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JD Vance has donned multiple hats on his journey to political stardom — he's gone from author to senator, never-Trumper to MAGA darling, junior senator to vice presidential nominee. But one thing has remained consistent: his comments disparaging those without children, especially Democratic leaders.
Though Vance didn't officially enter the political scene until July of 2021, when he announced his Senate campaign, he kicked off a pattern of pro-natalist comments years before that. In May 2019, Vance made the keynote address at the annual gala for The American Conservative, a right-wing publication. At the time, he was introduced simply as the author of "Hillbilly Elegy."
Vance's comments on family early on in the speech were quite mild, as he noted that his American dream as a child was not to hold a powerful job, but rather to "become a good dad one day, a good husband." That dream, he said, was "in crisis."
Yet as Vance continued speaking, he addressed declining fertility rates and his rhetoric took a sharper turn toward those without children.
"I would say that we should care about declining fertility, not just because it's bad for our economy, but because we think babies are good and we think babies are good because we're not sociopaths," Vance said. At the word "sociopath," audience members cheered and laughed. The descriptor has since become a staple in Vance's rhetoric, dotting his now-viral comments in the years since.
The next year, Vance spoke on a conservative podcast. Again, he started by discussing the familial stability he craved as a child before pivoting to young Americans who aren't having as many kids.
Millennials in the professional class, Vance said, are getting married later and having fewer children, indicating that there is something "deeply wrong" about their interests.
"As those folks get into family formation, my strong suspicion is that they're going to really delay marriage and child-bearing, and in the long term probably aren't going to have as many children, probably aren't going to have as many successful families certainly as their parents and grandparents had, which is of course terrible," Vance, who now has three kids, said.
While he was initially careful not to pin the issue on coastal millennials alone, Vance eventually abandoned his hedging. He said later in the episode that those in the "leadership class" without kids risked being "more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country less mentally stable."
Vance's campaign has been careful to point out that his comments about childless adults are aimed Democratic leaders.
"As he has clearly stated, he was talking about politicians on the left who support policies that are explicitly anti-child and anti-family. The media can obsess over it all they want, but he's not going to back down when it comes to advocating for policies that protect parental rights and encourage people to have more kids," Taylor Van Kirk told Business Insider in a statement, the same one she issued a few days ago in response to a different story.
In the podcast, however, he addressed a wider audience.
"You go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don't have kids," Vance said.
In May of 2021, just before announcing his Senate campaign, Vance spoke on another conservative radio show to address millennials without children.
"We have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country," he said of an effort on X by "millennial feminist writers to talk about why not having kids was a good thing."
Vance, echoing the language that elicited applause in 2019, called the online action "psychologically deranged."
And then came his bid for Senate, launched in July of 2021. During a speech on July 23 of that year, Vance expressed support for Hungary's efforts to lift marriage and birth rates. In particular, he highlighted a policy that offers married couples loans, only to forgive them if the family eventually has enough children.
"Why can't we do that here?" he asked. A few moments later, he asked the audience to compare Democratic leaders and "the fact that they don't have families" to middle-class Ohioans with children.
Vance argued that parents should have more power at the polls and anticipated that he would get blowback for such a statement from outlets like the Atlantic and Washington Post. They would, he said, ask whether this means parents should have more of a say in how American democracy works.
His answer? "Yes. Absolutely."
Just two days later, Vance went on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and made the comment about "childless cat ladies."
"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," he said.
Rather than walk back his comments, Vance attempted to profit off of them. In August 2021, he fired off two fundraising emails based on the interviews.
"Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I need to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country," the first email read. "We've allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths - they're invested in NOTHING because they're not invested in the country's children."
Another fundraising email hit on a similar note, saying that "our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too."
As Vance's Senate campaign stretched on, so too did his string of pro-natalist stances. On September 7, speaking at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, he argued that conservatives should "take aim" at the "childless left" who were undermining the country with a "rejection of family."
In October of that same year, Vance told Breitbart News that the left's "next generation of leaders," including "the Kamala Harrises, they don't have kids. And so there's this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation."
Unknowingly addressing his future political opponent, Vance said, "If you want to brainwash children, have your own kids to brainwash."
Last week, the vice presidential hopeful addressed the controversy on The Megyn Kelly show, saying that Kamala Harris is not "lesser" for having stepchildren and assuring everyone that he has "nothing against cats."
Vance, suffering from historically low approval ratings and discontent among some Republicans for his past comments, has been accused of being an opportunist, willing to change his opinions with the political tides. One former classmate at Yale Law School called him a "chameleon" on CNN.
But his his pro-natalist ideology hasn't shifted in recent years, and now he's being forced to answer for his controversial comments.
