J.D. Vance has made it very clear he has nothing against cats, but it seems he has a history of singling out childless Americans.
The GOP vice presidential nominee hit back at his critics after his remarks disparaging “childless cat ladies” resurfaced. He insisted he was simply speaking as a proud family man and insisted the “sarcastic comment” was taken out of context.
However, CNN reports that the Ohio senator has also used the terms “sociopath” and psychotic” to describe people without children.
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Vance has claimed his now infamous quote from a 2021 Fox News interview on the Tucker Carlson show when he described Kamala Harris and other women as a “bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives” was aimed at anti-family Democrats. But some examples quoted by CNN appear to range beyond party political boundaries.
Vance claimed on a conservative podcast in 2020 that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” users of Twitter, now X, tended to be childless.
“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 on the Chris Buskirk 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. 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,” he added.
It seemed as if he was warming to the theme, as CNN claims Vance sent out fundraising emails for his Senate campaign in 2021 mentioning the “radical childless leaders in this country.”
In September 2021, he retweeted a story from The Hill reporting the results of a poll saying people were worried about having children because of the climate crisis and included the comment: “The cat ladies, man. They must be stopped.”
The following May, Vance reposted a link to an article in The Atlantic headlined, ‘Kids are low risk. Go ahead and plan the summer.’ With the post, he tweeted: “How many of the insane replies to this tweet are from people without children? Our country’s low birth rates have made many elites sociopaths.”
It's an issue that's now unlikely to go away in the 2024 presidential election campaign as it heats up this summer.
Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk told CNN the senator was “talking about politicians on the left who support policies that are explicitly anti-child and anti-family.”
“The media can obsess over it all they want, but he’s not going to back down when it comes to advocating for policies that protect parental rights and encourage people to have more kids.”
