Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Ronald and Nancy Reagan: The Bastards Behind the AIDS Crisis

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

In Part Two: Part Two: Ronald and Nancy Reagan: The Bastards Behind the AIDS Crisis, Robert is joined again by Andy Beckerman (Couples Therapy Podcast) and they continuing discussing The AIDS epidemic and how the Reagans were involved.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, this is part two of our episode on the Reagan's and the AIDS crisis. And my guest with me, as with on Tuesday, is Andy Beckerman of Couples Therapy. Hey, everyone. How are you doing? How are you doing, Andy?

What's going on? 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, if you had a graph of my energy as we hear more and more about just how... Look, it's not like I didn't know that the Reagan's 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. 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. So the graph of my enthusiasm and it goes from like making jokes to just like these motherfuckers. Yeah. So it's like a downhill slope of the emotional journey we all went through in that first episode. But I'm going to 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. Turns out... Well, I don't know. He's got superheal... you know, he heals.

I don't want to go on this journey. Yeah, no, this is not a healing factor. The very special X-Men issue about all this? I want Wolverine and like the... What was the crossover where all the... They fought other enemies. Like Magneto went and fought Spider-Man or something and Mandarin fought Sylocke. It's shocking to me that we're still able to have cartoon villains called the Mandarin.

Oh, no. It's really remarkable. No, I believe he's dead now. So that they could have less racist characters. But Wolverine vs. Reagan. Hey, Marvel, get on that. Yeah. Ooh, maybe make that the next X-Men.

Now that the X-Men are part of the Marvel Universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Oh, did that happen? Yes, when Disney bought the box. I'm behind on my Marvel news. Oh my, yeah, you're right. Disney did by Fox. Don't you read Deadline? Speaking of Fox.

Reagan was a 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. Had 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 and he was publicly homophobic. It 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. Like Sheldon Adelson? I assume he gets funding from a bunch of different...

One of the articles that I found on it was called the Democrats' War on Science. If you are a conservative, City Journal is a relatively reputable news source. If you're looking for right wing journals of punditry. What 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 age 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. 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. It's 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.

It made it easier to get drugs that hadn't been fully approved yet for a disease that was working at a date. 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 the fun part of being fair because once you dig into these things, like I read it 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- What syndrome? Ray's syndrome. Who's Ray? It's a disease that causes like brain damage and can kill kids.

I think taking aspirin, basically a 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. Oh, I remember commercials when I was a kid. Yeah, and so the pharmaceutical industry, obviously, once in a minute 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. Only 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 bad or 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 delve into the other cases here, you know? You know? The defenses of the administration. This is what I was talking about in part one, where I was like, once the pharmaceutical industry smelled a profit to be made, is that when things started to 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. 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 Koop as Surgeon General. Mr. Koop is a hero of the 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. 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 Koop was to tell me, now son, this place has a damn good bucket of fried bud here, I'd be like, you look like the kind of man who knows where good fried chicken is. My Truvada recipe's got seven secret herbs and spices in it.

The best, I mean, what, the, well, I guess I'll trust you, Koopie. Really getting a lot of play out of the Reagan voice jokes. If I was a journalist, if I was a journalist at the time, what's the poop on Koop? What's the poop scoop on Koop? Because they used to say poop is a scoop 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 chin beard.

If you can name a Surgeon General other than C. Everett Koop. 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 Koop 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 is still hot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Linnie Bruce was just a gleam in Fatty Arbuckle's eye.

I don't know much about the evolution of comedy. So yeah, Koop 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. Koop said, quote. What a scam. How many grifters are there in the Christian community?

He's not a grifter. I will say this for Koop. 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 like 30% there on See Everett. Yeah. Well, See Everett Koop wrote this book about, you know, hell, 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 Koop, when he was appointed, many Democrats, including Henry Waxman, spoke out against Koop. He said, quote, Dr. Koop 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 Koop'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 Koop 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 Koop had to be found elsewhere, quote, that elsewhere may be 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, the start of this seems like Koop 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 is 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 we age.

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. Koop monitored CDC reports in the response of public health services from the sidelines during the first several years of the AIDS crisis, despite his, his job was essentially to inform the American people about disease, 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 Koop, the reason for this was that his involvement would have implicated the Reagan administration in basically caring about gay people. Koop 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 Brant, Koop's boss, told him that he was

not allowed to speak publicly about AIDS during the epidemic. In 1983, when Brant created an executive task force on AIDS, Koop was not invited. By 1985, he'd started to get pissed about this. Koop thought it was outrageous that thousands of people had died and the surgeon general had said nothing. Now there were people agitating that Koop 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 Koop be, quote, un-muzzled, 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, Koop was made a member of the AIDS Task Force, and that winter he was ordered to prepare a report on the AIDS epidemic. Koop knew from the start that he was going to be a hard to write and 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 Koop 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, see, it's not an easy sell today.

