Welp, That Didn’t Take Long: The Right Freaks Out Over ‘Childless’ Kamala Harris
The equal parts sexist and stupid argument suggests that if you don't have kids, you are undeserving of holding political power.
Photo: Getty Images PoliticsAs demonstrated through years of both sexist dog whistles and vile policymaking, Republicans and the far-right influencers who increasingly guide them are determined to impose forced pregnancy and parenthood on every woman in the U.S. until we’re all pregnant in the suburbs raising 17 kids. So, unsurprisingly, it barely took 48 hours after Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race for the right to begin attacking presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for being, God forbid, “childless“—a line of attack that Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance himself rolled out against Harris as early as 2021, while also arguing people without children deserve less political power. (More on that shortly.)
For starters, Harris isn’t childless. She’s the stepmother of two children. But because she doesn’t have biological children, right-wing influencers insist she’s an unfulfilled woman who can’t be trusted to be president, because without (biological) kids, how could she possibly give a shit about the future of this country??
Props to Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer and inexplicably popular social media influencer, for emerging as one of the first idiots to bravely step up and observe that Harris has no biological children. “Really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President. No children,” he tweeted at 6:31 p.m. EST Sunday night. Unfortunately, one tweet wasn’t enough, so he went on to argue that stepchildren “don’t count” (party of family values, huh?), and claimed that “the concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to [Harris]”—as if presidents who don’t have cancer are uninvested in curing cancer. Mind you, the majority of Congress is parents and grandparents who’ve yet to lift a finger on climate change.
Chamberlain also suggested his misogynistic bullshit was not misogynistic at all because he’s made similar observations about former Republican presidential candidate, Tim Scott. I guess we’ll just have to take his word on that!
But even if Chamberlain doesn’t consider his comments to be gendered, other voices on the right made the same argument, just with more full-throated sexism.
JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024
On Monday, far-right influencer (which is frankly a generous term for this unabashed, terminally online white nationalist) Laura Loomer used some especially gross terms to similarly attack Harris for being “childless.”
“It’s time for Republicans to start talking about [Harris’] sexual history and the reason why she likely doesn’t have any children of her own. I’m willing to bet she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus. A woman who has no biological children of her own should not be allowed to make decisions in the White House for your children,” Loomer wrote in a sprawling, article-length tweet that reads like digital bile. She further called on Republicans to “run with this messaging” and argued, “Harris has zero investment in the future but she wants to determine our future.” (I’m tempted to join her in asking Republicans to go this route, which will surely do wonders to persuade suburban swing voters they aren’t sexist extremists.)
“It’s about measuring women’s worth by their ability to bear children, trying to punish those who don’t,” Nicole Regalado, vice president of campaigns at the women’s rights organization Ultraviolet, told Jezebel. She further explained that even if Republicans and right-wingers frame their critique of non-parents as gender-neutral, this remains not only “a sexist attack,” but “the exact line of thinking that led to abortion bans.”
Meanwhile, right-wing hacks like Milo Yiannopoulos (who is, first, British, and second, has literally endorsed pedophilia) are also trying to weaponize rumors about Harris’ dating history against her, even as Trump has cheated on all of his wives (including allegedly with an adult film star while Melania Trump was pregnant). On Monday, ousted Fox News star Megyn Kelly baselessly claimed Harris “[slept] her way into and upwards in California politics.” Author and white nationalist loser Matt Walsh said over the weekend that Harris “got her start in politics by sleeping with” one of her exes, and only “became vice president because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket.” (Yep, that’s exactly who I want teaching me about gender politics: A white guy who uses “female” as a noun.) In recent weeks, popular right-wing influencers have also called Harris a “Jezebel” (shoutout!), a “little whore,” and a “ho.” At other points, they’ve accused her of having a “bullying, bossy-ing mannerism” and called her a “bimbo.”
Now that JD Vance’s attack on “childless cat ladies” has been unearthed, all the Trump campaign can do is brace for impact pic.twitter.com/DFWwL3WG2A
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) July 23, 2024
And on top of being gross and nonsensical, these attacks are entirely unoriginal: In 2021, Vance, then vying for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat, stopped by Fox News to bash Harris (who is literally married) for being a cat lady: “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. “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?”
Personally, I’d argue cat owners have a more direct stake in the future of society than most—there’s not much that’s scarier than letting your outdoor cat into the world and not knowing what they’ll see, but I digress. The idea that women without children are incapable of caring for others is pure projection from the same sexist idiots who have dedicated their entire political careers to denying our interiority and humanity.
In a series of remarks delivered to a conservative group, also in 2021, 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, which… doesn’t exactly sound like democracy. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.” In sum: no voting rights for childless people, and double the voting rights for parents. If you’re a woman or man who physically isn’t able to have kids, tough loss, I guess.
Similar to Vance’s comments, in 2022, Newsmax’s Benny Johnson said Harris has “never been a mother, never had a child, was far too busy power gobbling for her career, trying to reach the next rung of power… Career woman right there… Pretty sad, pretty pathetic, and pretty soulless because what [Harris] has been left with now is a VP position that is truly under water.” (Welp, on top of everything else that last line is looking especially foolish now!)
So they’re going with “Kamala Harris is a childless slut” when their candidate has five children with three different women, cheated on his first wife with the second, cheated on the third with a Playboy model when the wife was pregnant & a porn star when she was postpartum, ok. https://t.co/Ur1S1I3FMh
— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) July 22, 2024
There’s some context to the right’s hyper-fixation on “childless” women and the existential threat they supposedly pose. Over the last decade, single women have emerged as one of the most powerful voting blocs, and they typically lean left: In 2012, unmarried women made up a quarter of the electorate and voted for President Obama by a 67-31 margin. Naturally, this has prompted some conservative influencers to either flirt with or overtly call for an end to the 19th Amendment. Last year, right-wing provocateur and alleged sexual harasser Elon Musk even tweeted that “the childless have little stake in the future,” and in response to one Twitter user quote-tweeting this to argue that “suffrage” should be “[limited] to parents,” Musk replied, “Yup.” Ironically, Musk himself doesn’t seem overly concerned about families and children’s futures: He’s fired Tesla workers who take parental leave, railed against programs for federally subsidized child care, laid off employees mid-IVF cycle, and eliminated his company’s once-generous IVF coverage, too.
All of this is to say, the right’s “childless” angle on Harris is as predictable as it is icky. The reality is that Republicans don’t have anything substantive on Harris, mostly because she’s far more qualified than Trump and very clearly isn’t a “radical leftist” (unfortunately!). So, they’re just throwing everything they can at the wall, trying to see what sticks—and because these people are unabashedly awful, most of it is rooted in race and gender.
“Republicans have a playbook for invalidating women leaders, especially women of color,” Regalado said, stressing that we already saw these attacks when Harris joined Biden’s ticket in 2020. Now that she’s at the helm, they’re escalating.