Conservative talk show host Dennis Prager on Monday made the wild claim that the unvaccinated today are treated worse than gay men during the height of the AIDS crisis. During an appearance on Newsmax, the PragerU founder said people who choose not to get vaccinated against the coronavirus are “the pariahs of America, as I have not seen in my lifetime... Can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users… had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable.”

Prager, who would have been in his thirties during the height of the AIDS crisis, apparently went the length of the decade without witnessing the endemic fear, ostracizing, and mistreatment of AIDS sufferers by wider society. During his Monday appearance, the conservative also shot his mouth off on the topic of climate change, saying that those concerned about it had an “idiotic, irrational, sick fear of extinction of the biosphere.” Disgusted, Prager continued, “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?’”