Reagan was elected in 1980, around the same time that HIV began spreading and turning into a pandemic. Nearly 60,000 cases were reported with more than 27,000 dead before he even mentioned the disease in a major speech, during his second term.
His administration spent years pushing back on requests for funding for treatment and research. It’s impossible to know for certain, but if the disease had been aggressively studied and treated in the early years it might have been contained to a few hundred or few thousand deaths here in the USA.
Also he cut funds for mental health treatment and facilities, turning disabled people out onto the streets, the War on Drugs was cranked up to inner-city warfare, and the fundamentalist Christian “Moral Majority” that was his power base happily watched queers and black people and sex workers and homeless people die alone and scared.
Until Donald Trump was elected, he was the best example of an oblivious wealthy white person riding a wave of bigotry into the White House, and empowering that bigotry to a degree that cost tens of thousands of lives.
TL;DR, he watched us die and didn’t care.
My friend: “I thought everyone liked Reagan.”
🙄🙄🙄
Republicans like Reagan, idolize him because he was a good public speaker (he was an actor) and he had an overwhelmingly popular re-election campaign because he survived an assassination attempt.
Make no mistake though- blood is on Reagan’s hands for every single person who died from HIV/AIDS. Worse still, his economic policies condemned an entire generation: we’re still suffering from Reaganomics and the stunning amount of cuts he gave to the wealthy to fuck the middle class.
Ronald Reagan can burn in Hell.
The man put a wreath on the graves of Nazis while visiting Germany, because “they were just doing what they were told”. He was a villain
Reagan literally told the CDC committee on HIV/AIDS research to “look pretty and do as little as possible.”
He’s also pretty much the reason our economy is fucked and corporations control literally everything.
Reagan was a fucker who took a thriving nation and threw it in the toilet. I don’t even believe in hell, but part of me sincerely hopes he’s there.
He can fucking rot
The actor Rock Hudson, the first major celebrity to be open about his HIV status and due from AIDS, had been a personal friend of both Reagans. He tried to ask them to use their influence to get him into a clinical trial that might have prolonged his life, but they didn’t take his calls.
The Paradox Machine 