‘Get busy. Make babies.’

May 12, 2006

I know better than to take [tag]Fox News[/tag]’ [tag]John Gibson[/tag] too seriously, but his “My Word” segment from last night, brought to my attention from reader D.S., was even more disturbing than usual.

Make more [tag]babies[/tag]. That’s the lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple days.

First, a story Wednesday that half the kids under 5 years old in this country are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. Know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority population is Hispanic.

Why is that? Hispanics are having more kids and others, notably the ones [tag]Hispanics[/tag] call gabachos — [tag]white[/tag] people — are having fewer.

Now in this country, European ancestry people — white people — are having kids at a rate that sustains the population, even grows it a bit. That compares to Europe where the birthrate is in the negative zone. They’re not having enough babies to sustain the population.

Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things, and those immigrants are having way more babies that the native population. Hence Eurabia.

Gibson goes on to lament white people who don’t have children because they don’t want kids to “get in the way of a prosperous and comfortable modern life.”

He concludes by imploring Americans — in context, Gibson seems to be referring to white Americans — to “get busy” and “make babies.”

Or put another way, a slogan for our times: Procreation not recreation.

Now, Fox News is Fox News, so no one expects too much in the way of reasoned discourse, but how does this guy manage to stay on the air?

Typical Republican nonsense. Forget about the insular and clearly racist tone of it all and consider the consequences of large numbers of people having babies they may not actually want. What makes it uniquely Republican of course is the notion that Gibson wants the babies born, but won’t give them another thought after that (unless they grow up wealthy).

  • Gibson is a provincial fear mongering racist, and he caters to the same. By the way, are not most hispanics caucasion? I think if “white” people would bother to get to know their hispanic neighbors, they might have their fears relieved. By and large, they are pretty nice people.

  • Would this fall under the category of eugenics? 🙂

    And if Gibson does have children, can we take them away from him?

  • But he’s overlooked the most obvious and practical solution to his “problem.” Exhorting white people to have babies is hardly going to work. But if he promotes making jobs typically held by latinos into higher-paying jobs — so that latinos move into the middle-class — then statistics suggest that they, like other members of the middle class, will start to curb their baby making.

  • I’m sure that Gibson only wants white Republican babies. In other words Democrats should continue to practice their birth control regimens .

  • Didn’t he say anything about avoiding mixed marriages to prevent “muddying” the race? Seriously?!! How can you say that kind of thing? What if he said Hispanics should have fewer babies?

    I thought the Hispanics were the new Republikan base. Wouldn’t this trend then represent a move toward the permenent Republikan majority that DeLay et al are trying to engineer?

  • how does this guy manage to stay on the air?

    I KNOW! I KNOW!

    By saying what his audience is thinking.

  • “Now, Fox News is Fox News, so no one expects too much in the way of reasoned discourse, but how does this guy manage to stay on the air? ”

    If reasoned discourse was presented, it would not stay on the air. Especially Fox, but all of the MSM is in the bag. Reasoned discourse would be educational, enlightening, and fact-filled. Therefore, it would be Liberal. Can’t have that on the air. GE (NBC) might lose some defense contracts. Angry VRWC bloggers might complain to CBS. Richard Cohen might have to agree with someone other than the Republicans.

    CB, I love your intent. But no matter how cynical I get, I can’t seem to keep up.

  • Can I smugly tell Gibson that this is America and if he doesn’t like it he should move back to Europe?

    You know, I’d love to know if Gibson has any kids too. I tried Wikipedia and his bio at Foxnews.com, no mention of any family at all. Anybody want to tackle this, just for a yes-or-no answer? Because wouldn’t it be great if we could be the ones to counter that this blowhard hasn’t been doing his share of procreating?

  • I always have to snicker at this woe-is-me argument from parents: childless people are selfish hedonists and procreators are heroic sacrificers for the greater good.

    There is nothing more selfish than thinking you’re important enough to reproduce.

  • “By the way, are not most hispanics caucasion?” – Gracious

    Depends on how you look at it. South Americans are usually of European descent, Native American, or for Brazilians some African descent. With a lot of mixing, of course.

    One way of looking at this is that the indigenous population of the Americas is going to win their countries back 😉 Sort of makes up for all our (being white folk) illegal immigration in the 1600’s and 1700’s.

