Robert Evans and Andy Beckerman dissect the Reagan administration's "quiet war" on AIDS, exposing how political cowardice and homophobia delayed action despite Surgeon General C. Everett Koop distributing 107 million pamphlets advocating condom use. While Koop faced backlash from figures like Jesse Helms for opposing mandatory testing, President Reagan ignored gay victims until 1985, prioritizing abstinence over life-saving measures even as 14,000 Americans died in 1989 alone. Ultimately, the episode argues that administrative silence and funding cuts, rather than simple negligence, fueled a preventable tragedy where ethical medical advice was stifled by partisan expediency. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Awful Tuesday Energy00:03:27
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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There's a lot of life.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
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10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
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Hi, everybody.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again, Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Now, this is part two of our episode on the Reagans and the AIDS crisis.
And my guest with me, as with on Tuesday, is Andy Beckerman of Couples Therapy.
Hey, everyone.
How you doing?
How are you doing, Andy?
What's going on?
I'm going, so we're recording this right after the first episode.
I'm going to try to get my energy back.
If you listen to the first episode, you can, if you like, had a graph of my energy as we hear more and more about just how, like, I knew, look, it's not like I didn't know that the Reagers were fucking awful, right?
I knew about, look, read Manufacturing Consent.
Chomsky and Herman go all into like their fucking shenanigans in Central and South America.
We all know about the Iran-Contra scandal.
Reagan Era FDA Reform00:15:41
We know about how they allowed crack into black communities in the United States that eventually then destroyed those communities.
We know they're awful people.
But to have like the nitty-gritty right in front of you, it just like lit.
So the graph of my enthusiasm and it goes from like making jokes to just like these motherfuckers.
Yeah.
And so it's like a downhill slope of our, of, of the emotional journey we all went through in that first episode.
But I'm gonna, look, I'm gonna try to put out the energy for this one.
This episode has a hero.
So that's good.
This episode has a hero?
It does include a hero.
Was there a Wolverine comic where he fought Reagan?
Well, he tried to fight the AIDS virus.
It did not work out well, but he was attempting it.
It turns out...
I don't know.
He's got super healing.
You know, he heals.
I don't want to go on this.
Yeah, no, this is not a healing factor.
The very special X-Men issue about all this.
I want Wolverine in like the, what was the crossover where all the, they, there fought other enemies, like Magneto went and fought Spider-Man or something, and Mandarin fought Cylock.
It's shocking to me that we're still able to have cartoon villains called the Mandarin.
Oh, no.
Really remarkable.
No, I believe he's dead now.
So that they could have less racist characters.
But Wolverine versus Reagan, hey, Marvel, get on that.
Yeah.
Ooh, maybe make that the next X-Men when now that the X-Men are part of the Marvel universe, the Marvel cinematic universe.
Oh, did that happen?
Yes, when Disney bought...
I'm behind on my Marvel news.
Oh, my, yeah, you're right, Disney did by fair.
Don't you read Deadline?
Speaking of Fox.
Fox in the Hen House of the AIDS epidemic.
Actually, this does segue nicely into Fox because part of my due diligence for this podcast was reading several defenses of the Reagan administration's reaction to the AIDS crisis.
And to be fair, I wanted to find the best defenses I could for their behavior.
I found one such defense in a conservative journal called City Journal.
It's a quarterly publication, and it claims that Reagan actually waged a quiet war on AIDS.
That's the term it uses.
Where he didn't talk about it or approve much additional funding.
In fact, actually slashed most medical funding for research.
Or do anything about it anyway?
But he was a quiet war.
It was quiet.
It was so quiet you might not have heard him say anything about it until 1986 when 20,000 people had died.
The article argues that the quietness is okay because his administration took action to reform FDA procedures that slowed down the development of better drugs.
So that's what it's saying.
What's the source again?
City Journal.
If you're a conservative person, it's like Sheldon Nadelson.
I mean, I assume he gets funding from a bunch of different groups.
Like one of the articles that I found on it was called The Democrats' War on Science.
So if you are a conservative, City Journal is a relatively reputable news source if you're looking for right-wing journals of punditry.
Wow, Democrats are all Jews with horns.
Well, it's not quite that bad.
I'm going to read a quote from it trying to make the claim that FDA reform during the Reagan administration helped against the AIDS crisis.
As the gravity of the AIDS threat became clear, the Reagan FDA began writing new rules that spelled out when significant parts of the old rules wouldn't be fully rigorously enforced.
By doing so, the agency accelerated patient access to desperately needed drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies quickly began coming on board once new policies were in place that would speed up the approval of drugs.
In short order, the firms delivered a slew of powerful new drugs using the new tools for designing precisely targeted drugs that were coming of age at the time.
As the National Academy of Sciences later noted, the extraordinarily fast development of drugs that ended up in cocktails now used to control HIV had a, quote, revolutionary effect on modern drug design.
Part of this is true.
The research that was done and the fight in order to make effective medicine for age was a revolutionary moment in the development of pharmaceuticals.
What's really debatable is how much Reagan's reforms of the FDA had to do with any of this.
Now, you can make an argument that some of those reforms might have sped up the process.
There are certainly things that were done that made it easier for people to get medicines that weren't officially FDA approved, like Rock Hudson had to travel to France.
You could make that argument.
A lot of people would laugh at you for trying to, but you could make that argument.
Important to be fair.
But it is tough to make a evidence-based case that the Reagan administration improved the FDA because they actually gutted it and slashed its funding.
And this is the fun part of being fair, because now that I have gone into, this is, again, the best argument I found about how the Reagan administration took action.
And it is, you can back it up with strong facts that changes that were made to FDA procedures during the Reagan administration helped certain aspects of things that people suffering.
Like it made it easier to get drugs that, you know, hadn't been fully approved yet for a disease that was working at a danger.
That's a legitimate achievement of that era.
Debatable as to whether or not you want to put it on Reagan or someone, and it's a thing that was done that helped some people.
Yeah, but they also introduced a bill that if you've ever seen someone's penis in a changing room, like at the gym, then you no longer have access to health care.
