Again???

Lest you thought we'd unearthed every clip of the birth-rate-obsessed senator railing against childless people, a new tape from 2021 has him condemning childless teachers.

By Kylie Cheung  |  August 28, 2024 | 12:01pm
Photo: Getty Images Politics JD Vance
Again???

For someone alleged to have more sex with his couch than his wife, JD Vance is famously concerned with whether the rest of us are making babies—to the extent that, every other day, it seems, there’s some new audio of him condemning “childless” people for dooming human civilization.

On Tuesday, the Chicagoland radio station WCPT820 published a newly unearthed clip of Vance speaking at the Center for Christian Virtue forum in October 2021, along with other candidates for U.S. Senate in Ohio. In the audio, Vance tears into teachers who don’t have biological children of their own, and accuses them of brainwashing kids.

When the panel moderators, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt and the group’s president, Aaron Baer, asked the candidates about parents’ rights in schools, Vance called out Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers. Vance took issue with Weingarten for describing herself as “a mother by marriage,” disdainfully saying she “doesn’t have a single child.”

“You know, so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children. That really disturbs me and really disorients me.” He continued, referring to Weingarten, who’s a teacher: “She doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, told NBC that Vance was criticizing Weingarten for her role in “the left wing indoctrination being peddled in our schools,” and that he “will continue to loudly call this crap out to defend our kids.” In recent years, the GOP has waged an all-out war on schools and teachers if they have a curriculum that so much as acknowledges LGBTQ identity.

Obviously, it’s always cruel to even allude to someone’s fertility, let alone chastise them for not having kids, and it’s stupid to suggest the decision gives Weingarten or any teacher a political agenda. On top of all of this, the continued doggedness of Vance’s misogyny—ascribing morality and fulfillment to women based on whether they have kids—is bordering on obsession.

I say “continued” because we’re in, what, week seven of Vance’s tenure as Republican vice presidential nominee, and how many nearly identical audio clips of Vance saying insane things about “childless” people have we had to endure? How many more could there possibly be??? I’m almost certain we’ll be hit with a new one by next week if not earlier, and Tim Walz is right: There’s no word for any of this other than “weird,” really.

Vance’s first “childless” comments to go viral, also from 2021, were incidentally attacking Harris and other top Democrats: “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats… 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 rambled to Tucker Carlson. “If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children—and how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Also in 2021, a year in which Vance really seems to have been going through something, he said people who don’t have children are “sociopathic,” “psychotic,” “deranged” and can’t be trusted with political leadership. In another speech from that year, Vance argued that people who don’t have children should “face the consequences and the reality” and not be accorded “nearly the same voice” in democracy. He even suggested they shouldn’t be able to vote, while parents should be able to vote twice: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.”

On Sunday, Vance doubled down yet again on NBC’s Meet the Press, refusing to apologize for his “childless cat lady” line: “I made a sarcastic comment years ago that I think that a lot of Democrats have willfully misinterpreted. I regret, certainly, that a lot of people took it the wrong way, and I certainly regret that the [Democratic National Committee] and Kamala Harris lied about it.” Before that, on Megyn Kelly’s podcast in July, Vance apologized not to women without children, but to cats. Funny! Of course, while Vance is publicly digging in his heels, tellingly enough, the New York Times reported earlier this month that Trump privately asked members of his team if they’d adequately vetted Vance and were aware of his obsession with childless people before Trump named him VP.

What is there left to say, really? Vance can write off his own words as a recurring, obsessive little inside joke all he wants, but when his and Trump’s policy positions are meant to compel pregnancy and birth, you’ll have to excuse me for not finding any of this particularly funny.

 
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