    Being part French-Canadian, I suppose I can claim there is some native blood in there somewhere (there being a lot of generations between 1642 and 1890). So maybe they’ll let me stay an American when they take over. My daughter is lucky, she’s part French-Canadian on both sides.

    Gibson, he is an idiot, no?

  • Underlying all of these subtle messages is an enabling of bias and prejudice. Republicans have institutionalized the practice in their agendas and their campaigns. The surest way to guarantee a voter’s loyalty is to signal (wink, wink) that you hold the same unspoken bias. Republicans have made an art of framing and spinning these prejudices into issues of morality and patriotism. By doing so, it relieves the angst and conscience of those who support similar discriminations…in essence, they receive the message and it makes them feel better.

    While I despise Karl Rove, he truly understands the mindset of his constituency and he knows how to play it like a fine instrument. Sadly, his goal and the goal of so many like him is to simply obtain power in order to be in a position to legislate and dictate the beliefs he holds. If they were to ever actually express their agenda without restraint and deception, those in the mainstream middle would be stunned…which is why they are so adept at staying on message…they realize that they must first obtain full control before they can expose and implement their true objectives.

    more observations here:

    http://www.thoughttheater.com

  • but how does this guy manage to stay on the air?

    Because Pat Buchanan doesn’t have time to replace him

  • Can’t everyone just have less children so we can manage population growth in a responsible way?

    Calling for anyone to have more children ignores the growing healthcare problem, job scarcity, land issues, not to mention that the human race has already take more than its fair share of the world.

    When has rampant, uncontrolled population growth ever resulted in a better living environment?

    We have no naturual predators; most in America survive well into adulthood. Let’s all have a little personal responsibility when it comes to creating future generations.

  • “Lebensborn, Republican style” – – – 2Manchu

    My sentiments exactly. On hearing this, the very first thought in my mind was ” How Hitler-ish; making babies for the Reich legions….

  • It is just beginning to dawn on John Gibson and many other comfortable white men, mostly Republican, that they are going to wake up some day and they people who mow their lawns and clean their houses are going to outnumber them.

    It scares them to death.

  • Gibson’s take: “Make babies, but don’t expect one damn thing to change as far as asking our society to help support them and raise them through enlightened policies.”

    It’s always people like Gibson and Brit Hume who look to disasters like Katrina and wonder how their stock investments might be affected. So maybe they’d find this piece of interest:

    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0403.longman.html

    “[W]e still leave it to individuals to bear (in both direct expenses and foregone wages) nearly all of the growing cost of raising the children who sustain the system, while allowing those individuals to retain a dwindling share of the value they create. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, a typical middle-class family will spend over $200,000 in direct expenses to raise a child born this year–not including the cost of college. Then there is the growing opportunity cost of raising children. A mother (or father) who stays at home or accepts a family-friendly, part-time job to be with the kids often sacrifices substantial income. Even for families with modest earning potential, the opportunity cost of raising a single child through age 18 can easily exceed $1 million.

    “All of us benefit hugely from such parental investment. What could you buy with your Social Security check, or your I.R.A.s for that matter, if everyone else in your generation had simply forgotten to have children or had failed to invest in them? Yet parents do not receive any greater pensions than non-parents for the sacrifices they make to raise and educate the future workers upon whom we will all depend in old age.

    “We also live in an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which the formation of human capital becomes increasingly essential to all sectors. Yet again, we leave the cost of amassing this human capital primarily in the hands of individual parents and low-paid caregivers and educators, nearly all of whom could vastly increase their incomes simply by getting out of the “nurturing business.” Many are, as attested to by the high divorce rate, the growing shortage of caregivers and qualified teachers, and above all by the dwindling fertility of the American people. Birthrates among native-born Americans are now well below the levels needed to replace the population and are dropping precipitously among immigrants as well.

    “These two trends–the mounting costs of caring for a growing elderly population and the increasing importance of human capital to the economy–have fundamentally altered the economics of family life. To put it bluntly, childrearing is fast becoming a sucker’s game.”

  • Why does Fox keep an alarmingly bigoted blowhard on the air?
    Dunno. Maybe Hillary can ask Rupert next time they hang out together.
    Publicly confronting him on this would likely get her my support.
    Silence will make sure she never gets it.