Well, here's what they actually did, because it's really fucked up too.
So this is why, this is the fun part of being fair, because once you dig into these things, like I read up and it's like, okay, yeah, there are some reforms of the FDA that were made that improved access to certain drugs.
Here's what else happened.
So Reagan's priority, one of the big things they did when they started slashing funding to the FDA to try to streamline it, their goal was to make the FDA a better, quote, partner for the pharmaceutical industry.
That did speed some things up, but it also got lots of people killed.
Here's the New York Times, an interview with a doctor named Sidney Wolfe from the World Health Research Group.
In October 1981, a federal government advisory committee recommended against the use of aspirin for chickenpox or flu because of the increased risk of Ray's syndrome.
But as a result of pressure on the aspirin industry...
Ray's syndrome.
Who's Ray?
It's a disease that causes like brain damage and can kill kids.
I think taking aspirin, basically the federal government advisory committee was like the current medical advice that the pharmaceutical industry really, really supports is give your kid aspirin if they have chickenpox or something.
Oh, I remember commercials when I was a kid.
Yeah, and so the pharmaceutical industry obviously wants anything that gets people taking more aspirin.
But then there was evidence that this is actually bad for kids and may in fact have been killing them.
But quote, as a result of pressure of the aspirin industry, a proposal by the FDA for mandatory warning labels was withdrawn in the fall of 1982.
As a result, 150 American children are dead and dozens have brain damage.
So cutting back on FDA red tape cuts both ways.
And in this case, it cut 150 kids to death.
Anyway, that's what fairness looks like.
That's not a ton.
It's only 150.
And dozens of kids with brain damage.
Not that bad, really.
It's less than 200 total, probably.
If you're going to make it easier for people to get experimental medicines, some children are going to die from aspirin.
That's just...
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, look, in comparison with how many people the Reagan administration murdered in Central and South America, that's nothing.
You know what?
You know what?
It's perspective, guys.
It's perspective.
It's perspective.
Exactly.
And now we have some perspective.
I just thought we'd delve into the other cases here, you know?
You know, the defenses of the administration.
This is what I was talking about in like part one, where I was like, once the pharmaceutical industry smelled a profit to be made, is that when things started to like pick up?
Like, oh, let's address this now, I guess.
Not in the period we're getting into.
They get better at it later on.
But again, most of the first medicines to treat AIDS did not fucking work.
And we're going to talk about that in a little bit here.
So according to City Journal, another aspect of Ronald Reagan's so-secret it looked invisible, war on AIDS, was his appointment of C. Everett Coop as Surgeon General.
And Mr. Coop is a hero of this story, and he was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
But Ronald Reagan and his surgeon general did not exactly see eye to eye.
Doesn't he look like the colonel from KFC?
Yeah, we're about to pull up his picture.
He looked amazing.
He's, I'm going to go ahead and say probably the best aesthetic of any surgeon general we've ever had.
And he does look like I would trust his recommendation on where to buy fried chicken.
If C. Everett Coop was to tell me, nah, son, this place has a damn good bucket of fried bird here, I'd be like, You look like the kind of man who knows where good fried chicken is.
Matruvada recipe's got seven secret herbs and spouses in it.
The best, I mean, what's the well?
I guess I'll trust you, Coopie.
Really getting a lot of play out of the Reagan voice jokes.
If I was a journalist, if I was a journalist, I'd say poop on Coop.
What's the poop scoop?
Because they used to say poop because it was funny.
Look at this guy.
Oh, yeah.
Look at this guy.
What a fucking champion.
That is truly a courageous chin beard.
And this picture will be on behindthebastards.com if you want to see, I'm going to go ahead and say the best chin beard any surgeon general has ever had.
I think that's probably fair.
Text us on, send us a message on Twitter if you find a better surgeon general with a twin.
If you can name a surgeon general other than C. Everett Coop.
That's also fair.
He is the only surgeon general whose name I knew before I started on this podcast.
So that's a fair point.
So Charles Everett Coop was called chick by his friends in Dartmouth College because chickens live in.
Comedy wasn't really very advanced back then.
What year is this?
This is like in the 40s, something like that.
Back in the day.
Oh, sure, vaudeville.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lenny Bruce was just a gleam in Fatty Arbuckle's eye.
I don't know much about the evolution of comedy.
So, yeah, Coop was a born-again Christian.
In 1976, he published The Right to Live, The Right to Die, which argued against both abortion and euthanasia.
The book sold 100,000 copies, mostly to Christian readers, in its first year.
Coop said, quote, what a scam.
How many grifters are there in the Christian community?
He's not a grifter.
I will say this for Coop.
He believes strongly everything.
And I think you might come around on this, but he's definitely not, you would think, in any sort of reasonable corner right now.
But he believes this stuff.
Look, I love the beard.
Love his aesthetic.
All right.
I'm already 30% there on C. Everett.
Well, Sieveret Coop wrote this book about how as a physician and a Christian, he didn't believe abortion should be legal or euthanasia.
And in fact, he viewed them as basically the same thing.
That said, he was also had a brilliant career as a surgeon in a children's hospital in Philadelphia, and he established the United States' first neonatal unit in 1956, worked there until 1981.
So he was a guy with very strong, very right-wing religious conservative views.
But he was also a guy who clearly viewed his North Star as taking care of human beings.
And that was the thing that was his main focus in life.
And how did that clash with his Christian beliefs?
Well, we're about to get into that.
So Coop, when he was appointed, many Democrats, including Henry Waxman, spoke out against Coop.
Waxman said, quote, Dr. Coop frightens me.
He does not have a public health record.
He's dogmatically denounced those who disagree with him, and his intemperate views make me wonder about his and the administration's judgment.
Here's a quote from the book After the Wrath of God.
Titled Doctor Unqualified, the New York Times editorial board lauded Coop's work as a pediatric surgeon, but underscored his lack of public health experience.
Past surgeon generals, almost without exception, the article continued, have possessed experience specifically within the field of public health.
That Coop had shown no evidence of such experience, along with the fact that he technically was older than the legally permitted age to assume the position, suggested that the Reagan administration's interest in Coop had to be found elsewhere.
