Family and "childless cat lady" comments
Vice Presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance is getting the Romney "binder full of women" treatment.
What's the deal with media and Hollywood celebrities ranting about Vice Presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance and "childless cat ladies?"
It's a conflation of two separate sets of comments, for one thing.
For another, the narrative is coming from a group called MeidasTouch.
As I noted recently on X, JD Vance getting the Romney "binders full of women" treatment. Expect it to continue through Nov. Folks should really take a moment to see what he really said.
So, is this a Mitt Romney "binders full of women" moment? Yep.
The Daily Caller recaps the entire "childless cat lady" uproar in a quick hit video:
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What are Vance's actual comments?
The comments come from two different sources; one an interview snippet and the other from a talk Vance gave on "Our civilizational crisis" in 2021.
1) "Childless cat ladies interview snippet
This comes from a 2021 Tucker Carlson segment. This is what Vance said:
"We're 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 choices that they've made. And they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact - 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."
It's worth noting that most media outlets are truncating Vance's 2021 interview remarks and almost all of them are leaving out the last line, "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."
2) The "Our civilizational crisis" speech
Intercollegiate Studies Institute hosted the July 24, 2021, event described as delving "into the complexities of the American Dream and the civilizational crisis facing our nation today."
Vance's speech focused on conservative themes of family values, supporting family growth and structure, courage of convictions, and the American Dream.
He assesses those in elite circles, including elected officials and the media are “miserable” because they are “childless adults.” But he also qualifies his remarks by acknowledging some people can’t have kids “through no fault of their own.”
Vance also points out these issues are embedded in culture wars playing out in this country, saying in his speech that, "The culture war in this country is a class war... It is a war against middle- and working-class people.
Keeping those themes in mind, here is the full section of the speech that Vance shortened in the Carlson interview:
Now let me ask you a question. I’m going to get in trouble for this, but I want to ask the question anyway. Separate Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden. The three elder Democrat politicians who have run for president before but who, except for Biden, may not run for president again. Consider all of the next gen of the Democrat Party. If you go on any of these prediction markets, they’ll tell you who’s most likely to win the democrat nomination for president in 2024 or 2028. Think about all those people.
The names are obvious. They’re well-known people. Kamala Harris; Mayor Pete Buttigieg; who’s now the secretary of transportation; Cory Booker; AOC. Think of all these people. They come from different walks of life, different parts of the country. What is the one thing that unites every single one of them? Not a single one of them has any children.
Why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life? That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?
Now, let me do the necessary throat clearing, because I do think it’s important. Look, a lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons. I know good friends of mine who struggled to find the right girl, find the right guy. There are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons, that can’t have children. The target of these remarks is not them. It’s important to point that out. There have always been people like that, who, even though they would like to have kids, are unable to have them. Let’s set them to the side.
It’s one thing to recognize that there are people who don’t have children through no fault or choice of their own. But it’s something else to build a political movement, invested theoretically in the future of this country, when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.
Now this also true of a lot of folks in our media. What you find is that many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults. Let’s just be honest about it. Because look, the elite model, the American Dream to the elites is get as much credentials as you can, get as much money as you can, get the most prestigious job, and that’s where you’re going to find your self-worth. But I gotta be honest with you, most of our mainstream reporters are not impressive enough to find a lot of self-meaning in their jobs. They’re just not good enough at it.
But what society has built its entire civilization, the flow of information, the leaders of its country, political and governmental, and also corporate, around completely childless adults? It’s never happened. This is a new thing in American life, but I think probably a new thing in world history.
It’s not good. It’s not healthy. You see the obsessive, weird, almost humiliating aggressive posture of our media and you wonder how could these people possibly seem to be so miserable and unhappy? Well, the answer is because they don’t have any kids. Kids are the ultimate way that we find self-meaning in life, whether your own children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews.
No matter what, the most important thing in my life is going to be my two beautiful boys and my wife who loves me. It will always be them. That recognition makes us healthier people. It makes us more stable people. And we should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed.
The speech is just over 35 minutes long and can be viewed below.
Additionally, an adapted transcript of the same speech penned by Vance can be read on the website The Conservative American.
Who is MeidasTouch?
In a nutshell, it's a Democrat Super PAC masquerading as news. Its Editor-in-Chief is Ron Filipkowski (seen in the X post above).
The point of MT was to create a super PAC for Democrats that cranked out anti-Trump and anti-Republican videos, many of which were sent viral by Hollywood celebrities.
In the 2020 election cycle, MeidasTouch (MT) spent $1,839,651 opposing Republican candidates and $681,916 supporting Democrats. In 2023, the PAC changed names to "Democracy Defense Action," but MT maintained its hyperpartisan "news" platform.
MT was founded during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 by three brothers from Long Island that, in 2021, Rolling Stone dubbed the
"golden boys of the #resistance."
The three brothers are:
Ben Meiselas, an attorney who seems to be the Democrats new Marc Elias.Brett Meiselas, a video editor who worked for five years at The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Jordan Meiselas, a “marketing supervisor” from Brooklyn, New York.
Rolling Stone's article also called MT's fundraising efforts "nonsensical" and focused on money instead of helping Democrats win elections."
The website Media Bias Fact Check rates MT as "extreme far left."
"Overall, we rate MeidasTouch Left Biased based on the negative portrayal of Donald Trump and Republicans and the promotion of Democratic candidates," Media Bias Fact Check's rating stats. "We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to a lack of transparency with funding and the publication of one-sided content that can be misleading."
One of MT's top viewed posts on X was a video of the "Hauk Tuah" girl saying she won't vote for Trump. Really hard hitting stuff there.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Magazine's editor and chief quit after being unable to pay bills, vendors, and staff. What does that have to do with MT? Ben Meislas owns Los Angeles Magazine along with Mark Geragos.
For months, the outlet has faced complaints from freelancers who say that the new owners, prominent L.A.-based trial lawyers Mark Geragos and Ben Meiselas, have refused to pay freelance writers, reporters, photographers and graphic artists.
Geragos and Ben Meiselas bought L.A. Magazine, one of the oldest city magazines in the country, in late 2022 for more than $6 million from Detroit-based Hour Media, with promises to invest in the magazine, which was losing money at the time.
Instead, the financial situation has worsened considerably, according to numerous insiders. A spokesperson for Geragos and Meiselas did not respond to requests for comment about late payments and layoffs. - The Wrap via Yahoo News, 7/21/24
Vance is charismatic, famous in his own right for his bestselling book, has been successful in business prior to public service, and isn’t afraid to speak his mind.
When taken as a whole and exploring what Vance actually said, tt seems clear this is a "squirrel" moment - a strategy to draw attention away from one issue and put it back on another.
In this case, the comments are being used to bring abortion and contraception issues like IVF back into play, and to move away from the tanking economy, border crisis, and rabid inflation - as evidenced by Jennifer Aniston's response in this CBS News article and this post by Megan McCain, who failed to do her homework.