In the middle of October, right-wing radio host Dennis Prager told his audience that he had contracted COVID-19. He told his audience that he had purposely “engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting COVID. Which is, indeed, as bizarre as it sounded, what I wanted, in the hope I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics. That is exactly what has happened.” It was a special kind of madness that only Prager could generate.

Prager, like all ultra right-wingers, has been on the bleeding edge of profound misinformation, promoting an anti-flatten-the-coronavirus-curve model of living over during the pandemic. This is the same Prager who told women during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to just get over sexual harassment and assault. On Monday, video of Prager being interviewed on the Chris Salcedo show, ostensibly to carry oil for his billionaire fracking backers, drew what can only be called one of the most offensive comparisons concerning unvaccinated Americans and the LGBTQ community during the HIV/AIDS crises in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Prager began by reversing reality, explaining that Democratic policies and a culture of climate change fear have led to middle class and lower class folks not being able to afford energy costs. To unwrap this 100% fabricated line of thinking is to leave the real world we all live in. Needless to say, Prager’s basic tapestry is one of fearmongering by liberal elites, making everyone afraid of fossil fuels and big fossil fuel company monopolies. It is the same as Trump, the same as most Republican officials these days: all projections of GOP fearmongering about Big Bird and critical race theory and Dr. Seuss, etc. 

However, Prager wants to connect the fossil fuel energy—the one that recently brought you a wintertime disaster in Texas—to public health measures during the time of COVID-19. Transitioning by calling climate change an “irrational fear” and saying that if our democracy “survived” the current onslaught against it by … Democrats (surprise twist!), historians would ask themselves, “How did people get governed by irrational fears?”

The only true thing he says in those few lines is that it “should have been inconceivable.” Every other single thing he says in revising the history of the AIDS crisis under then-president Ronald Reagan is a lie. It is not an opinion. It is factually incorrect.

Ronald Reagan deliberately chose to ignore the rising public health crisis, which he was aware of, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during his first year in office. His administration joked that it was the “gay plague” in its first White House press briefing. Reagan would not even acknowledge AIDS publicly until 1987, after nearly 41,000 Americans had died from the virus. Reagan was a piece of shit for many reasons, not the least of which was his deadly homophobic policy—or lack thereof—on the AIDS crisis in America.

Remember 14-year-old Ryan White, who likely contracted the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion and then had to fight as some parents and some teachers fought to keep him from being able to attend school in Kokomo, Indiana? He wasn’t even gay. He just had a virus that could only be transmitted through blood, and the same people who refuse to wear masks during a respiratory virus today treated him like a pariah. White’s fight for normalcy in his life put a “face” on the AIDS virus that Americans, because of homophobia and the stigmatization of drugs, had not been able to reconcile. Ryan died at the age of 18 in the spring of 1990.

Meanwhile, we can get in the wayback machine and travel to 2008, when Prager wrote a column for Townhall. On Nov. 25 of that year, probably just in time for Thanksgiving, Prager wrote this: “Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a ‘progressive’ end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America – science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research.” William F. Buckley Jr., a man who Prager likely had pictures of in his locker and above his bed, wrote this* in March of 1986 in The New York Times:

The Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Johnathan Demme Academy Award-winning film Philadelphia was literally the story of a real-life civil rights lawsuit about discrimination because of HIV and AIDS in the workplace.

Salcedo’s show is a perfect place for this kind of multiverse reading of a bizarro world history where gay men were treated like human beings during the first decades of the AIDS epidemic. His platform is the same one that has brought on former Fox News personalities to argue that Fox News brass should be jailed because they didn’t follow through with the big lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by massive voter fraud.

Part of what makes people like Prager dangerous is not that they are simply hateful ignoramuses. It is that people like Prager are bankrolled by hateful billionaires, allowing their drivel to be marketed up and out into the American public, with a patina of legitimacy that is meant to confuse issues and seed general right-wing propaganda. PragerU is Prager’s pretend university that is funded by fracking magnates Dan and Farris Wilks. Through Prager, they promote fossil fuel interests and whatever other alternate reality takes on the material world.

PragerU, a nonprofit, has reportedly been pushing itself into public schools by way of misinforming videos for years.

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Last fall, PragerU began its first massive initiative to concertedly push its content into schools. Known as “PREP,” the educational program already has over 6,000 educators and parents signed up. An annual donation of $25 gives users access to the program’s materials and a private Facebook group with over 1,400 members. Its website says that the media nonprofit launched the program “to give [educators and parents] the resources, support, and tools to teach their children about America’s blessings and limitless opportunities.”

Actor Jeffrey Wright gave a nice summation of Prager and his ilk’s views on the world and what they consider American history, writing:

Racism. Never existed.

Climate change.

Hogwash.

COVID. Just a flesh wound.

Vaccine. Doesn’t work.

Big Bird. Commie.

White genocide, JFK Jr & The Rapture. Coming soon.

*Buckley was suggesting this solution for a much more communicable virus like, say, COVID-19.