Quote, that elsewhere maybe his anti-abortion crusade, the Times concluded with its hope that Congress would reject the appointment for not to do so would, quote, be an affront to both the public health profession and the public.
So again, at the start of this, it seems like Coop is the perfect guy to not make a fuss while tens of thousands of gay people die, right?
Seems like the worst case scenario for a surgeon general in an already conservative administration.
So he's like, who's the guy that's on the Supreme Court that they thought was a conservative, but then is actually more moderate?
Kennedy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he's like that.
Like, they're like, this guy's going to hate everyone once again.
He's going to hate all the right people.
Let's make him the Surgeon General.
But no, in fact, that's actually not what happened.
Coop monitored CDC reports and the response of public health services from the sidelines during the first several years of the AIDS crisis.
Despite his job was essentially to inform the American people about diseases, about what was happening.
And so he wanted to make a statement earlier in the AIDS crisis once it was confirmed in 1982, but he says he was, quote, completely cut off from AIDS by other people in the administration.
He blames interdepartmental politics from blocking him from any of the few conversations that the Reagan administration had about AIDS during the early 1980s.
According to Coop, the reason for this was that his involvement would have implicated the Reagan administration in basically caring about gay people.
Coop says that because AIDS was seen as a gay disease, the president's advisors, quote, took the stand they are only getting what they justly deserve.
Now, Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt, Coop's boss, told him that he was not allowed to speak publicly about AIDS during the epidemic.
In 1983, when Brandt created an executive task force on AIDS, Coop was not invited.
By 1985, he'd started to get pissed about this.
Coop thought it was outrageous that thousands of people had died and the Surgeon General had said nothing.
Now, there were people agitating that Coop should be allowed to talk about the AIDS crisis.
They were conservative Christians who sent anonymous telegrams to the Health and Human Services Secretary asking that Coop be, quote, unmuzzled, because they thought he was going to speak out against protecting gay civil rights.
They expected him to endorse the kind of anti-gay public health measures, like shutting down bathhouses, that other Reagan administration officials endorsed.
Finally, in 1985, Coop was made a member of the AIDS task force, and that winter he was ordered to prepare a report on the AIDS epidemic.
Coop knew from the start that it was going to be a hard to write an unbiased report about AIDS.
He recalled in his autobiography, quote, a large proportion of the president's constituency was anti-homosexual, anti-drug abuse, anti-promiscuity, and anti-sex education.
These people would not respond well to some of the things that have to be said in a health report on AIDS.
So Coop realizes immediately, if I'm going to address AIDS, I have to talk about condoms.
I have to talk about the ways in which gay people are having sex that makes it more likely for this to spread.
I have to talk about sexual health to the entire American people, which is basically the kryptonite of a Republican in the 1980s, 90s.
It's not an easy sell-to-day.
Coop, I gotta talk about condoms.
I gotta talk about biscuits.
I gotta talk about mashed taters and gravy.
I gotta talk about sex ed.
It's weird that this is the guy who realizes I have to instruct America about safe sex.
But this is the guy who realized that he had to instruct America about safe sex, and that's exactly what he did.
That may be like the last time that a Republican was overwhelmed by the feeling that this is going to spiral out of control if we don't address it.
Yeah, and did something.
And did something.
And did something.
And Coop fucking did something.
On October 22nd, 1986, with more than 16,000 Americans dead from AIDS, Surgeon General C. Everett Coop released the Surgeon General's report on acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Guns, Empathy, and Gulch00:03:32
Here's a description of it from After the Wrath of God.
It presented the best medical information available to date about HIV and AIDS and sought to alleviate the fears of the American people.
The 36-page report called Americans to fight the epidemic as a unified group rather than condemning certain populations disproportionately affected by the disease, who some felt deserved the illness.
By saying this, Coop attempted to move the rhetoric of the AIDS epidemic beyond its association with homosexuality and drug use, away from the idea that it was the just desserts for immoral behavior.
As he noted, we're fighting a disease, not people.
Could you imagine at any time in your life thinking a population just deserves something for I think that sociopaths deserve to be excommunicated from civil society.
But that's because they have proven themselves to be destructive to the general social fabric.
I think the behavior Coop is fighting against is a behavior you see on every side of the aisle and different things.
Right now, among the left, there is a strong chunk of the American left that believes Bashar al-Assad is a basically good guy.
The gassings of his people are part of a propaganda campaign.
Wait, sorry.
Who on the left believes that he's a good guy?
Talk to me with a red rose avatar on Twitter and talk about the gassing of people.
Like, I've met some of these people.
Like, there's like tankies in the United Kingdom, which like the term started because the Soviet Union essentially invaded countries in its dominion who were trying to agitate for more independence and civil rights outside of the USSR.
And so these British socialists were like, no, it's good that the USSR is crushing resistance with tanks.
And those people, there's a strong strain of that in the left who believes that Bashar al-Assad, like the campaign against him, is part of a NATO conspiracy to try to oust this guy to get Syria's oil.
There's also the same thing with Ukraine, where people will write off the Maidan revolution in Ukraine as they're all neo-Nazis.
They're neo-Nazis fighting against the Russians there.
And the Ukrainian government is a Nazi government because there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Like it's, it is very easy for people on, and it's the same thing you see on the right with like, well, everybody in fucking Iran is a religious extremist who hates America or whatever.
Everybody finds it easy when you're separated enough from a group of people that have complex interests, some of which run counter to your own.
Anybody can be convinced to condemn a group of people.
It just depends on how far away they are.
But like, I'm saying, let's condemn people who don't have empathy for others.
I think that would be great.
But they...
We'll give them Galtz Gulch.
We'll give them an island of their own.
So if you don't have empathy, look, I'm saying we create a test and then for people who to see whether they have empathy or not.
And then if you don't, then we put you on a little island and you get to live the rest of your life there.
You can do what you want.
We call it Galtz Gulch.
And they'll all be like, you know, they'll all be erect from living in their Ayn Rams.
Oh, I thought you were describing New Hampshire.
But no guns.