Koop. 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 Koop fucking did something. On October 22, 1986, with more than 16,000 Americans dead from AIDS, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released the Surgeon General's report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Here is 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, Koop 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 deserts 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? Yes. I mean, look, 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 Koop is fighting against is a behavior you see on every side of the aisle in 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 about the Red Rose avatar on Twitter and talk about the gassing of people. I've met some of these people. There's tankies in the United Kingdom, which the term started because the Soviet Union essentially invaded countries in its dominion who were trying to agitate for more independence

than civil rights outside of the USSR. These British socialists were like, no, it's good that the USSR is crushing resistance with tanks. Those people, there's a strong strain of that on the left who believes that Bashar al-Assad, 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.

There are neo-Nazis fighting against the Russians there, and the Ukrainian government is a Nazi government because there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine. It is very easy for people on, and it's the same thing you see on the right, with 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 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 galt's galt, we'll give them an island of their own. So if you don't have empathy, look, I'm saying we create a test for people 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 galt's galt, and they'll all be like, you know, they'll all be erect from

living in their Einran fancy. Oh, I thought you were describing New Hampshire. But no guns, they don't get guns. So it's not like New Hampshire. Oh, they're not going to be happy. They're not going to be happy with that. Or maybe guns with blanks. Yeah, that might do the trick.

I mean, like Westworld. But yeah, so Coop is doing the right thing here. That's 1986. Hanging with Dr. Coop. The surprisingly woke Dr. Coop despite everything else about his life. Hey, write that movie. 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, ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. We're back, and we're talking about C. Everett Koop. He's just released his 1986 report on AIDS, Koop'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. Koop 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 include 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 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.

Well, that's a shame. They get better with age. That's what I've heard. Yeah. I've heard. Oh, vintage condoms. I get all my condoms on eBay and make sure that they're from, well, it's just gone. Let's move fast this bit.

So in his report, Coop commented on drug use as well as oral and anal sex because those were all major wades 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, headline their coverage of the report, Coop urges AIDS sex course in grade school. The LA Times.

Look, it worked in my grade school. William F. Buckley, Jr., a famous conservative pundit, attacked the Surgeon General for suggesting... And 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 Schaeffle, 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 Schaeffle when the book was written. Yeah, this lady, wind the... Also, the fly? Yeah. It was based on the...

Just the Jeff Gold woman before the change was based on Phyllis Schaeffle. The fly itself, the actual fly, before the change. So not Jeff Gold woman's fly. The concept of a fly was based on... The concept of a bottom-feeding vermin. Yeah. So Phyllis said that the AIDS report, quote, looks and reads like it was edited by the gay task force.

She accused Surgeon General Koop of suggesting that third graders learn, quote, safe sodomy. She said, Koop, why anyone paid attention to this lady is one of the mysteries of the 80s. I'm not the Surgeon General to make Phyllis Schaeffle 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. Koop 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. So I was talking about in part one. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The Bible's about compassion. Yeah. And then that's Koop how Koop 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. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't believe in God, but like it's supposedly this being unknowable force, unknowable force that created all, 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, a lot of hate mail for calling God a creature. I, Koop 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 Koop's report, we have AIDS, a special report, almost the same title as Koop'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, Koop 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 Wright, 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 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? They're just nice little, they're like little, okay, you know, Nilla wafers? You know, 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 is frigging like that? 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, Robert is reading copy from a piece of paper. No, that was all extemporaneous. I just, anyway, let's move on to AIDS. Oh, that was a 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, but if, or sorry, this is a quote from a C-word Coop. 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 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 Undersecretary of Education, Gary Bauer. He was a Baptist and a bit of a stickler for the word values. Here's a picture of a 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 weasley 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. Big boy suit. Yeah. 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. That's 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 homosexual 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 recommended. Shortly after that, Senator Jesse Helms passed a law thingy. So wait, hold on. 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. Four thousand. Hold on. Did the CDC, was the CDC like, by the way, if you're going to do heroin, don't snore it.

Inject it. Yeah. Why not? It said he is not allowed to promote intravenous drugs, right? What was the CDC doing before that? Was it? They were, what they're saying is that like by saying, hey, here's where you find clean needles.

Here's how to like 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 like going like, hey, snorting 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

stand. And you want to cook it and inject it. No, man, big, big Ernie's cell smacks so pure you don't got to cook it. That's the CDC's official report in 19, no. So four thousand eight hundred and fifty five Americans died in 1987. This was in spite of the fact that the year, 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 placebo's. 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 about Johnny Arson. He's like Johnny Carson, but he lights fires. Oh good. That's some 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. 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 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? Fucking piece of shit. I'm sorry that I have nothing. It just really boils my blood. Here's the thing, in speeches that C. Everett Koop 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. Koop 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 Koop is king. Koop is king? He's not perfect. King Koopa is what we're saying. You'll find criticisms of Koop 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. The Everett Koop 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 Koop was the surgeon general, and he had a little bit more power than these people. Koop 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, it was the first thing distributed on that wide a fucking, like your joke, but like that is, it was at the time the largest mass mailing in American history. And it's pictures of how gay sex works and how condoms work and stuff. Yeah, so it was how you got online originally. Yeah, well, it's A-line. Cause 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 in rural outpost in the heartland, Koop's pamphlet did. So not only is he giving out information on gay sex is the first he's forcing it effective sex ed on families in rural America.

