Brent Bozell takes on last week’s newly minted myths that Ronald Reagan “ignored” the AIDS epidemic (with help from Deroy Murdock on NRO) and “began” the 1980 campaign by pandering to white racists in Mississippi.

What the Reagan-bashing stories left out about the 1980s was the liberal fearmongering of that era – that the news media (and women’s magazines, and Oprah) suggested the AIDS epidemic would soon spread to the heterosexual population and cause a wave of mass death, that AIDS was an “equal opportunity destroyer.” Old myths fall away, and new myths take their place.