J.D. Vance Doesn’t Care If Kamala Harris Has Kids. He’s Mad His Own Kids Can See Her.

If they can see her, they might want to be her.

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Now let’s talk about gross disgusting J.D. Vance and his ideas about women like Kamala Harris.

(AUDIO VERSION OF THIS POST IS HERE.)

Holy crap, the world and the presidential race have changed since our last regular dispatch!

Donald Trump got shot and survived. The Republican National Committee held a prematurely ejaculatory convention — which we attended, and are still trying to wash off the stench — where they all but declared victory in the November elections.

It ended on a Thursday night. Friday, we started flying back from Milwaukee and ended up in the CrowdStrike/Delta airplane shitshow, stranded in Atlanta for three days. As we were heading back to the airport Sunday afternoon, down came the announcement that Joe Biden was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing our brilliant vice president Kamala Harris to stand for election in his place.

Now which side has all the youthful momentum and energy, and which one just looks gross and weird?

Like clockwork, the brutally racist and sexist attacks against Harris began, because Republicans literally don’t have anything else to run on besides their own brutal racism and sexism. (OK, they have homophobia and transphobia and other kinds of hate.)

One commentator on Fox Business called Harris “the original Hawk Tuah girl,” if you want an idea how disgustingly vile it’s gotten. (If you need to know what that means, click here.) They aim to paint her as a mere slut, a “side chick,” who got where she got by sleeping her way to the top. (Super cool way to get votes from normal people, white dudes.)

Republicans are rushing to call Harris a “DEI Hire,” because that’s their current euphemism for the N-word. (Don’t even let them pretend it’s anything but that. Just say, “I get it, you’re not allowed to say the N-word in public anymore and you’re lashing out.” Call them a loser and walk away.)

And all of this is bringing to light just how fucking gross and weird and nauseating J.D. Vance — Donald Trump’s running mate his idiot sons chose for him — really is, especially his authoritarian Christian beliefs about women and families. Turns out he’s frequently made Kamala Harris a primary target of his attacks on women who don’t take their marching orders from white conservative Christian men.

‘Childless Cat Ladies’

J.D. Vance told Tucker Carlson, in a clip that’s going newly viral, that this country is run by “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.” He namechecked Kamala Harris (who has two stepchildren), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — who has children, but didn’t when Vance said that — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He said those three “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous DC and New York status games.” He said it doesn’t make sense to give the country over to people who don’t have a “direct stake” in it.

Stake. Bookmark that word.

This wasn’t a one-off for Vance. He’s consistently fucking weird and gross and off-putting about these matters.

On MSNBC last night, Alex Wagner played a bunch of clips of Vance talking about Harris, and about childless women, and held a panel discussion on what might be the root causes of Vance’s sick beliefs:

In one clip, Vance said people with children should have extra votes over people without. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.”

Wagner highlighted Vance saying in 2001: “The question really to me is about the baby. We want women to have opportunities. We want women to have choices. But above all we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life.” Vance is, of course, a well-known anti-abortion extremist. He’s seemingly advocated for women to stay in abusive marriages, at least sometimes.

Once he said: “Universal daycare is class war against normal people.” Huh?

What a fucking weirdo.

Why is J.D. Vance like this?

That was Alex Wagner’s question, verbatim.

And, well, there are a few ways to look at that question.

Wagner hosted Jessica Winter, who wrote in The New Yorker this week on “J.D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family.” Winter explained how Vance seems to have gotten a lot of his warped ideas about what a woman and family are supposed to be from watching his grandparents, and especially his grandmother, who rescued him. Winter noted that Vance’s grandparents actually created an unstable, abusive home for his mother, that there was a “cycle of abuse” that extended to his mother’s parenting of him, but that his takeaway seems to be that his grandparents stayed married and saved him from becoming a statistic, therefore they were perfect and his mom was not.

So maybe that’s a part of his origin story, something he could and should work out with a licensed therapist.

But, this being The Moral High Ground, let’s see if this might be rooted in some of the same exact rage and fear all white American fascist Christian men feel these days, toward a society that appropriately has lost all respect for them.

Put On A Hazmat Suit, We’re Digging Deeper Into J.D. Vance’s Couch Cushions

Couch joke! Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

There’s so much psychology in that first quote from Vance about “childless cat ladies,” such a ridiculously metastasized white male victim complex.

As is often the case with these types, Vance’s remarks contain a desperate need to believe that the people he mentioned are unhappy, whereas we guess we’re supposed to believe right-wing fundamentalist white Christian people with children live in a state of perpetual holy orgasm. Because if coastal liberals without kids (or with kids, it actually doesn’t matter, as we will see) are actually happier than the conservative Christian yokels in South Bumfuck, Alabama — and they usually are — then there’s pretty much no argument for clinging to JD Vance’s sad, dead-end lifestyle.