They don't get guns.
So it's not like that.
Oh, they're not going to be happy.
Yeah.
They're not going to be happy with that.
Or maybe guns with blanks.
Yeah, that might do the trick.
Maybe like Westworld.
But yeah.
So Coop is doing the right thing here.
That's 1986.
Hanging with Dr. Coop.
Hanging with Dr. Coop, the surprisingly woke Dr. Coop, despite everything else about his life.
Hey, write that movie.
Never Mess With Talent00:03:52
Yeah, yeah.
There you go.
So we're going to get into some more things Coop proposed, and we're going to get into the right-wing backlash against his idea of talking about the concept of condoms and how controversial that wound up being.
But first, there's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
1987 Compassion and Condoms00:15:40
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
A victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're back and we're talking about C. Everett Coop.
He's just released his 1986 report on AIDS.
Coop's report opposed mandatory HIV testing and quarantines for those infected.
He said that it wouldn't work.
Both of those were ideas, though, that conservative politicians close to the Reagan administration had suggested.
Coop did more than just shoot down some of the GOP's favorite gut reactions to the crisis.
He also called for a nationwide sex ed campaign that would teach, among other things, how to use condoms.
He advised that this education should start at the lowest grade possible and be worked into normal health and hygiene education.
Quote, there is no doubt now that we need sex ed in schools and that it includes information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
The threat of AIDS should be sufficient to permit a sex education curriculum with a heavy emphasis on prevention of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
From first grade on, I got a condom a day in school.
Wow.
That's a weird.
That's a weird school.
That might be too many condoms for a first grader.
I don't know.
I mean, had a lot of good water balloon fights.
You save them up.
If you saved up enough, you could trade them in for prizes.
You get five condoms for one dental dam or something?
You get, well, no, you could get like baseball cards or Marvel cards at the time.
I'm going to say it again.
That's a weird school.
Anyway, the point is, I have a lot of X-Men cards.
But not a lot of condoms.
No.
Ah, well, that's a shame.
They get better with age.
That's what I've heard.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, vintage condoms.
I get all my condoms on eBay and, you know, make sure that they're from.
Well, it's just gone.
Let's move past this bit.
So in his report, Coop commented on drug use as well as oral and anal sex because those were all major ways that AIDS was being spread.
He talked about these things like a doctor without judgment because that's exactly what he was, a doctor.
Everybody lost their goddamn minds.
The LA Times, he would expect to have a reasonable take on the matter, headlined their coverage of the report.
Coop urges AIDS sex course in grade school.
Hey.
The L.A. Times.
Look, it worked in my grade school.
William F. Buckley Jr., a famous conservative pundit, attacked the Surgeon General for suggesting.
General piece of shit.
General piece of shit.
And specific piece of shit.
Both.
Attacked the Surgeon General for suggesting American kids learn about sex.
Robert Novak, Roland Evans, and other notable conservative thinkers wrote a whole bunch of lies about the Surgeon General's report and basically accused him of wanting to groom children for pedophilia.
Phyllis Shaifly, a right-wing religious firebrand, opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.
And if you've watched Handmaiden's Tale, The Commander's Wife in The Handmaiden's Tale was specifically based on Phyllis Shaifly when the book was written.
Yeah, this lady winded that.
Also, the fly is based on the crowd.
Just Jeff Goldwin before the change was based on Phyllis Shaifley.
The fly, the fly itself.
Oh, okay.
The actual fly before the change.
So not Jeff Goldwin's fly.
The concept of a fly was based on like bottom-feeding vermin.
Yeah.
So Phyllis said that AIDS, that the AIDS report, quote, looks and reads like it was edited by the gay task force.
She accused Surgeon General Coop of suggesting that third graders learn, quote, safe sodomy.
Said Coop, why anyone paid attention to this lady is one of the mysteries of the 80s.
I'm not the Surgeon General to make Phyllis Shafely happy.
I'm the Surgeon General to save lives.
Again, he's fucking, he seized his moment to be the one guy not fucking up.
Coop had been prepared to be attacked by the political right because he'd known that his report was going to reject all of the suggestions they'd already made.
But he later wrote that he did, quote, feel a profound sense of betrayal by those on the religious right who took me to task.
My position on AIDS was dictated by scientific integrity and Christian compassion.
I felt my Christian opponents had abandoned not only their old friend, but also their commitment to integrity and compassion.
That's what I was talking about in part one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Coop addresses.
Bible's about compassion.
Yeah, and then that's Coop, how Coop trans.
He does not like that people are having gay sex.
He thinks it's not what God wants, but he thinks they're also still people who deserve medical care.
Look how these dumb turds think they know what God wants, by the way.
I mean, look, I don't believe in God, but like, it's supposedly this being.
Unknowable force.
This unknowable force that created all things.
And some turd, you know, in a frock is just like...
I can translate what this creature.
By the way, I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for calling God a creature.
Coop clearly takes the right thing out of religion, which is that, like, oh, you should take care of people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which, okay.
That's a great thing.
Yeah.
So for an example of the Christian rights reaction to Coop's report, we have AIDS, a special report, almost the same title as Coop's report, but this didn't come from the government.
It was released by Summit Ministries and also published in 1986.
Its appendix was titled AIDS Warning.
The Surgeon General's Report May Be Hazardous to Your Health.
In one section, Coop chickens out, it claims the Surgeon General's pro-homosexual bias was causing him to ignore the health risks of sexual immorality.
They called his report, quote, littered with unscientific, allegedly authoritative statements about the disease, most of which let gays off the hook.
So, Christian right, everybody.
Really nailing it.
This report had suggestions for America, too.
Quote, our public health authorities must be made to realize that their first responsibility is to protect the public's health, not the perceived civil rights of homosexuals or drug users.
You're really, you're always the bad guy if you're including civil rights in quotes.
By the way, I love their other report about how communion wafers can give you six-pack abs.
Well, you know, actually, they are pretty low in carbs.
Hey, they're gluten-free now, too.
It's a good snack.
I would actually totally buy a big old bag of communion wafers.
I enjoyed eating those as a kid.
