White Babies Bad?

From Richard Rostron, The Response

According to Amanda Marcotte, a senior politics writer for Salon magazine, three pregnant women in the White House is nothing more than “a hateful project aimed both at white-ifying America and destroying decades of women’s progress.”

Created by ChatGPT.

That’s quite a mouthful.

But if you take a look at the full article she wrote, you’ll find it epitomizes her approach to ‘journalism’ (using the term loosely).

But, rather than draw my own conclusions, having determined to respond to her article, “Don’t buy MAGA’s baby boom hype,”

I tried to do the journalistic thing the way I had learned. In other words, I reached out to her with the hope of asking her some questions – to give her a chance to respond before I started writing.

This does not seem to fit with her approach.

Apparently, her caustic pros flow easier when they don’t suffer the inconvenience of other opinions.

But Ms. Marcotte has not responded to my invitation, and I am left to go it alone, basing this article solely on her own words.

Here are some of the questions I had hoped to ask:

• You spoke of immigration in your article. Do we have a responsibility to support the rights of immigrants to maintain their own cultures?
• You’ve raised concerns that women are being “shamed into childbirth” by the administration and, presumably, MAGA supporters. Why is that worse than women who were shamed into abandoning traditional roles of staying home and raising the children?
• Is procreation important? Why or why not?
• How is it a threat to “social change, racial diversity and women’s equality” if we have more white babies?
• If white babies are so bad, how did social change, racial diversity and women’s equality gain footholds in American culture when, in 1960, for instance, America was 87% white?  
• Is it racist to have white babies?
• Should we have laws to limit the number of white babies or should we sterilize all white men?
• Reflecting back on my first question, if we have a responsibility to support the rights of immigrants to maintain their own cultures, don’t they have a similar responsibility to support our right to maintain our culture? Or, isn’t it just possible that they have more of a responsibility to assimilate into our society?

I don’t know for sure how Ms. Marcotte would have responded to my questions but I think I can make an educated guess.

I saw in her article how she got around the fact that Usha Vance, the wife of VP J.D. Vance, is not white by writing that MAGA types ‘are mad at Usha Vance for having a baby that isn’t white.’ I wonder how many MAGA types she polled to arrive at that conclusion?

She tied the article to the concerns of liberals about employment uncertainty, the costs of healthcare, and the Trump administration’s ‘attack’ on public schools. These concerns would have prompted additional questions from me, such as:

• What do you say about job growth under Joe Biden when so many of the hirings were to work, in some capacity, for the federal government? And, with employment rates showing stability, how can you point a finger of blame at Trump?
• In regard to healthcare, how can you blame Trump when, after the lies of keeping our own doctors and insurance, we’ve found that Obamacare has dramatically increased the costs of healthcare and insurance?
• As for public schools, how can you defend them when their own report cards show that they are failing spectacularly? What about their focus on DEI over a practical education that focuses on tools they can use in life, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic?

For those who think I’m being too harsh on Ms. Marcotte, maybe these headlines of recent articles she’s written will give you a better idea of whether she might have some biases:

• The pro-ICE church is worse than you think
• How Kristi Noem turned ICE into the Proud Boys
• MAGA is weirdly thirsty for Barron Trump
• ICE is not the victim
• Sorry, GOP. There’s no Christian revival
• Minnesota day care hoax is fueled by MAGA psychosexual weirdness

What surprises me is that Salon magazine is not included in an online search for the most liberal publications. That included publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Mother Jones, but no Salon. Go figure.