According to tech journalist Kara Swisher, the problem with JD Vance isn’t that he hates “childless cat ladies” who haven’t performed their role as biological baby factories, stamping out new copies of a man’s genetic code. It’s simpler than that. Vance just seems to hate women.
“I’m not joking about it,” Swisher told Fortune. “Go pay attention to what he’s saying.”
What Vance has been saying includes demanding an end to no-fault divorce leaving women trapped in abusive relationships. He feels that abortion should be completely outlawed with no exception for rape and incest. Vance explains that “federal action” needs to be taken to prevent women from crossing state lines to obtain a safe abortion. And Vance isn’t just demeaning women who don’t have children or calling them mentally ill, he’s declared that “we have to go to war” against the whole idea that women can opt out of having children.
Where does Vance get these sick ideas? From the same place he gets his money: a group of billionaire techbros who see Vance as their chance to seat a figurehead on the throne.
Vance’s positions are so obviously anti-woman that Republicans have already pushed some of his family members in front of the spotlight to talk about all the strong women in his life. But Vance doesn’t seem to be doing anything to moderate his past statements.
Given a chance to walk back his “cat lady” comments on Megynn Kelly's podcast on Friday, Vance instead doubled down.
"Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” he said. “I’ve got nothing against cats."
Which seems to underscore Swisher's point.
It’s not about the cats, it’s about wresting control of women’s lives away from women and making them into the property of men where they can validate their worth through reproduction. It’s almost as though Vance thought “The Handmaid’s Tale” was an instruction manual.
As HuffPost reports, Vance didn’t hold back in a 2021 interview during his run for a Senate seat in Ohio.
“To be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” said Vance. He ripped into the idea that women could have a fulfilling life without children as a “ridiculous effort by millennial feminist writers.”
“You’re going to be a sad, lonely, pathetic person and you’re going to know it internally,” Vance said.
That latest not-so-hidden statement follows previous interviews or speeches in which Vance called for people without children to pay higher taxes and for people with children to get more votes in elections.
As Vox reports, the demand that parents should get additional votes illustrates one source for Vance’s ideas. “Vance’s intellectual debt to peculiar segments of the conservative elite has led him to embrace a brand of politics that’s alien to the vast American middle.”
Long before the Harris campaign started using the term, Vance himself said that he is “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” But it's not just neofascist dictators who capture the attention of Trump’s running mate.
By far the most important of Vance’s influences, The Washington Post reports, is a network of tech billionaires led by would-be vampire Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel
Vance described a speech given by Thiel as “the most significant moment” of his years at Yale. After graduation, Thiel adopted Vance into his network, helped him get his first big-money tech job, and then brought him into his investment firm. Just a year later, Vance was back in Ohio, creating a nonprofit that spent more on a consultant to launch his political career than it did addressing the issues it was supposed to be tackling. When Vance was ready to run for the Senate, Thiel was there with a $15 million contribution to bankroll his campaign.
As the Post reports, Thiel’s network "orchestrated Vance’s rise in Silicon Valley—and then the GOP." They feel that his brief but lucrative foray into the tech industry, and the ties they have maintained with rivers of cash, make him “one of them.”
When it came time for Trump to select a new running mate to replace the one he tried to have killed, Thiel’s network—including fellow tech billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks—was there to make it clear they wanted Vance in the role.
According to Swisher, who worked with Vance in the tech industry, his real role in any Trump government would be acting as a "butler" for the tech billionaires who put him in place as Trump’s running mate. His job would be to see that Trump’s policy was their policy, including their attitudes toward women.
Vance is a stalking horse, there to hand over power to Thiel, Musk, Sacks, and other techbroligarchs. It doesn't matter how many Republican senators think Vance was a bad choice, the power behind the throne is on his side.
Politico warns that "If there is a Trumpism after Trump, it might look a bit like Thielism." That’s not a good thing.
If Vance is "weird" he gets a lot of his weirdness from these guys, whose policies are chaotic, self-serving, and disconnected from reality. Their dreams are billionaire dreams—living forever, building cities on Mars, and ruling over a techno-feudal future where artificial intelligence and robots make workers superfluous while the tech lords exchange cryptocurrency in a world stripped of government regulation. They don't give a damn who gets hurt in the process.
Neither does Vance. But if he can hurt a few childless women while doing his masters’ bidding, he would certainly see that as a bonus.
Stick it to the tech bros and show your opposition to Vance’s anti-woman ideas by giving $10 to Kamala Harris’ campaign today.