Are they...
I'm Jewish, so I've never even had one, but do they have any taste to them?
Yeah, they're just nice little...
They're like little...
Okay, you know, nila wafers?
You know how they're made of that weird foamy substance?
If that had no sugar in it and was tiny, it's a little bit like that.
So it sounds like it's styrofoam.
A little bit, but I like styrofoam.
But like, why not, look, body of Christ, but also what about, like, could the hair of Christ be like cinnamon and sugar that he's freaking out?
I'll tell you what, when I imagine the taste of Jesus Christ's hot glistening body, I imagine the taste of Cool Ranch Doritos.
Because there's nothing like that nice Dorito bite to make you realize that maybe, just maybe, there might be someone out there looking out for us.
I'd like to point out the taste of reading copy from a piece of paper.
No, that was all extemporaneous.
I just, anyway, let's move on to AIDS.
That was a bad, bad segue.
So as hard as I hope it is to believe right now, but probably not at all hard to believe right now, most of the outrage against Coop had come from his decision to endorse condoms.
Quote from one of Reagan's advisors, Gary Bauer.
The White House doesn't like the C word.
Or sorry, this is a quote from us here.
It refers to women.
So Coop said.
I'm sorry that every racist in this is a Southern or misogynist is a Southern person.
Apologies.
Apologies to progressive Southern people.
Thank you.
Now, Coop said at the time, the White House doesn't like the C word, but if you don't talk about condoms, people are going to die.
So I talk.
Another Christian conservative who didn't like Coop was Under Secretary of Education Gary Bauer.
He was a Baptist and a bit of a stickler for the word values.
Here's a picture of Bauer with Ronald Reagan.
Just to get a picture of this guy in your head before I tell you what's next.
He's a little weasily looking shit.
Oh, yeah, he looks like a Tim and Eric character.
He does look like a Tim and Eric character.
And he's wearing a suit that's clearly too big for him, which is like my favorite type of conservative.
I like how a guy in government couldn't go to a tailor.
Didn't have time to stop by Brooks Brothers.
No, no, no.
He had too much.
Well, we're about to hear what he was doing when he wasn't getting his suit fitted.
Gary is currently the president of American Values, an advocacy group that lobbies for exactly the kind of things you'd think.
In December of 1986, he wrote up the education policy that would actually teach American school kids about AIDS.
Rather than following any of the guidelines Coop had laid down, he believed the Department of Education should, quote, not be neutral between heterosexual and homosexual sex.
While homosexuals should not be persecuted, heterosexual sex within marriage is what most Americans, our laws, and our traditions, consider the proper focus of human sexuality.
Bauer believed that all federally mandated or federally sponsored AIDS education supplements should, quote, encourage responsible sexual behavior based on fidelity, commitment, and maturity, placing sexuality within the context of marriage, which, of course, means you don't have to talk about condoms.
Ronald Reagan approved these changes, even though they flew in the face of what his surgeon general had recommended.
Shortly after that, Senator Jesse Helms passed a law thingy.
So wait, hold on.
Sorry.
So these people don't even think that married couples use condoms.
Well, why would you need to?
The only reason you're having sex is to make kids.
Right.
Ronald Reagan approved these changes.
Shortly after that, Jesse Helms passed a law prohibiting the CDC from using its funds to, quote, promote, encourage, and condone homosexual sexual activities or the intravenous use of illegal drugs.
4,000.
Hold on, did the CDC was the CDC like, by the way, if you're going to do heroin, don't snort it, inject it.
Yeah, why not?
It said it's not allowed to promote intravenous drugs, right?
What was the CDC doing before that?
Was it what they're saying is that, like, by saying, hey, here's where you find clean needles.
Here's how to make sure your needle is clear.
Here's how to dispose of needles.
That kind of stuff.
Just trying to be like, you're going to be fucking shooting drugs with needles.
Be safer with your needles.
So the CDC wasn't just going like, hey, snorting's for squares.
No, the CDC wasn't like, all right, so the best H on the block.
You're going to go down, take a right at the pioneer chicken.
And you want to cook it and inject it.
No, man.
Big Ernie sells smack soapure.
You don't got to cook it.
That's the CDC's official report.
No.
So 4,855 Americans died in 1987.
This was in spite of the fact that this was the year that AZT, the first anti-HIV drug, was approved by the FDA.
AZT had to be taken every four hours without fail, even interrupting your sleep, and came with horrible side effects, including muscle soreness and fatigue.
Subsequent large-scale studies showed almost no difference between AZT and placebos.
1987 was a big year for AIDS.
Not only was it the AZT year, it was also the year that the first San Francisco AIDS quilt was made.
It was the year that a family with three HIV-positive hemophiliac sons had their house burned down by an arsonist.
It was the year the U.S. shut its borders to HIV infected immigrants and the year Ronald Reagan finally addressed the nation about what he now called public health enemy number one.
Not a lot there for humor, except I did come up with a character while you were talking.
Oh, good.
Johnny Arson.
He's like Johnny Carson.
Oh, good.
But he lights fires.
Oh, good.
Russ from weird, fiery stuff.
We got a really big blaze.
That's all I know about Johnny Carson.
At this point, when Reagan finally delivered his very first public speech about AIDS, 23,000 Americans had already died from the disease.
Part of why Reagan even addressed it is because thousands of hemophiliacs had also been infected by this point.
Many were dying.
Ryan White was probably the most famous of these hemophiliac kids to catch AIDS.
He was diagnosed in 1984, and by 1987, he'd become one of the most prominent figures in the fight against the disease.
Since he and other hemophiliacs were not gay, they were seen as not deserving what had happened to them.
This gave the Reagan administration the cover that it needed to take effective action against the disease.
That said, in his big speech, Ronald Reagan also noted abstinence as an important tool in the fight against AIDS.
Oh, God.
So wait, so the lesson from this is, if there is a disease that affects only a small part of the population, what you want to do is give that disease to someone that the government can use as cover to treat it.
Yeah, I mean, that is actually the lesson here.
Right.
Yeah.
So here's what Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan noted that abstinence was also an important tool in the fight of AIDS.
