UPDATE: Mediaite DM’d me to say that we were right and they have pulled the article:
“Hey. You were correct. And the post has been removed. That was aggregated from another site who also got it wrong. Thanks for the help.”
The aggregation claim seems like one to save face because the article was clearly written by Josh Feldman. The source for their story, though, was a Raw Story post and they clearly got it wrong as well.
Either way Mediaite did pull the post and for that we give them KUDOS. Let’s just hope Josh Feldman is more careful in the future choosing his sources.
***ORIGINAL ARTICLE BELOW***
Josh Feldman over at Mediaite wrote a hit piece on Louie Gohmert yesterday with the title: GOP Rep. Gohmert: ‘Scary’ to Think Liberal Elites Would Use Vaccines for Population Control. The article quickly accuses Gohmert in the first paragraph of remarking “that it’s “scary” to imagine liberal elites like Bill Gates pushing vaccines on the general public in order to control and reduce the global population.” The problem is he made no such remark whatsoever.
Yesterday Rep. Louie Gohmert hosted a radio show for Tony Perkins on the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch radio show and he had on Alan Keyes as a guest. At one point Gohmert brings up a point made earlier by Keyes that we need a growing population to sustain an economy and proceeded to mention an WSJ article arguing the same point. The article also points out that despite conventional wisdom that we are headed towards overpopulation, the global population is actually slowing to a halt and will begin to decrease in 60 years.
Note, the topic was population growth and economics, not vaccines for liberal population control.
Gohmert then said:
“But when you follow God’s plan for reproduction and using marriage as the building block for multiplying – “Go forth and multiply” – though there are some that say we have multiplied enough, it turns out that’s not necessarily so. Really interesting…what are your thoughts on that?“
It’s at that point that Keyes mentions Bill Gates suggesting that vaccines might be a way to cull the earth’s population and then he mentions Ted Turner suggesting that 250-300 million people would be the ideal global population. Keyes then says that liberals
“actually believe that we’re a blight on the face of the planet, we human beings, and we should therefore be put on a path toward our own semi-extinction. I often try to get people to see that if you think about it, if we actually get back to the levels they’re talking about, it would just be these elitists and the people needed to service them. That’s all that will be left in the world.”
By this point the music is playing to end the radio segment and Gohmert just laughs and says “That’s a scary thought” to end the dialogue, clearly responding to the statement that only elitists and the people needing to service them would remain. And that’s it, the segment ends!
Gohmert NEVER said anything about using vaccines to cull the earth’s population being ‘scary’ and Mediaite needs to pull the article and Josh Feldman needs to apologize to Gohmert for getting this completely wrong.
Mediaite on Twitter is @Mediaite and Josh Feldman on twitter is @FeldManiac. They need to hear from you on this.
Also, here’s the FULL AUDIO so you can hear what I wrote is exactly what happened: