The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [86]
I frowned. Come on, people, I thought. First of all, in 1992, the population of the United States was already well over 200 million. There’s no way such an article could possibly have existed. And indeed, when I went back and looked later on, the only mention in Time’s Earth Summit coverage of population control that I could find—amid otherwise massive and voluminous coverage of the summit participants’ proposals for greenhouse gas restrictions, sustainable development policies, preservation of genetic material, species protection, air quality, and dozens of other issues—was an item about how “in what is perhaps the worst example of bureaucratic obfuscation, the text at one point endorses the promotion of appropriate demographic policies—the nearest negotiators could come to confronting the explosive issue of population control.”
The idea that someone at the Earth Summit was proposing cutting the American population by more than half ought to have struck even these people as absurd. Beyond that, the whole idea was counterintuitive. Not even environmentalists think the American population is threateningly large—not compared to Bangladesh, India, and China. But more interesting to me was the fact that Hagee felt so comfortable offering up these absurd fictions; he must have known that no one was going to call bullshit or bother to look up his “facts.”
Hagee went on. “Then there was a law they tried to pass last week,” he began, “to make it mandatory to check for birth defects using amniocentesis. Now why would they want to check for birth defects? What is the only reason you would want to know if a baby has birth defects before birth? To abort. To abort.”
I looked that one up, too. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act—which I had to assume was the piece of legislation he was talking about, since no other bill involving genetic screening popped up in Congress that week—was a law that I suppose could have, in the abstract, encouraged abortions. But it certainly had nothing to do with requiring prenatal screening. All the proposed bill would do is prevent health insurers and employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic information gleaned from medical tests. The general point of the bill was to alleviate concerns people might have about getting themselves or their fetuses tested for birth defects. Hagee didn’t have to misrepresent this bill—he could have said quite honestly what it was and still have been correct in saying that it encouraged abortions. But what’s interesting is that he didn’t do that; he just went the fictional route.
Next he went after global warming, denouncing it as a bunch of bosh.
“These people, what they do is, they tell you that something is a problem when it isn’t,” he said. “That is how they control you. And who else does that?”
“The Devil!” some voices shouted.
“The Devil, that’s right,” he said. “You know who else? Hitler did that. What did he say Europe’s problem was?”
“Jews!” the voices cried out.
“The Jews, that’s right. Now, were the Jews a problem in Europe?”
No! No!
“Of course not,” he said. “Of course the Jews weren’t a problem. And that’s exactly the same thing they’re doing with global warming!”
“Hear hear!” shouted Brian, Rebecca’s husband, clapping enthusiastically.
“Amen!” I shouted.
Hagee smiled.
“They say we’re all going to die because the ice caps are going to melt,” he snorted. “No we’re not. We just gonna get wet—IF they melt.”
The crowd roared.
“They want you to be afraid that aerosol is going to contaminate the planet,” he went on. “So what? Don’t worry about it. The earth belongs to God. And God…”
The crowd finished the rest of his sentence along with him:
“…did not instill us with an attitude of fear!”
“Aerosol,” he sneered. “Aerosol destroying the earth. Ridiculous. Why, if aerosol could kill, everyone on the set with Jan Crouch of TBN woulda been dead a long time