J.D. Vance’s Hatred of Cat Ladies Is Weirder and More Dangerous Than You Think

Donald Trump hates dogs and J.D. Vance hates cats, so it is hardly surprising that the two men have teamed up for a perfectly balanced presidential ticket. The president habitually and bizarrely uses the word “dog” as a slur while his recently selected running mate seems to regard feline fanciers as the root of all social evil.

Vance followers have long been aware that he often uses “cat lady” as an all-purpose putdown. I wrote about Vance’s peculiar tick in a Substack post in 2021 where I flagged Vance’s claim that “Paul Krugman is one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country.” Paying attention to such mind-numbingly stupid comments used to be the lonely work of the few journalists who specialize in monitoring the far right. But Vance’s utterings have gained new prominence, since there is real chance he could soon be vice president (or even, given Trump’s age and decrepitude, soon be president).

In a recently resurfaced video of a 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program, Vance spells out what he means by “cat lady”:

We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by 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. And it’s just a basic fact if 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…. If we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support more people who actually have kids. Because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.

In a follow-up comment, Vance claimed that the childless left “hate normal Americans for choosing family.” Vance also used the “cat lady” jibe many other times, notably against young people worried about climate change, journalist Victoria Brownworth, and former Planned Parenthood head Leana Wen.

There are many possible responses to Vance’s comments. One would be a simple fact-check. Kamala Harris is not childless. With her marriage to Doug Emhoff in 2014, she became stepmother to his two children, Ella and Cole, who call her “Mamala.” Indeed, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife, Kerstin Emhoff, recently said, “These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a coparent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” At the time Vance made his remarks, Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, were in the midst of trying to adopt children, which they succeeded in doing a month after Vance’s appearance Carlson’s show.

Speaking on CNN, Buttigieg poignantly noted, “The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children, and it’s not about his kids or my kids or the vice president’s family. It’s about your family, people’s families whose well-being will depend on whether we go into a future led by somebody like Kamala Harris, who is focused on expanding the prosperity, the freedom, the well-being of our families.” This reasonable response boils down to “mind your own business.”

Many others were personally offended by Vance’s comments, notably the actress Jennifer Aniston, who wrote on Instagram:

Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.

Of course, these responses from personal experience don’t address Vance’s philosophical claim, which is that only biological children give someone a “direct stake” in society. Vance is so committed to the view that the fertile are superior to the childless that he wants to change the political system to increase the political power of parents. In a 2021 speech, Vance argued:

Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power—you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic—than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.

Unfortunately for Vance, all of human history makes the point that the childless are no less committed to social life than the fertile. As a Catholic convert, does Vance really believe that priests and nuns are more antisocial than those who have children? Does he think that childless founding fathers such as George Washington and James Madison should be seen as inferior to the traitor Benedict Arnold (robust patriarch with a clan of four sons and one daughter).

Does he believe that Jesus (no children) is of lesser value the the prophet Mohammed (who by tradition had seven children)? This is not to speak of the contributions to human civilization of Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Joan of Arc, Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery O’Connor (to give only a small sampling of notable non-breeders). None of these illustrious figures could match Senator Vance’s success in thrice impregnating his wife, but their lives surely had some value. Do their voices deserve to be less audible than those whose main achievement is procreation?