Everyone had a “cat lady” on their block as a child. The house you crept past for fear of getting yelled at for no reason, the one you’d dread should a stray ball land on her lawn, the door you ran from should it open. No one, and I mean no one wanted that person running the country for obvious reasons.
They don’t call the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day the silly season in politics without good reason. Though this year’s presidential race has been defined by no shortage of historic events, from President Joe Biden’s mental meltdown in front of almost 50 million people at the debate on June 27, to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13, to President Biden withdrawing from the race on July 21, followed by the sudden coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the second coming of Barack Obama, Democrats, progressives, and the mainstream media have chosen to obsess over comments President Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance made some three years ago regarding “childless cat ladies” running the country to our detriment. Yes, “cat ladies,” as if no one had ever heard the phrase before, have dominated the political new cycle for days rather than potentially world-changing events like the sudden escalation of Israel’s conflict with Iran. For its part, CNN felt the topic was so important they provided an in-depth analysis of Senator Vance’s history on the subject this Tuesday, placing it prominently on their home page for everyone to see and perhaps needless to say, echoing the approved progressive narrative. “It’s not just ‘cat ladies’: JD Vance has a history of disparaging people without kids,” but before we consider their thoughts, we should begin with the original comment now heard around the world. In 2021 Senator Vance spoke to then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, stating his belief that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “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 continued, “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. 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?” You might well take issue with the use of the phrase “childless cat ladies” instead of, say, “Karens,” which were all the rage during the pandemic, but it takes an almost unprecedented level of obtuseness to pretend he was referring to anyone without children (for the record, I have on children of my own) rather than a specific type of person without children. In reality, just about everyone who grew up in suburbia had a “cat lady” on their block as a child. This was the house you crept past for fear of getting yelled at for no reason, the one you’d dread should a stray ball land on her lawn, the door you ran from should it open. To my knowledge, there was no one, and I mean no one, at the time who wanted that person running the country for obvious reasons.
More recently, the entire world witnessed the lengths some would go to ensure other people were as lonely and miserable as they were during the lockdowns, demanding we wore scarfs on our faces, scolding anyone that dared gather together, claiming everyone who didn’t follow whatever restriction or proscription was possible at the time literally had blood on their hands even though all of it was untested and most of it didn’t work. Does anyone have any doubt that most of these people were miserable and wanted others to be so when they readily embraced every insane idea whether or not there was any evidence of its efficacy? Of course, this isn’t to suggest that you should agree with Senator Vance’s interpretation of who’s running the country, why they are making the decisions they are, or who he chose to call a cat lady, merely that it takes some serious skill in ignoring the obvious to pretend you had no idea what he meant, or that he was somehow disparaging those unfortunate few who want to children, but cannot have them for obvious reasons. If you have any doubt about the difference between the two, consider the comments of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who the Senator singled out. In 2019, she pondered on Instagram, “There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” “We had time when I was born, but—tick tock—nothing got done. As the youngest member of Congress, I wish we didn’t have 12 years. It’s our lungs that are going to get choked with wildfire smoke….Climate delayers are the new climate deniers,” she continued. Around the same time, the progressive “explainer” website Vox.com claimed “We need to talk about the ethics of having children in a warming world.” As they saw it, “The discussion of whether to have children on environmental grounds quickly leads to some important fundamental questions, like what parents owe their children: Are the resources of this planet something we rightfully inherited from our ancestors, or are clean air, safe water, and a stable climate things we are borrowing from our grandchildren? However, the conversation can also raise controversial ideas like anti-natalism, the philosophy that each birth has a negative value to society. And the idea of limiting births has historically been informed by pseudoscience and leadened with racism and classism, often brought up by the powerful as a way to limit less desirable peoples.”
They concluded, “Fortunately, there’s a growing discussion about the ethics of having children, with some groups trying to help parents grapple with their concerns without pushing them in one direction or another. Instead, their goal is to encourage political action. We’re in a make-or-break era of climate change, where our current actions or lack thereof will lock us into a certain outcome. A clear vision of the stakes for our own progeny is a powerful motivator to act aggressively to limit emissions, regardless of our own verdicts on having children.” Vice President Harris herself made similar remarks to younger voters in 2020. “Because young people said, ‘We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis’ — you know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called ‘climate anxiety,’” she said at Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania, as part of her “Fight for Our Freedoms” college tour. “Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home…because what will this climate be?” she continued. Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg has also referenced the phenomenon while announcing an initiative to address the mental health crisis among young people in 2019. He told Teen Vogue, “The other big thing is climate. The longer you’re planning to be here, the more you have at stake…To me, it’s a question of generational justice. If those in charge now leave an unworkable climate for those coming up, it’s basically a form of theft. As someone who kind of stands between those who came before and those who are coming up, it gives me a sense of great urgency. I’m someone who expects to be here when we see whether we got this issue addressed in time.” Whether you choose to refer to them as “cat ladies” or “Karens” based on these comments or others is entirely up to you, but rather than confront the obvious reality that there is a segment of the progressive population that believes the world is ending and therefore we should reconsider having children as a result, meaning implicitly that children might not be a good thing and could be a bad thing, CNN chose to focus exclusively on Senator Vance, recapping the various times he mentioned the importance of the basic act of procreation, apparently never having heard Shakespeare’s famous quip that “the world must be peopled.”
