Newsmax did what it could to defend and tamp down J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” smear:
- Trump Aide Defends Vance’s ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Comment
- Vance: ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Quip About ‘Anti-family’ Dems (in which he plays the “sarcasm” card)
- JD Vance Responds to Jennifer Aniston’s IVF Comment
- Guilfoyle to Newsmax: Dems Take Vance’s Quip Out of Context
- RNC Spokesperson to Newsmax: Reaction to Vance Comments Overblown
It did, however, run a couple articles critical of Vance’s comment:
- Bolton: Vance’s ‘Cat Ladies’ Like Hillary’s ‘Deplorables’
- Sen. Murkowski Hits Vance Over ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Quip
Meanwhile, Josh Hammer played some serious defense, using an Aug. 2 column to insist there’s substance behind Vance’s smear:
But even engaging this dishonest left-wing information operation on its face, we must ask: Where exactly is the lie in Vance’s 2021 comments?
Is elite American society not currently run by a decadent ruling class of Regime Party loyalists? Of course it is.
And do corporate oligarchs in such places as Silicon Valley notrule the roost? Even leftists such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., would presumably assent to that.
That leaves the part about “childless cat ladies.” There are at least three points to make.
First, speaking of petulant, hectoring “cat ladies” has become something of an online meme in recent years. Boomer journalists might not get the reference, but Vance’s 2021 quip to Carlson reflects, in part, the Ohio senator’s demographic status as a millennial.
Boomers may not relate, but part of the appeal of picking Vance as former President Donald Trump’s running mate is to accelerate the movement of iconoclastic younger Americans away from the stodgy old Regime Party and toward the irreverent Deplorable Party of Trump.
Second, many single women who are tragically unable to conceive children for medical reasons have incorrectly taken umbrage at these comments.
In discussing the overarching substantive point — America’s, and the Western world’s, escalating social crises of dating, marriage and birthrates — over the years, Vance has often been at pains to differentiate between those who desired children but were sadly unable to have them, on the one hand, and those feminists and climate zealots who outright scorn marriage and childrearing, on the other hand.
The former need not take offense; it ought to be clear that Vance was referring to the latter.
Third, and most important, Vance is emphatically correct — through not merely his offhand “cat ladies” remark to Carlson but also his support for an expanded child tax credit and openness to other family policy proposals — on the actual substantive debate over the basic human necessity of childrearing, the need to fix America’s (and the West’s) broken dating and marriage markets, and the duty of public policy to cultivate the formation of strong families.
That, of course, led to a rant about feminists:
Many feminists do encourage young women that they can “have it all” — college- or graduate school-level education, a rigorous career, a husband and children — while conveniently ignoring obvious tradeoffs and omitting the very real constraint of human biology.
And many greenie radicals, who are more likely to worship the pagan earth goddess Gaia than the “be fruitful and multiply”-exhorting God of the Bible, do discourage creating more carbon dioxide-emitting toddlers.
America’s dating market is fundamentally broken. A shockingly high percentage of young women, according to all available polling, lament a dearth of marriageable men. The result is that fewer Americans date seriously, fewer get married, and even fewer have children.
Yet Hammer doesn’t advocate doing anything to make men more worthy of being married beyond “better-paying jobs “more families can get by the way they used to — on a single household income.” Nor does he explain why women should not be allowed to work and be forced to stay at home and have babies.