Hillary Clinton’s insulting AIDS revisionism: Why her praise of the Reagans feels like such a slap in the face
The Democratic frontrunner says Ronald and Nancy Reagan brought attention to the crisis. History says otherwise
TOPICS: HILLARY CLINTON, RONALD REAGAN, NANCY REAGAN, AIDS, HIV, AIDS CRISIS, HISTORY, DEM PRIMARY, ELECTIONS 2016, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Sometimes the mistakes Hillary Clinton makes are truly baffling. Take the colossal mistake she made on Friday when she said the following about the late Nancy Reagan and AIDS while appearing on MSNBC:
Hillary Clinton: The Reagans, particularly Nancy, helped start "a national conversation" about HIV and AIDS.
Said Clinton:
“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan, in particular Mrs. Reagan, we started a national conversation. When before, nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something that I really appreciate with her very effective low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience, and people began saying, ‘Hey, we have to do something about this too.'”
The mind reels. It is difficult to imagine a more historically inaccurate and insulting way to describe the Reagan approach to AIDS than what Hillary Clinton said.
She is right in one respect: It was indeed very difficult for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. A large part of the reason it was so difficult was because the Reagan administration essentially refused to acknowledge that the AIDS crisis was even happening until well after thousands of people had already died from the disease. Reagan’s silence on the issue is so well-documented that it’s hard to comprehend exactly what Hillary Clinton was thinking when she praised his handling of the crisis. But since she apparently needs a reminder of the basics, let’s review some of them.
We could talk about the infamous, nauseatingly homophobic White House press briefing from October 1982, when Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes and a roomful of reporters literally laughed off a question about AIDS, with Speakes joking, “I don’t have it, do you?” Speakes added that he didn’t think the White House knew anything about AIDS, which was undoubtedly true.
We could talk about the fact that Reagan didn’t so much as utter the word “AIDS” until 1985, and didn’t give a speech about AIDS until 1987, by which point it had killed at least 40,000 people in the United States alone.
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