So during this speech, he said, quote, after all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons?
What a fucking piece of shit.
I'm sorry that I have nothing.
Like, it just really boils my blood.
Here's the thing.
In speeches that C. Everett Coop gave when he would go to colleges, he said the same thing, but he was also like, but also people are going to do what they're going to do.
So let's teach them how to use condoms because I'm a doctor and I don't want people to die.
Like, you can believe that morality says you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage.
You're not evil if you believe that, as long as you're also like, but we should do basic things to make sure people understand how to protect themselves if they choose to do something different.
Coop was able to make that kind of leap in his own mind, even though he didn't approve of it, and make a note of what was necessary.
Reagan was not able to make that leap, or maybe he was and he was just a political coward.
I don't know.
We'll talk about that a little bit.
So Coop is king.
Coop is king.
He's not perfect.
He's what we're saying.
Yeah.
You'll find criticisms of Coop that are valid, but he's trying.
He clearly doesn't want people to die and takes it seriously, which is something more than anybody else has done.
So in 1988, 4,855 more Americans died.
With the death toll nearing 30,000, C. Everett Coop believed that the government could and should do more.
So he put together a pamphlet called Understanding AIDS that provided frank descriptions of anal and oral sex as well as fact-based discussions of contraception.
It was the sort of thing that various grassroots groups across the country had already started distributing, particularly in coastal cities with a large gay population.
But Coop was the surgeon general, and he had a little bit more power than these people.
Coop had this one pamphlet mailed out to almost every home in America.
107 million families received a copy of Understanding AIDS.
It was the original AOL disc.
Yeah, yeah.
It was like the first thing distributed on that wide a fucking like you're joking, but like that is like it was at the time the largest mass mailing in American history.
And it's like pictures of like how gay sex works and how condoms work.
Homophobic Panic in Schools00:15:55
Yes, it was how you got online originally.
Yeah, well, it's a line.
It's like laying pipe.
You know, someone will get that.
Descriptions of gay sexual practices, often sensationalized, had never before reached so large an audience.
And now the Surgeon General pressed Americans to learn even more about sex through his education campaign, which included promoting abstinence and monogamy, but also maintained the importance of using condoms.
If the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s had not yet reached every small town and rural outpost in the heartland, Coop's pamphlet did.
So not only is he giving out information on gay sex, this is the first, he's forcing effective sex ed on families in rural America.
Well, how did, look, in Texas, how did you grow up?
I had like such a fear of AIDS that it was like terrifying.
The idea of sex was terrifying as a kid.
I didn't really understand much about what it was, to be honest.
I don't remember.
I'm sure there were conversations.
I know I remember a couple of talks at school about it, but I think I was late enough that most of the panic over AIDS had kind of faded by that point.
Yeah, I mean, the panic, like it was no longer when I was a kid, but I also grew up in a pretty egalitarian household where, you know, my parents were like, treat all people the same.
So there was no like, there was no panic at home about like gay people or whatever like that.
But like even in culture, I didn't feel that.
So like there wasn't anything, it wasn't like that, but there was still a panic about sex in general in the late 80s.
Bet into the like 90s.
There was definitely a panic about like the like that was like the thing everybody joked about was like making another guy do something that looked gay so that everybody can call him gay or whatever.
Like I was definitely of the generation where like when I was in high school, the word fag was like every fourth word out of my mouth and everybody else's mouth that I knew.
Like that was like.
Oh, it was Texas.
Yeah, it was Texas.
It was one of the most common.
It was one of those things when I was like 18, 19, and then finally got out of school and into the world, I realized like, oh, this is a really fucked up word to use all the time.
You shouldn't say that about people.
But it was, it was, I don't know.
Like, I don't remember any education about AIDS.
I don't remember ever learning any of this for sure.
I mean, it was just like a generalized panic about, that's what I'm saying.
Like, it wasn't like a panic about gay people.
Again, I wonder if that's because I grew up in like a household where everyone was treated the same, unless you were a piece of shit.
Like, that's where my parents were like, you know, this, you know, they sat me down at some point and they're like, don't use gay.
Like, you know, gay was slang at the time for like, that was dumb.
And they're like, don't use that because there are gay people that we know and you know, and they're, that hurts their feelings.
And don't use these certain words.
You can use the word fuck and the word shit.
Don't use it around the rabbi or whatever.
Like there's certain contexts.
But there's like forbidden words where like these hurt people's feelings.
There was swear words that you could use.
And that, and so the thing was like, it went from being a like a panic about gay people to a panic about sex at some point.
I think it became like when I remember it, because I was in, you know, I was born in 88.
So I was, I was not conscious during the 80s.
I was 38 years old.
Yeah.
So like I, what I remember was more of a generalized panic about things that weren't heteronormative.
Like that was the thing.
Like there was no, like it wasn't like if you're gay, you're going to get AIDS when I was a kid.
It was that like gay meant not what we expect out of like straight masculine men.
And so that's silly and you should make fun of it.
Like that was sort of my, what I grew up with.
And that was less that I didn't really catch any of that from my parents.
That was just like school.
Like that's.
So there was just homophobia everywhere.
Like it's not like it's not like I went to a high school that was like super gay friendly, but it was, I don't think it was as, I don't think the homophobia was as suffocating.
And I, I mean, I'll ask my gay friends from high school what they thought.
Yeah, I certainly had, I had one gay friend when I was in high school that I met when I was a senior.
He came out to me when I was a senior in high school, and that was the first gay person that I knew.
So it was definitely like not, you know, it was not a, but, but we were also, we were also past enough the AIDS epidemic that like the only thing I remember in school about AIDS was them really driving home to us that you can't get it from the water fountains.
Like that was the biggest part.
That's the thing that stuck in my mind about my high school age education.
But I wonder now if that's Texas versus Pennsylvania, if that's south of the Mason-Dixon line, it was like still full of homophobia into the 90s.
And north of the Mason-Dixon line, it turned into like a sex paranoia in general thing.
I certainly can't.
I would describe a lot of what I encountered as a sex paranoia in general thing, but I couldn't tell you what it was like outside of Texas because I only grew up in the one spot.