In November 2020, Senator Vance explained himself this way, “There are just these basic cadences of life that 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, less mentally stable. 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, he tweeted “cat ladies…must be stopped,” responding to a report that a higher percentage of Americans fear having children because of climate change. A month later, he tweeted, “Our country’s low birth rates have made many elites sociopaths.” He also used comments like this to drive fundraising for his successful Senate campaign in Ohio, “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 a prime example 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.” In another, he wrote, “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?” Further, the Senator has explained precisely why he feels this way, several times. In a 2019 speech, he described why he believed children have a positive impact on both society and individual lives, “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. 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.”
Even aside from our personal experiences, likely having seen the arrival of a baby radically alter people around us for the better, there is at least some data to support these claims. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, lists both being “socially isolated” and “distant from one’s” family as two critical risks for radicalization. Childless people are also significantly overrepresented in prison, 47% of state prisoners and 58% of federal prisoners compared to 69% of the general population (to be sure, that metric is for inmates with no minor children; I couldn’t find the more general statistics, but it is likely close enough for our purposes). Democrats, however, steadfastly refuse to acknowledge any of this and rather than engaging with the substance of the argument, they prefer insisting that Senator Vance is “weird” for promoting families and the positive impact of children as part of a coordinated effort between politicians and their willing accomplices in the media. As the Associated Press described this effort by Vice President Harris and her supporters, “Democrats are applying the label with gusto in interviews and online, notably to Vance’s comments on abortion and his previous suggestion that political leaders who didn’t have biological children ‘don’t really have a direct stake’ in the country. The ‘weird’ message appears to have given Democrats a narrative advantage that they rarely had when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection. Trump’s campaign, which so often shapes political discussions with the former president’s pronouncements, has spent days trying to flip the script by highlighting things about Democrats it says are weird. ‘I don’t know who came up with the message, but I salute them’” said David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University. Karpf said labeling Republican comments as ‘weird’ is the sort of concise take that resonates quickly with Harris supporters. Plus, Karpf noted, ‘it frustrates opponents, leading them to further amplify it through off-balance responses.’ ‘So far, at least, Trump-Vance has been incapable of finding an effective response,’ Karpf said.”
Apparently, neither Professor Karpf nor the Associated Press have noticed that neither the former President nor his running mate have made any attempt to distance themselves from the substance of the comments and are instead, embracing them. “If you look at the full context of what I said, it’s very clear the Democrats have tried to take this thing out of context and blow it out of proportion, which is what they always do because they don’t have an agenda to run on themselves,” Senator Vance told Fox News’ Trey Gowdy on Sunday Night in America last weekend. “If you look at what the American people are most concerned about, it’s not an out-of-context quip I made three years ago. It’s the fact that Kamala Harris, the border czar, opened the American southern border. It’s the fact that the Democratic Party has become explicitly anti-family in some of their policies,” he continued. “In fact, you just heard Kamala Harris in a surfaced clip recently talk about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety, so what I’m trying to get at here is that it’s important for us to be pro-family as a country. Of course, for a whole host of reasons, it’s not going to work out for some people. We should pray for those people and have sympathy for them. I still think that means we should be pro-family, generally speaking, as a party.” “There are a whole host of people who don’t have children for a whole host of reasons, and they certainly are great people who can participate fully in the life of this country,” he added. “So this is not a criticism and was never a criticism of everybody without children. That is a lie of the left. It is a criticism of the increasingly anti-parents and anti-child attitude of the left.” President Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham something similar earlier this week, “He made a statement having to do with families. That doesn’t mean people that aren’t a member of a big and beautiful family with 400 children around and everything else — it doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t have — he’s not against anything, but he loves family. It’s very important to him.” “He feels family is good. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in saying that,” the former President added, accusing Democrats of “spinning things differently.”
Strategically speaking, and of course strategies can be wrong, it seems clear to me that President Trump believes this debate, scandal, kerfuffle, or whatever you choose to call it shifts the conversation onto friendly territory for his campaign. The former President has a well-earned reputation as a counter puncher, luring his opponents into a fight on terms that do not redound to their benefit in the long run. In this case, the media has been fond of pointing out that there are 22 million childless women in America, without mentioning that very few of them would vote for President Trump under any circumstances. By a 2-1 margin, single women support Democrats and have done so since at least the Obama Era. As the American Enterprise Institute reported in 2022, “Between 2018 and 2022, unmarried women showed more stability in vote preferences than the other groups. The midterms during the Trump administration produced a Democratic wave (offset in Senate elections by a Republican-favorable map). Compared with then, married men in the recent elections gave eight points more to Republicans. Unmarried men voted eight points more Republican, too. Married women voted Republican by twelve additional points. Unmarried women were immune to this trend, swinging zero points toward the Republicans. (They were the same percentage of the electorate, 23, in both years.)” In other words, President Trump is trying to increase his percentage with the married, family-oriented voters favorable to his message by highlighting what he perceives as an anti-family trend among Democrats. This is certainly not guaranteed to work, but pretending there isn’t a proverbial method to the madness is merely wishful thinking, creating a scandal where there is none, and if anything, it seems the Democrats themselves are the ones caught “off balance” by claiming it’s “weird” to support families – while they actively embrace the most radical transgender ideology imaginable, up to and including condoning the ridiculous display that opened the Olympic Games. If this is the fight they want to have, I say bring it on.
Of course, President Trump flipped the script while I was writing this comment by appearing before a convention of black journalists and claiming he didn’t know his opponent was black until recently, but that’s a topic for another post.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 