  • I wish there were a way to ask him this question–

    Mr. Gibson, how many babies have you given birth to?

    None? Then STFU already.

  • “It is just beginning to dawn on John Gibson and many other comfortable white men, mostly Republican, that they are going to wake up some day and they people who mow their lawns and clean their houses are going to outnumber them.

    It scares them to death.” – Pug

    What does it matter? The Republicanites are so busy selling out this country to the Communist Chinese that it won’t matter who lives in it.

  • “Make babies”, this only applies if you have blue eyes and blond hair.

    (Only kidding of course).

  • “Does that clown Gibson even have children? ”

    It took a while, but I found John Gibson’s bio and family details.

    According to this link:

    http://www.nndb.com/people/949/000044817/

    He has one child. Looks like he’d better start the horizontal mambo himself. Only one kid for the nation?

  • This is at least as old as the 1870s English (and to a lesser extent American) Eugenics movements. Once William Farr (1st British Register General) began publishing the first reliable national statistics on births and deaths, it was no trick for early statisticians such as Francis Galton and Karl Pearson to compute the fact that “the better sorts” were producing babies at a far lower rate than “the lesser sorts”. Malthus had made the same point speculatively in 1798, and Gregory King’s “census” of England’s families provided “evidence” of it just over a century before that.

    It took a small, but determined, number of early Birth Control advocates (Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, Margaret Sanger) to point out that this wasn’t “natural law” – that women didn’t desire the maximum number of children that the Intelligent Designer had proposed for them, that with higher incomes and more education they willingly brought down their own birth rates. About the only people who want high birth rates anymore are fanatical religious sects under the sway of insane patriarchs. Any sane person with access to birth control will use it, though there is *growing* movement in the Republican Party to ban birth control along with abortion.

    The Nazis during the ’30s had a program, commemorated in a series of postage stamps as the “Mother and Child campaign”, designed to increase the output of Master Race babies. Putin, alarmed at the sub-replacement level of birth-rates in Russia, has initiated a similar campaign to promote fertility. The old Soviet Union, realizing that it (and hence its army) might someday be swamped with Muslims as against White Russians, due to the high birth rates of the former and the lower birth rates of the latter, began a schizophrenic government policy of putting their Muslim women to work in factories (and going to school) and getting their White Russian women back into the home and baby making (five babies got you a red star medal as “heroine mother of the Soviet Union”). The country fell apart before either half of that program had made much “progress”.

    The Reagan administration began imposing the “global gag rule” – no foreign aid if any part of that could conceivably used for even discussing birth control or (eek) abortion – while continuing a policy under which US women have had legal access to abortion since 1973. Clinton lifted the gag, then the Regal Moron re-imposed it.

    I’ve only been addressing the business of making babies in Europe and North America, and even then in a highly limited way. There are many more twisted and tragic instances of this issue in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

    Through all this is a phenomenon I’ve never understood. Why is it that dominant (usually white) males hate women? And even more importantly, for politics in this country, why do so many women vote for such hatred?

  • This is merely a further demonstration that “right winger” is a synonym for moron.

    Karl Rove was actually quite right a few years ago when he made the observation that Latinos could be a “natural constituency” for Republicans. They are socially conservative, they are patriotic (I think if you compared enlistment rates by ethnicity, you find they join the military at a higher rate than their percentage of the population, and even during Vietnam, Latino/Chicano vets got a better welcome home), they believe in working your way out of a hole, etc., etc.

    But guys like Gibson keep coming along and reminding them that “el padrone” is always a pig, which defeats Rove’s analysis.

    We gotta love those Republican “minutemen” and activists like Mrs. Dellacroce, the Bimbette of Belsen in Phoenix who founded Mothers Against Illegal Immigration to insure that the Mexicans don’t commit “genocide” against her two (upper class) sons and limit their chances to “keep what we were given” – particularly when you read that 60+ percent of Americans disagree with their politics.

    So please, thank you John Gibson for reminding us who’s really hiding behind the “nobody here but us patriots” mask.

