New reporting from CNN today unearthed JD Vance’s long history of making disparaging remarks toward people without children, including calling them “sociopaths,” going back to the early days of his run for Senate.
Since he was announced as Trump’s running mate earlier this month, Vance’s weird obsession with punishing childless people has taken center stage. Last week, ABC News uncovered a 2021 interview with Charlie Kirk where he proposed a higher tax rate for childless Americans. Vance’s 2021 statements about childless women also resurfaced this month, provoking actress Jennifer Aniston and conservative women like Meghan McCain to speak out against him.
Learn more about JD Vance’s weird obsession with attacking childless adults:
- In November 2020, Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance added that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter – now known as X – were typically childless.
- In August 2021, one month after launching his candidacy for the Senate, Vance’s campaign sent fundraising emails referring to the “radical childless leaders in this country” following his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” where he made comments deriding “childless cat ladies” and leaders running the country. The comments sparked a widespread backlash against Vance when they resurfaced on social media following his nomination to the Republican presidential ticket.
- A CNN KFile analysis found several examples over the course of a few years of Vance saying similarly disparaging things when talking about people without children — usually while targeting Democratic officials.
- “There are just these basic cadences of life that I think are really powerful and really valuable when you have kids in your life,” Vance said in November 2020 on a conservative podcast. “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, less mentally stable,” he said. “And of course, you talk about going on Twitter – final point I’ll make is 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.”
- In September 2021, Vance tweeted that “cat ladies…must be stopped” in response to a report that a higher percentage of Americans fear having children because of climate change. In another tweet a month later, Vance wrote, “Our country’s low birth rates have made many elites sociopaths.”
- The multiple examples of similar remarks demonstrate that Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment to Carlson was part of a broader pattern of him pressing the culture war by, in part, singling out Democratic leaders for not having children.
- Vance would later fundraise off those 2021 remarks in a series of emails obtained by CNN from a commentator who posted them on social media at the time “Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country,” reads one Vance fundraising email from August 2021. “We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.
- “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths – they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children. Fighting back won’t be easy – our childless opponents have a lot of free time. That’s why I need YOU to stand with me.”
- Another fundraising email reads, “Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too… What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?”
- In a 2019 speech, Vance articulated his belief in the positive impact that children have on society and individual lives. He explained that many of his views on children and society stem from observing how becoming a father can transform young men he knew from being “driftless” to becoming “rooted” and “grounded” members of society.
- “I care about declining fertility because I’ve seen the role of fatherhood, the positive role that it can play in the lives of my friends and in my community,” he said. “I’ve seen young men who were relatively driftless but became rooted and grounded when they had children.”
- “I’ve seen people who become more attached to their communities, to their families, to their country because they have children,” he added. “And in my own life, I felt the demons that come from a traumatic childhood melt away in the laughter and the love of my own son. So, I would say that we should care about declining fertility, not just because it’s bad for our economy, but because we think babies are good and we think babies are good because we’re not sociopaths.”
Published: Jul 30, 2024