But I will tell you what this pamphlet Coop sent out looked like.
This is the front.
Why don't you check out?
I find a little bit of humor in the last question listed on the front of the pamphlet.
It says, understanding AIDS.
And there's a bunch of pictures of people.
It's very multi-culty.
And it says, what do you really know about AIDS?
Are you at risk?
AIDS and sex.
And why no one has gotten AIDS from mosquitoes?
Which tells you what people knew about it at the time, where Coop was like, all right, what are the big things we have to address?
Oh, mosquitoes.
Everybody's asking about fucking mosquitoes.
You could see that.
I mean, yeah, no, and make it.
You've got to get the info out.
Yeah.
And there was like, it was already around the time where arachnophobia came out.
Yeah.
And so people were worried about bugs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a very basic thing, but people flip their shit over this.
Like, this is a major issue.
There's tons of like political cartoons, people freaking out over the pamphlets.
I'm worried about skeeters.
I don't want them to talk about how gay people have sex.
Like, it freaked people out.
And it was a legitimately courageous move from Coop to be like, no, we're fucking mailing this out to every family in the country.
And they did it.
It took way longer than you'd have hoped, but it happened.
And in 1988, this fucking thing gets out, and finally, people start to get forced on them some practical sexual education.
Now, it's important to note that C. Everett Coop was not a hippie-dippy dude.
He was not, you would certainly not call him pro-gay.
Like, his advice was specifically, like, don't have sex with anyone who could carry the virus of AIDS.
And then he would go on to, after a couple of paragraphs, of why you shouldn't do it, if you do decide to do this anyway, use a condom.
Here's how condoms work.
Like, it was the most couched it possibly could have been, but at least he was getting the information out.
If you don't use a condom, just do hand stuff.
Yeah, just do it.
Well, just do hand stuff was the second pamphlet he sent out to 107 million homes.
It was 47 pages of really hardcore hand pornography.
Should I use lube?
Yeah.
No.
He's a surgeon general strict on that shit.
Yeah.
The Bible doesn't say nothing about lubricants.
The only lubricant you're going to need is a single page from the King James Bible, and you're going to wrap that around yourself like a sheath.
Of Christ is the only lube you need.
Oh, boy.
As I said before, Coop, C. Everett Coop, agreed with President Reagan that religion and morality were in lockstep on the matter of AIDS.
Abstinence was the best way to deal with it.
But he also was like, let's fucking teach people about condoms and stuff.
Let's fucking teach people about fucking.
Yeah, let's fucking teach people about fucking.
That was C. Everett Coop, the man who taught America to fuck.
Another great name for his biopic.
On January 20th, 1989, Ronald Reagan left office.
More than 14,000 Americans died from AIDS that year.
Another 18,000 died in 1990.
One of these was Ryan White.
The president wrote him a public letter, which was more than Rock Hudson got.
Here's a quote from a writer with a New Yorker who actually knew Ryan.
Reagan wrote a letter that ended with the words, Ryan, my dear young friend, we will see you again.
But that letter really just shows the limits of Reagan's sympathy.
Ryan White was an absolutely delightful Indiana schoolboy, so he was an innocent AIDS victim, unlike the gay men Reagan did not like to mention.
It is no coincidence that Reagan would feel comfortable singling White out to honor, nor is it a chance that the single biggest piece of HIV legislation ever enacted in the United States is called the Ryan White Act.
I should note before we end that Rock Hudson was not the only friend of the Reagan's to die of AIDS.
Ronald Reagan's good buddy, Roy Cohn, died of AIDS in 1986.
He was apparently furious when, during treatment, his doctor repeatedly insisted that he stay abstinent, and that was most of the advice that Kahn was able to get.
The Reagan did send Cohn a letter before he died, but neither showed up at his funeral.
He was buried in a tie with Ronald Reagan's name on it.
The AIDS epidemic continued to kill.
More than half a million Americans had died by 2002, 11 years before Ronald Reagan's daughter would claim that her dad had supported gay marriage.
Because in 2013, that's exactly what Reagan's daughter said: that she thinks her dad would have backed up Patty?
Yeah, I think it was Patty.
I will say, she might be right, because in 2013, Reagan wouldn't have had to pay a political price for supporting gay marriage.
And I think that really was most of what it was for him.
He would have been fine if he thought in 1982, you know, jumping on AIDS and like increasing funding to it would have won him election in 84, he would have done it.
I don't think he had a moral issue with this.
I think he was just a coward.
Well, that's a moral issue.
Well, I don't think they're not.
No, that is a moral issue, but that's not.
He didn't have a moral issue with treating gay people of AIDS.
He himself was a coward, and that was a moral issue.
He had a deeper failing than homophobia.
Which I think is important to note because I think people look at it and they're like, oh, Reagan was homophobic.
And I'm like, well, it's actually scarier if he was not homophobic for the time, but just too much of a coward to do anything because it was bad politically because all these people who supported him thought that gay people were monsters.
And I do think that's probably closer to the real story, which is scarier.
I mean, well, do we know like when he really started to get dementia-y?
I mean, there's a lot of debate around that.
Some people are going to say most of his second term, he was starting to like, he was definitely not at 100% from like 84, 85 on, but I don't really know.
But are there any like, I mean, we all think that like something's wrong with Trump because like he says insane things and can't talk and is in general just a mush-brained freak.
But were there any speeches?
Again, I was a child, so I don't really remember anything.
Were there speeches where like Reagan could at least talk, right?
He was a real good talker.
He was a real good talker the entire time he was he was president.
Okay, so there was never any kind of like, it was never to the depths of what we're experiencing now.
No, but like, like he didn't, he wasn't tweeting and stuff.
Every appearance he had was carefully state managed.
His speeches were written for him and stuff.
Like he was good at delivering the lines.
I don't know how much he'd started to suffer from Alzheimer's at that point.
But they also think the fucking 40 years before that, the president's staff was able to hide the fact that he couldn't walk.
So it's clearly not hard if you've got a good staff to hide shit from the country.
Or at least it was back then.
