Sen. JD Vance made a series of bizarre comments during a resurfaced podcast interview from 2020, including at one point seemingly agreeing with the show’s host that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren.
Sandwiched between discussions about race science, biological determinism, and questions around male and female brain sizes, Vance tells Eric Weinstein, host of The Portal podcast, a story about how his wife Usha’s mother dropped everything to care for their newborn son.
“It makes him a much better human being,” Vance says of his son’s interaction with his grandparents.
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Weinstein goes on to say that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female,” is to help raise children.
Vance can be heard saying “yep,” just after Weinstein says the word “postmenopausal.”
A spokesperson for Donald Trump’s running mate, however, strenuously denied that Vance was agreeing with the host, telling the Daily Beast in a statement: “The media is dishonestly putting words in JD’s mouth—of course he does not agree with what the host said.”
“JD reacted to the first part of the host’s sentence, assuming he was going to say: ‘that’s the whole purpose of spending time with grandparents,’” according to Vance’s spokeswoman, Taylor Van Kirk. “It’s a disgrace that the media is lying about JD instead of holding Kamala Harris accountable for her policies that caused sky high prices for groceries and everyday necessities, a disaster at the southern border, and a historic drug overdose epidemic.”
Just after his comment about “postmenopausal” women, Weinstein said that having a grandmother around to help raise children was a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” to which Vance replied: “Yeah.”
“In some ways [it is] the most transgressive thing I’ve ever done against the the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family,” he added.
The comments are just the latest brouhaha to emerge from Vance’s past comments about women.
He previously came under fire for saying that Democratic women are miserable, “childless cat ladies” leading the country to ruin. Vance also courted controversy by calling people without children “sociopaths” and “psychotic,” during and appearance on right-wing podcast host Chris Buskirk’s show in 2020.
“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 during the podcast. “And the fact that so many people, especially in America’s leadership class, just don’t have that in their lives.”
Vance has also railed against Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vice and Sen. Cory Booker for “building a political movement, invested, theoretically, in the future of this country, when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment.”
Usha herself came out in support of Vance following the comments, telling co-host of Fox & Friends Ainsley Earhardt during an Aug. 5 appearance on the program, “The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning.
“What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country,” she said.