It’s helpful here to look at another quote Media Matters uncovered, of Vance speaking on October 4, 2021, to Breitbart News, because it really gets to the bull’s eye of what this newsletter is always saying.

“One of the things I've beat up on the left about is that so many of their leader, their next generation leaders, you know, the AOCs, the Cory Bookers, the Kamala Harrises, they don't have kids. And so there's this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation. And I just say, look: Leave your hands off of our children. Stop trying to brainwash them. Parents get to raise their children. Families get to raise their children, not the state, not the leaders of the left. If you want to brainwash children, have your own kids to brainwash. Leave your hands off of mine.”

Oh, so angry mad GRRR! And oh so exactly what we were talking about a few weeks ago, when the weird Libs Of TikTok woman and Charlie Kirk were jizzing on themselves to “outbreed the left.”

We asked at the beginning of that piece, “Have you ever noticed how right-wing MAGA religious extremist creeps think they own their children?”

Vance wants parents to have more votes than people without children. Failed Republican Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters referred to it as those parents having “skin in the game.” Noted funny guy Joel Berry, from The Babylon Bee, the website with the jokes, whined that “We can't allow our future to be dictated by those who purposefully, willingly have no stake in it.”

Stake in it. There’s that word again, and it’s a tell.

These people believe they have ownership of the future, as if they’re holding the deed. Because they believe they own their children, whether their children are still children or not. That’s why Vance wants Christian Nazi-type parents to vote extra times on behalf of their kids, even though in all likelihood many of their kids would recoil at the votes their parents cast in their name.

Millions of their own children are “woke,” are non-Christian, are liberal people of faith, are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary. Millions of their own children will grow up to fundamentally decent people — or already did — thus abandoning the family tradition entirely.

Also note how Vance’s construct, and these other men’s constructs, completely negate the existence of liberal parents, liberal step-parents, gay parents — millions of people who want a world for their kids exactly like what Kamala Harris (again, step-parent to two grown children) is envisioning. Or like Pete Buttigieg (gay parent to twins) is envisioning.

Vance doesn’t want those parents to have extra votes. For the purposes of these particular arguments, those parents don’t count, obviously.

So maybe this isn’t about parents at all. Maybe it’s just that Vance and his type believe only white Christian fascists like them are fit to rule, and to dictate the future of this country, the future that comes long after they are dead and gone. People like Vance steal elections and rig the courts and gerrymander, partially in order to impose their will on future generations. Likewise, that’s what they’re doing here.

These people don’t want people with “skin in the game” to rule America. They want people who share their insecurities about the world, who want to rig the country for their sick lifestyle for generations to come, who are committed to grooming today’s children to become tomorrow’s white Nazi leaders.

Put another way: if Kamala Harris was a white fundamentalist woman with two grown stepchildren, would we be hearing a word from this fuckin’ neckbeard about her?

Listen, it’s simple:

What J.D. Vance and people like him truly fear is that America’s children, but most importantly their own children, will see a person like Kamala Harris and want to be just like her. (As opposed to just like them.) This absurdly accomplished woman, with her shining smile and uproarious laugh, who was a prosecutor and the attorney general of California and the vice president of the United States and (hopefully soon) the first Black woman president.

She fulfilled her dreams, she got married later in life to a really great guy, she’s the loving and joyful “Momala” to his great kids, and …

No! No! No! Miserable cat lady! Miserable gays! Miserable AOC and Secretary Mayor Pete also! They’re all miserable! Must tell children they’re all miserable!

It’s the only way to preserve our way of life!

J.D. Vance’s Bullshit Rhetorical Games Are Nothing New

One last point:

We alluded to this above, but it’s not an accident that J.D. Vance is pretending this is a matter of “childless” people vs. parents. It’s a well-worn rhetorical trick. The intention is to suggest, firstly, that there’s something wrong with people who don’t have or want children. But also importantly, it’s to dishonestly suggest that theirs is the position of all real parents.

This is the same game the Christian Right plays when they call their movement “pro-family” and create sicko organizations like “Focus on the Family.” As if they, and only they, represent real families.

It’s why they accuse everyone to the left of them of hating “Christians,” when what they mean to say is that society can’t stand racist, sexist, homophobic, off-putting garbage conservative Christians like them.

It’s why they invented the phrase “Judeo-Christian values,” to give the false impression that theirs is not simply a right-wing Christian movement, and to exert ownership over Jewish people. (Note how Donald Trump and fundamentalist Christians quite often suggest that Jewish people who vote Democratic, who support abortion rights, who support LGBTQ+ people, etc. — AKA most American Jews — are actually bad Jews, or fake Jews, or do not count?)

So that’s just a note on the language here.

By the way, we have a feeling it won’t be long before another childless cat lady — another one who just seems so miserable with her hot boyfriend and her uber-successful life with her 283 million Instagram followers — weighs in on this.

With the help of gross creeps like J.D. Vance, this really might end up being a “Look What You Made Me Do” election.

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