Sen. JD Vance, the Ohio Republican who was named this month as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, has come under fire ― and become a meme ― for disparaging people who don’t have children as “childless cat ladies” in 2021.
But the 39-year-old senator has a years-long documented history of describing people without children as immoral and inferior. And as Election Day nears, those remarks are continuing to resurface.
On Tuesday, HuffPost first reported on comments Vance made in May 2021 in an interview with the conservative outlet The Federalist, in which he was asked him what he thinks Republicans can do to convince Americans to have more children.
“To be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” Vance answered, adding that people who support women prioritizing their careers over having children are “sad, lonely, pathetic” people.
Vance’s comments about families and motherhood have been under particular scrutiny since his nomination. A 2021 speech he gave at an Intercollegiate Studies Institute conference — in which he said Vice President Kamala Harris is among the Democratic Party’s “childless cat ladies” and “has no physical commitment to the future of this country,” because she does not have biological children ― has fueled extensive criticism.
In that same speech, Vance also said that Americans without children should not have “nearly the same voice” as parents when voting.
“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance doubled down to far-right media figure Tucker Carlson days later. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it?”
The resurfaced comments brought immediate backlash across the political spectrum, as “childless cat ladies” backing Harris have started embracing the term.
In an apparent attempt at damage control, Vance said last week on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” that he was being sarcastic and has “nothing against cats.”
In that July 26 interview, Vance acknowledged Harris is a stepmother to two adult children, and that Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, adopted twins with his husband. But the Republican refused to apologize directly to people who can’t or don’t have children, instead criticizing the country’s low birthrate.
“People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said. And the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true,” Vance said, amplifying the white supremacist “great replacement theory” by claiming without evidence that Democrats think they can “replace American children with immigrants.”
Vance has three children with wife Usha Vance, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants.
On the far-right “Charlie Kirk Show” podcast in March 2021, Vance also floated the idea of taxing childless people at a higher rate than people with children.
A spokesperson for Vance said the policy he supported was “basically no different” from the child tax credit, which Democrats support.
Between July 30 and Aug. 8 of 2021, Vance gave three separate interviews with Fox News in which he said virtually the same thing, according to Media Matters: That Democrats are “experimenting” on children with COVID-19 mitigation measures like mask and vaccine requirements.
“If you want to experiment on somebody’s kids, Kamala Harris, AOC and so forth, have your own kids ― lay off mine,” Vance told Fox News Primetime’s Tammy Bruce.
Vance, however, did not appear to have a problem with criticizing how people who do have children choose to raise them. In a September 2021 speech to a high school in Southern California, the Republican said that parents should be more willing to stay in unhappy and potentially violent marriages for the sake of their children ― and suggested that much of the blame for higher divorce rates rests on the American cultural and sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when the fight for women’s bodily autonomy led to the Supreme Court’s now-overturned Roe v. Wade ruling.
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,’” he said, according to Vice News. “And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”
“Maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical,” he continued. “But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”
Vance has also gone on-record supporting a federal abortion ban, and suggested to Spectrum News in 2021 that the public simply needs to reframe the idea of forcing a pregnant person to bring a child caused by rape or incest to term.
As senator, Vance voted to block federal protections for in vitro fertilization. He instead backed the GOP’s rival bill, which doesn’t require organizations or individuals to provide IVF services.
On Tuesday, CNN revealed that Vance had described childless Americans in November 2020 on a conservative talk show as “sociopaths” who are “deranged.”
“There’s just these basic cadences of life I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life, and the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives, you know — I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less mentally stable,” he said on the “Chris Buskirk Show.”
“You go on Twitter and almost always, the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home,” he added.
Spokespeople for Trump and Vance did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, including whether they believe the vice presidential candidate’s remarks could hurt the party’s chances with women who don’t or can’t have children. Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk told CNN that he was only “talking about politicians on the left” who support “anti-child and anti-family” policies.
“It is beyond insulting that a creep like JD Vance would attack millions of adults without children as ‘sociopathic’ and more likely to be ‘deranged’ as part of his warped and out-of-touch worldview,” DNC spokesperson Aida Ross said in a statement on Tuesday, stressing the concern over the vice presidential candidate backing up his rhetoric with policy plans.
“Just like Donald Trump, Vance is running on a dangerous and wildly unpopular agenda that Americans want nothing to do with,” Ross continued. “And no amount of mean-spirited and offensive insults from Vance will change that.”