Well, how did it look how 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 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 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. That was 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, is it really fucked up word to use all the time? Like you should, 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. Yeah, 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's 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 context. 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 already eight years old. Yeah. So like I went, 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, I didn't really catch any of that for my parents. That was just like school. So there's just homophobia everywhere and like, it was 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 a 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, 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, that's the thing that stuck in my mind about my high school age education. But I was, 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 nineties and north of the Mason Dixon line, it turned into like a sex paranoia in general thing.

I certainly can't, I would, I would describe a lot of what I encountered as a sex paranoia in general thing, but I, 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. 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, 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, no, it makes sense.

You've got to get the info out. Yeah. And there was like, it was already around the time where, uh, arachnophobia came out. Yeah. And so people were worried about bugs. Yeah. So, this is a very basic thing, but people flip their shit over this. This is a major issue.

There's tons of political cartoons, people freaking out over the pamphlet. I'm worried about skaters. I don't want them to talk about how gay people have sex. 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. Um, now it's important to note that C. Everett Coop was not a hippie-dippy dude. He was not, uh, you would certainly not call him pro-gay, um, like his advice was specifically like don't have sex with anyone who could carry the, 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, the most couched it possibly could have been, but at least he was getting the information out. And if you don't use a condom, just do hand stuff. Yeah. Just do, 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 is 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 sheet of Christ is the only room you need. Oh boy.

Uh, as I said before, a coop, severate coop agreed with president Reagan that religion and morality, uh, we're 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 Sea of Red Coop, the man who taught America to fuck.

Another great name for his, uh, biopic on January 20th, 1989, Ronald Reagan left office more than, more than 14,000 Americans died from AIDS that year. Another 18,000 died in 1990. One of these was Ryan White, uh, 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 man Reagan did not like to mention. It is no coincidence that Reagan would feel comfortable signaling, signaling 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 Regans to die of AIDS. Uh, Ronald Reagan's good buddy Roy Kohn died of AIDS in 1986.

He was apparently furious when during treatment, his doctor repeatedly insisted that he stay abstinent and that that was most of the advice that Kohn was able to get. Uh, the Regans did send Kohn 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 gay marriage.

Your name, Patty? Yeah, I think it was Patty. To stretch. 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, no, that is a moral issue, but that's not it. He didn't have a moral issue with treating gay people of AIDS. He himself was a coward and that was a moral issue. Right. He had a deeper failure than homophobia. Which I think is important to note, because I think people look at, 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 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 stayed 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, they also, like, 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 knew that, 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, 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. Now 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, was, was fine enough, president. He was fine. Yeah, he's fine. New deal was good. New deal was good. Not, not, not being a fascist was really the best thing he did. Right.

Yeah. Right. Super kudos to that. Could have joined World War II earlier, maybe, or done something economically to help, uh, help, uh, like, sanctions on Hitler before... Oh, could have agreed to take Jewish refugees from the country, rather than, I don't know, the problem. I mean, I've been thinking about it earlier.

Before it gets into... There's a lot to... Yeah. You know, the only president you're gonna find with less than a couple of buckets of blood on his hands is Jimmy Carter, and, you know, that's, that's just the way it is. He's the, he's the one nice guy we let be president. Hey, Jimmy Carter, 2020, let's, 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. Oh, yeah. I was at the location of 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, it was 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... 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. Well... 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, 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 if him and Nancy were both secretly gay, and they're like, well, we can't, if

we say anything, 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 Regans, Nancy and Ronald, both in their social life, were clearly capable of not being judgmental assholes to their friends who were gay.

See Everett Koop, 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 Koop cared more about human life, so even though he was homophobic, he did the right thing. And 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. Yeah. Well, it's about, it's, you know, an ethical question, which is like, and really ethics

comes down to like, will you do the right thing no matter what the circumstances are? And Koopy 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 and what are the differences, I don't know. There's not. It really isn't. 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 plugables? 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, if they are lovers and spouses and siblings and best friends, they do sets together about their relationship, then on the podcast, we take the best live sets and bring them to you. People like, so she hasn't made a Nicole Byer or Rachel Bloom from Crazy Ex-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, yeah, it's fun. So Couples Therapy, here on the How Stuff Works Network. And I'm Robert Evans.

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, Behind theBastards.com. We'll have a good old picture of Sea Everett Coop up there. You'll all enjoy that. He looks like a guy named Sea Everett Coop.

Anyway, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at At BastardsPod. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. And that is the end of the episode. And oh yeah, you can find our shirts on T-Public, 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. Stickers.

I have forgotten the word mugs. Stickers. All of which will make Reagan's Ghost screech in horror and shame. So do that by buying products on T-Public.com. And until next week, well, I'd love about 40% of you jelly beans. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.