So what, they weakened at Bernie's FDR's legs?
What?
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
Most of the nation didn't know that he couldn't walk.
They would do, they had like special braces made for him, and he would like walk with people who you wouldn't quite be able to tell where.
And the press pool was in on it too.
Like it was one of those things where people were like, there's fucking wars going on.
Don't let anyone know that the president can't stand up.
I have this idea that he's wearing a harness with strings attached to it and there's a car driving and it just like it like strings like a marionette move his legs.
Harry Truman just puppeteering him.
Yeah.
No, that's dark.
We're the bastards now.
We have become.
I don't think so.
I think ethically I'm on the right side of history.
I mean FDR was a fine enough president.
He was fine.
Yeah, he's fine.
New Deal was good.
New Deal was good.
Not great.
Not being a fascist was really the best thing he did.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Could have won kudos to that.
Could have joined World War II earlier, maybe, or done something economically to help sanctions on Hitler before.
Oh, he could have agreed to take Jewish refugees from the country rather than think about it earlier.
Yeah.
The only president you're going to find with less than a couple of buckets of blood on his hands is Jimmy Carter.
And, you know, that's just the way it is.
He's the one nice guy we let be president.
Hey, Jimmy Carter, 2020.
Let's start the campaign here.
96-year-old Jimmy Carter takes office.
Is there ever a symbol about how decrepit America has become, even as good as Jimmy Carter is, than hauling up a 96-year-old white man?
This is the best we can do.
No, it's not the best we can do.
And Jimmy Carter would be the first person to tell you that.
Yeah.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, 2020.
Crazy that Carter had to give up his peanut farm because it might make a conflict of interest when he was president.
What if you're nicer to with peanut subsidies?
Yeah.
No, no, now the president owns a hotel that foreign dignitaries stay at, but it's fine.
No, we've gotten off the subject of the bastards of today, and we were talking about other bastards.
So many bastards and so many people behind them.
I will tell you, I will ask you, are you converted to my way of thinking, which is that Reagan himself was probably less homophobic than most people of his age at the time and was acting the way he did and ignoring the crisis because of political expediency rather than because of homophobia.
That's my take.
Here's the thing.
I'm a pragmatist.
And if there's no difference in practice, then there's no difference in the philosophy behind the practice.
So regardless of what he believed, his actions were extremely homophobic and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
650,000, I think, so far.
Hundreds of thousands of people.
And just like the spread of the AIDS epidemic, he didn't, whatever he believed, the practice was, we don't give a shit about gay people and we don't give a shit if they die.
And that to me is unforgivable.
I don't care what he, I don't care if like him and Nancy were both secretly gay and they're like, well, we can't, if we say anything, you know, people are going to find out our secret or whatever.
I find it unconscionable no matter what.
It's certainly unconscionable no matter what.
I will say one of the things that's interesting to me about this from a moral point of view is that I think you have, with Reagan, you have a guy who I think in his social life did not act like a homophobe because a number of gay people were very close with the Reagan.
Nancy and Ronald, both in their social life, were clearly capable of not being judgmental assholes to their friends who were gay.
C. Everett Coop, I doubt, ever had a gay friend.
He was definitely a guy who was homophobic in terms of he thought it was wrong for gay people to have sex.
I think what we have in the two of them is you have one man who's homophobic, one man who's not particularly homophobic, but is all he cares about is politics and his career and advancing.
And I think Coop cared more about human life.
So even though he was homophobic, he did the right thing.
While Reagan wasn't super homophobic for his era, he did the wrong thing because all he cared about was politics.
And I do think that's interesting that you have these two guys who you would expect them to act completely the opposite way in this situation.
But instead, the guy who has this very strong religious condemnation for his whole life against homosexuality does the right thing.
And the guy who has a bunch of gay friends does the wrong thing because it's the politically expedient thing.
I think that's interesting.
Ethical Circumstances Matter00:05:18
Yeah.
Well, it's about, it's, you know, an ethical question, which is like, and, and really, ethics comes down to like, will you do the right thing no matter what the circumstances are?
And Coopy will do the right thing no matter what the circumstances are because he has deeply held ethical beliefs.
Whereas Reagan is at best a sociopath and at worst a psychopath.
What are the differences?
I don't know.
There's not like they're synonyms.
Yeah.
But like, do you know what I mean?
There's not, there is no deeply held ethical belief besides a kind of like instrumental, whatever will help me advance.
And that's not ethics.
That is, you know, that's the gnashing teeth of under-the-bed creatures.
Well, I agree with you, Andy.
Do you want to plug your pluggables?
Sure.
Hey, everyone.
We have a podcast.
Me and my dear Naomi have a podcast called Couples Therapy.
We have a live show here in Los Angeles and around the country where we have stand-ups do live sets.
They are lovers and spouses and siblings and best friends.
They do sets together about their relationship.
And then on the podcast, we take the best live sets and bring them to you.
People like Sashira Maiden, Nicole Bayer, or Rachel Bloom from Crazy X Girlfriend and Her Husband, and lots of great comics you don't know, comics you do know.
And then Naomi and I talk and you, you, uh, yeah, it's fun.
So, Couples Therapy here on the How Stuff Works network.
And I'm Robert Evans.
Uh, this is Behind the Bastards.
We'll be back Tuesday, next Tuesday, with someone else terrible and something else terrible to talk about.
So, please tune in and you can check out the sources for this episode on our website, behindthebastards.com.
We'll have a good old picture of C. Everett Coop up there.
You'll all enjoy that.
He looks like a guy named C. Everett Coop.
Anyway, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
You can find me on Twitter at iRideOK.
And that is the end of the episode.
And oh, yeah, yeah, you can find our shirts on TeePublic, Behind the Bastards.
So buy some shirts.
Reagan's ghost will scream for every shirt that you buy, but also you can buy phone cases and mugs.
Thank you for the word mugs.
I've gotten the word mugs, stickers, all of which will make Reagan's ghost screech in horror and shame.
So do that by buying products on tpublic.com.
And until next week, Leal, I love about 40% of you.
Jelly beans.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.