In his 2021 remarks to this pro-industry crowd, Vance spoke freely on sex and gender politics, returning several times to the then-new Texas anti-abortion law S.B. 8. He appeared to see the law as something of a failure for conservatives. Vance said that “the fundamental problem” with the law was the opposition from major corporations, citing statements in their press releases that Vance said were “in support of not the unborn babies, but in support of people who might want to abort them.” Vance said he wasn’t qualified to offer an opinion on whether the law would pass constitutional muster (“I don’t know; I went to law school, but I went to Yale Law School so I’m not a very good lawyer,” he said). The problem with this anti-abortion law, in Vance’s view, was that it hadn’t sufficiently disciplined their opposition: “Challenge number one,” he said, was that “we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”
This is a relatively unvarnished look into how sex and gender politics function for this segment of the American right that Vance increasingly embodies. In public, Vance and others will say that we need to protect families and children from “sexualization” or “groomers” or whatever bogeyman is in vogue; in private, though, they acknowledge that culture war is an important tool conservatives can use to threaten people who do not conform to their anti-abortion, anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ political agenda. Actually believing in or achieving that agenda, as evidenced by Vance’s remarks on the Texas abortion law, appears to be secondary to the goal of conservatives acquiring more coercive power. To the extent that legislatures and the judiciary help conservatives build that power, they absolutely matter, but the laws themselves don’t.
This is where Vance’s pro-natalism is intertwined with his anti-immigration politics. Vance has framed deportations as a service to those American families he says are under attack. “We have a lot of young people in this crowd. You know what happens when you bring in 20 million people and you have to give them all shelter?” said Vance at Turning Point USA’s “People’s Convention” in Detroit. “Well, not only do your taxes go up because somebody has got to pay for that shelter, but homes become so expensive that our young people can’t afford to raise families in them anymore. So that is the problem. And the solution is to deport every single illegal alien who came to this country under Joe Biden’s regime.”
