Intercollegiate Studies Institute/screenshot/YouTube
GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was slammed this week when a video of a 2021 Fox News appearance emerged in which he smeared Vice President Kamala Harris: He described her as being one of a “bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Vance faced an onslaught of bad press, as many commentators—including Harris’ step-daughter, Taylor Swift fans, Democratic officials, actor Jennifer Aniston, and several conservative women pundits—decried his comment.
Yet Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, might have had an easy way of dismissing the criticism, for not so long ago, while speaking to a group of conservatives, he blamed the negative media coverage he often received on “childless” reporters.
It turns out that his remark about Harris was not a one-off soundbite. This dig was part of a larger schtick that Vance has deployed to explain the challenges faced by the conservative movement, including derogatory stories in the media. In 2021, Vance presented the full pitch when he spoke at a conference outside Washington, DC, organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a rightwing outfit co-founded by William F. Buckley Jr. to promote conservative thought on college campuses. During this talk, Vance said he had been victimized by childless journalists. But first he noted that the conservative movement was screwed:
We have lost every single major cultural instiution in this country—Big Finance, Big Tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media, and the government. There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control. But there’s one of them, just one that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future, and that’s the consitutional republic that our founders gave us. We are never going to take Facebook, Amazon, Apple and turn them into conservative institutions. We are never going take the universities and turn them into conservative institutions… We might just be able to control the democratic institutions in this country… This is a raw fact of cynical politics. If we’re not willing to use the power given to us in the American constitutional republic, we’re going to lose this country.
To achieve that control, he said, right-wingers needed to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.” He added: “The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing the left has done in this country.”
Vance blasted the “next generation” of Democratic leaders—Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—for not having children. (Harris is stepmother to the two children from her husband’s previous marriage; Buttigieg adopted twins in 2021.) Vance ranted that that the Democratic Party had “become controlled by people who don’t have children” and that “the leaders of our country don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring.” He howled, “Not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.”
He then focused his attack on the media:
It’s honestly true of lot of folks in our press and in our media. Very often I will read a [negative] story about me….and I’ll think a little bit about the people who wrote those stories, and what you find consistently is that many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults. Let’s just be honest about it. Because, look, the elite model—the American dream to the elites—is get as much credentials as you can, get as much money as you can, get the most prestigious job, and that’s where you’re going to find you self-worth. But I have to be honest with you. Most of our mainstream reporters are not impressive enough to find a lot of self-meaning in their jobs. They’re just not good enough at it.
So it’s not just politicians who are to be dismissed because they have no kids; it’s journalists, too. Vance went on:
What society has built its entire civilization—the flow of information, the leaders of its country, political and governmental and also corporate—around completely childless adults? It’s never happened. This is a new thing in American life, probably a new thing in world history. It’s not good. It’s not healthy. You see the obsessive, weird almost humiliating aggressive posture of our media and you wonder how could these people be so miserable and unhappy. Well, the answer is because they don’t have any kids. Kids are the ultimate ways that we find… self-meaning in life.
Vance bemoaned low birth-rates in the United States, noting this was a “civilizational crisis.” He praised Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban for providing loans to newly married couples that are forgiven once they have children. He also proposed that parents be given more voting power than non-parents—a remark that has received attention in recent days.
When Vance dissed Harris as a “childless cat lady,” he was not speaking off the cuff. This runs deep for him. The right, as he sees it, has been outmaneuvered by the left on various fronts, and its only target of opportunity is the government. To win that battle, conservatives must target Democrats as foes of the family. And if the media don’t give Vance or his allies good coverage, well, you know why: reporters are wallowing in self-loathing because they’re not changing diapers, carpooling kids to soccer games, or worrying about college tuition.
Vance likes to pose as a big thinker, but this is a weird and simplistic way to see the world: dividing it into haves and have-nots regarding children. And it seems that many, it not most, elected officials, CEOs, and reporters are parents. (FYI, I have two children.) Still, Vance is relying on a skewed view of reality, as he draws up his master plan for the right. At least this distortion can help him dismiss any criticism from the media.
