today or in 2020. And what was the response? The government poured billions of dollars into the development of a vaccine. And even in America, a late stage capitalist hellhole, the vaccine is free. It's actually free. Everyone can take it and it's widely available. Back then, they didn't care. But at least the government acknowledges that this pandemic is bad and they're taking action to stop the pandemic. They're trying to save lives. In fact, the vaccine itself has already saved nearly 300,000 lives, according to an estimate by the Yale School of Public Health, and it prevented more than a million hospitalizations. So in effect, the response today to anti-vaxxers by the government is, hey, please take this vaccine, it'll save your life. Whereas in the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, the response from the government to gay people was, don't really care if you die, go away. We don't like you. We don't want you here. A little bit different. Don't you think Dennis Prager? But he knows this, he knows this. And being hyperbolic is how he gets people to pay attention. In a way, we're kind of feeding into what he wants, right? He wants the eyeballs on him. This is someone who is incredibly stupid. He's reactionary and he just likes attention. Any attention, even if it's negative, is good for him. It raises his profile. But I think that to say that anti-vaxxers are bigger pariahs than gay men during the height of the AIDS crisis. There's something uniquely stupid and offensive and evil about that, quite frankly, because there is no comparison. There really is no comparison. Anti-vaxxers today, their lives are mildly inconvenient. If you work at a job that has a vaccine mandate, well, you can either test usually weekly or you can get a vaccine, which is safe and effective. But back then people were begging the government to pay attention to the AIDS crisis and the government just did not care because the government did not like gay people. Back then it was a fight to get sodomy decriminalized. So it's a little bit different. And I think that the history here is important because when a conservative reactionary says something that's a historical, I think it is important to correct the record, especially if you're younger and you don't really know about the history, but no, long story short, it's a little bit different the way that we treat anti-vaxxers today and the way that we treated gay people during the AIDS crisis. We might make fun of anti-vaxxers today and say that they need to educate themselves with actual science and data and their lives might be somewhat inconvenient because of their own stupidity, but we're not leaving them to die. We're not celebrating their deaths and pushing them away. As was the case in the 1980s. See, back in the 80s, many people didn't know a gay person. We all know someone who's anti-vaxxer. I know anti-vaxxers. I have them in my family in my social circle. I don't want them to die. The reason why I push the vaccine on them is because I want their lives to be saved. It's a bit of a difference. See, the compassion here is there, whereas it was lacking before. But yeah, if you didn't know, now you know.