  • One of the interesting things I’ve learned reading about early Christianity was the fact that Jesus, Peter and Paul all believed that the current evil, procreative world we live in, with its births and deaths, was going to end, in their lifetimes (well, not Jesus’) and the Kingdom of God would be established where there would be no death, birth or even two sexes.

    Because of these beliefs, many early christians, including Paul, lived lives of chasity, not getting married or not having children.

    Imagine how the Church had to scramble when they figured out they needed their members to start having kids or they would be wiped off the face of the Earth 😉

    Not to mention some of the heresies that sprung up over this issue.

    Frankly, I think we are better off in America with Latin Americans who are Christians coming into the country and out breeding us, than the French who are losing out to Muslims.

  • I love this story. Terrified bigots getting the vapors over the notion that the brown people will eventually outnumber them. The fact that hypocrite Gibson himself only managed to produce one offspring for the fatherland is icing on the cake.

    Aside from the delicious reminder that the GOP faces demographic oblivion, this also works well to remind the teens and twenty-somethings how far behind the curve Republicans are with fear-mongering about gays and non-caucasians.

  • 1. Mexicans are disproportionate consumers of state-funded services such as Medicaid, welfare, education, ‘special education,’ police, criminal courts, prisons…

    2. Mexicans are poor economic producers. They were poor producers in ‘Mexico’ and remain poor producers. They didn’t leave Mexico. They brought it with them. “Ah Mexico, Mexico, she is a lifelong love affair. Where ever I am, there she is also!” Thus goes the life of the Mexican Indian. ‘Mexico’ is not a state of mind and it is not a ‘culture.’ Mexico is a genetic pool.

  • I’m putting this on my “To Do” list…”make white baby”…

    It’s on the list right after “shopping for Dad: tuna, extra TV dinner,” and “deadhead rhododendrons”…

  • I’ve made two American babies already…oops, they’re Hispanic, so does that mean they don’t count? I guess I’ll just have to find me a white woman.
    Hey! Where’re all the white women?

  • Half my family is Mexican-American and I have never heard anyone use the term “gabacho” in regards to a white person. Gringo, yes. Guero, yes. Gabacho, never. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that it is used by Chicano Nationalists, but that hardly reflects the overall views of all Chicanos just as John Gibson’s views hardly reflect the overall views of white people.

    Or at least, one hopes this is the case.

  • hi my trinh le nguyen,,now i am lisa andrews i was born in vietnam in 1975.i am mix with american and vietnam.,,,they call me at MY LAI i come to usa in 89 is take me all most 16 untill now,,how can i fine my american dad,,dath or live ,i think he is,,i born 75 the war is over then,,but with out pic,,name or id,,,,no way i can find him,,the only thing is DNA but how,,,no one help me,,no one know how bad it is to be a mix kids live in vietnam then,,,we can’t go school,kids hate at us,,,trow rocks,,hit us,,,they think that our mothers is sale there badys make money frome american,,,but yes they are,,but is not every vietnames woman are like that,,,,like my mom,,she dont know enlish,,but 1 american man like her,,so she think is love,,but after one time american man hit and run,,we never see him again,,we did’t know why,,or what have hapan to him….i think american need to do something about war babies,,,is alots out there,,,hafe black and viet,,,and hafe wite and viet,,we dont aks to be born like this with out father,,,untill now i still dont see that goverment doing anything for us ,,,is not ok american man go the war and he think oh well i am here,,so lake make babies and run they can’t find us,,,is that amrican man think????………some of us got bless to get out vietnam,,,all 15 years of my life in viet nam,,,i got no food to eat,,i got to pick up food in str, me and my mom go place asking for food,,i still ,,anything to make money or to have food just for 1 day,,,we live day by day,,,is not eazy,,you not want to be like us,,,so what american man give us,,,,a terriable life,,is that american do for there manly,,,we do not ask for nothing but a ringht thing to do,,that if any one of american man think they mind have babies in vietnam,,,please go surch,,,so if any one out there can help me with this jornals i be very bless,,i do so much to fine,,,but the only thing is where can i take a DNA frome vietnam war,,my email is sandl07@sbcglobal.net or my # 817-733-2702…and i am hafe viet and white,,now i got meried and got 2 butifull kids,,,and my mom is not stay with me that long,,so if she go,,i got no family….so please help me,,,ty,,sorry my english not that good,,,,,

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