Based on tech journalist Kara Swisher, the issue with JD Vance isn’t that he hates “childless cat ladies” who haven’t carried out their position as organic child factories, stamping out new copies of a person’s genetic code. It’s less complicated than that. Vance simply appears to hate ladies.
“I’m not joking about it,” Swisher advised Fortune. “Go pay attention to what he’s saying.”
What Vance has been saying contains demanding an finish to no-fault divorce leaving ladies trapped in abusive relationships. He feels that abortion must be utterly outlawed with no exception for rape and incest. Vance explains that “federal action” must be taken to forestall ladies from crossing state strains to acquire a protected abortion. And Vance isn’t simply demeaning ladies who don’t have kids or calling them mentally sick, he’s declared that “we have to go to war” towards the entire concept that ladies can choose out of getting kids.
The place does Vance get these sick concepts? From the identical place he will get his cash: a bunch of billionaire techbros who see Vance as their probability to seat a figurehead on the throne.
Vance’s positions are so clearly anti-woman that Republicans have already pushed a few of his members of the family in entrance of the highlight to speak about all of the sturdy ladies in his life. However Vance doesn’t appear to be doing something to average his previous statements.
Given an opportunity to stroll again his “cat lady” feedback on Megynn Kelly’s podcast on Friday, Vance as a substitute doubled down.
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” he said. “I’ve got nothing against cats.”
Which appears to underscore Swisher’s level.
It’s not concerning the cats, it’s about wresting management of girls’s lives away from ladies and making them into the property of males the place they will validate their price by means of copy. It’s nearly as if Vance thought “The Handmaid’s Tale” was an instruction guide.
As HuffPost reviews, Vance didn’t maintain again in a 2021 interview throughout 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,” stated Vance. He ripped into the concept ladies might have a satisfying life with out kids 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 stated.
That newest not-so-hidden assertion follows earlier interviews or speeches through which Vance referred to as for folks with out kids to pay larger taxes and for folks with kids to get extra votes in elections.
As Vox reviews, the demand that folks ought to get extra votes illustrates one supply for Vance’s concepts. “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.”
Lengthy earlier than the Harris marketing campaign began utilizing the time period, Vance himself stated that he’s “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” Nevertheless it’s not simply neofascist dictators who seize the eye of Trump’s working mate.
By far an important of Vance’s influences, The Washington Publish reviews, is a community of tech billionaires led by would-be vampire Peter Thiel.
Vance described a speech given by Thiel as “the most significant moment” of his years at Yale. After commencement, Thiel adopted Vance into his community, helped him get his first big-money tech job, after which introduced him into his funding agency. Only a yr later, Vance was again in Ohio, making a nonprofit that spent extra on a marketing consultant to launch his political profession than it did addressing the problems it was purported to be tackling. When Vance was able to run for the Senate, Thiel was there with a $15 million contribution to bankroll his marketing campaign.
Because the Publish reviews, Thiel’s community “orchestrated Vance’s rise in Silicon Valley—and then the GOP.” They really feel that his transient however profitable foray into the tech trade, and the ties they’ve maintained with rivers of money, make him “one of them.”
When it got here time for Trump to pick a brand new working mate to interchange the one he tried to have killed, Thiel’s community—together with fellow tech billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks—was there to make it clear they needed Vance within the position.
Based on Swisher, who labored with Vance within the tech trade, his actual position in any Trump authorities can be appearing as a “butler” for the tech billionaires who put him in place as Trump’s working mate. His job can be to see that Trump’s coverage was their coverage, together with their attitudes towards ladies.
Vance is a stalking horse, there at hand over energy to Thiel, Musk, Sacks, and different techbroligarchs. It would not matter what number of Republican senators suppose Vance was a nasty alternative, the ability behind the throne is on his facet.
Politico warns that “If there is a Trumpism after Trump, it might look a bit like Thielism.” That’s not a very good factor.
If Vance is “weird” he will get numerous his weirdness from these guys, whose insurance policies are chaotic, self-serving, and disconnected from actuality. Their desires are billionaire desires—dwelling eternally, constructing cities on Mars, and ruling over a techno-feudal future the place synthetic intelligence and robots make staff superfluous whereas the tech lords change cryptocurrency in a world stripped of presidency regulation. They do not give a rattling who will get damage within the course of.
Neither does Vance. But when he can damage a couple of childless ladies whereas doing his masters’ bidding, he will surely see that as a bonus.