Couches. Dolphins. Cat Ladies. Weird.

Yup, we’re talking about J.D. Vance Again. Women and families edition!

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Does J.D. Vance actually like being a parent? 

The more I learn about Vance’s political views and his visceral hatred of people women without children, the more it starts to feel like projection. It’s one thing to suggest that childless people don’t understand how difficult it is to be a parent or what families need from society. It’s another to refer to people without children as “sociopathic,” “psychotic,” and “deranged.” Vance is fond of calling out “childless cat ladies” and raging at how much political power these women supposedly have over the rest of us. After a while, his rants start to feel like projection.

As the parent of young children myself, I get it. I love my kids but also sometimes miss the days when my schedule was my own, and I could sleep in on weekends or meet friends for a beer after work without a care in the world. It’s healthy to grieve that part of your life and have strong feelings about it being over. It’s not healthy to project your misery onto people who’ve made different choices or perhaps don’t have the option to become parents themselves. 

How Vance talks about parenthood and family is weird. He thinks people should stay married, even when they’re subjected to physical abuse. He’s called universal daycare a “class war against normal people.” He’s against universal preschool, paid parental leave, and paid sick leave. Curious choices as his wife is a working parent herself, employed at a law firm until her husband was announced as Trump’s VP pick.

There’s been a lot of pushback on Vance’s attacks on women without children, and my colleagues at FYP have a fun rundown of how childless cat lady memes and videos have taken the Internet by storm:

“In the past 7 days, the TikTok conversation around Vance has been overwhelmingly negative. According to social analytics platform Zelf, 76% of the top-performing posts mentioning Vance on the platform have been negative, while just 18% were positive.”

“But the couch jokes have nothing on the ire of the “childless cat ladies.”

For context, way back in 2021, Vance claimed that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." That quote reemerged this week and the “childless cat ladies” had some thoughts.  Dozens of cat owners took to TikTok to share reaction videos of their cats listening to Vance’s offensive remarks.”

I’m glad to see the Internet hit back so hard. Vance’s misogynist rhetoric is gross. It’s no way to talk about other human beings, especially women, whose supposed offense is not having children. But I think it’s equally important to push back on Vance’s vision of marriage and parenthood. Because it’s just as misogynistic and gross.

Writing in her newsletter, MomLeft, Kelly Weill reminds us that the future J.D. Vance wants is actually a nightmare for mothers:

“Although he seldom makes it so explicit, Vance’s policies would make that family a restrictive unit for women, who would be pressured to have children, cut off from abortion care, denied childcare measures that could aid their financial futures, and discouraged from divorce even in abusive relationships.

This is not even the “up-by-your-bootstraps” ethos that Vance outlines in Hillbilly Elegy. It's a concerted campaign to drag women down. And he’s just joined the top-polling campaign ticket with a presidential candidate on the cusp of his 80s.”

In his RNC speech, Vance said that “becoming a good husband and a good dad” was his proudest achievement. I don’t doubt his sincerity, but Vance believes that marriage and parenting should be a burden and a hardship women are forced to endure rather than a willing choice we make. As I wrote two weeks ago, Vance’s politics are heavily influenced by neoreactionism, a political movement that calls for the fall of democracies and a return to the so-called natural order of monarchies. It’s clear that Vance extends that desire for that natural order to extend into all of our home lives as well as the public sphere. 

None of this is normal or reflects the lived realities of most Americans. One of the reasons calling Vance and MAGA weird is such an effective attack is that the more you learn about what these guys want and think, the more obvious it becomes how completely divorced from reality the MAGA movement is. It’s been heartening to see so many men push back against this limited view of masculinity and show up for Harris on Zoom affinity calls for Black men and white dudes. An overall shift on masculinity in politics that I’ve observed previously and one I’m glad to see expand this cycle.

Again, I can’t help but wonder if Vance himself doesn’t feel limited by it. Perhaps his rage at “childless cat ladies” is less about them and more about Vance jealously longing for the days before he had children of his own—a simpler time when he could spend an entire day alone watching dolphin videos on his couch.

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ICYMI

The Far Right and the Southport Riot: What We Know So Far (HOPE not hate)

If you’re following events in the UK, our friends over at HOPE not hate have everything you need to know from an on-the-ground perspective. 

Opinion: How to Harden Our Defenses Against an Authoritarian President (Washington Post)

An important piece by the Brennan Center for Justice’s Barton Gellman. Crucial preparations for an uncertain future that will hopefully prove to be unnecessary. 

Did Black Journalists Get Played by Inviting Trump to Its NABJ Convention in Chicago? (The Root)

There’s a lot I could say about the choices made here, including from the Trump campaign. But as Black journalists are the authority here, I’ll leave the floor open for their take. 

TikTok Has a Nazi Problem (Wired)

Newer platform, same old problem. When will the platforms learn?

Elon Musk Posts Deepfake of Kamala Harris That Violates X Policy (The Verge).

I don’t want to elevate Musk or his antics, but his ownership of Twitter remains a problem, especially as it continues to influence the public conversation, even at a reduced amount. 

Want even more links? Subscribers receive a special ICYMI edition of CARD on Fridays. 

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Coda

I had a lot of fun talking to Puck’s Peter Hamby about the internet since Harris launched. No one could have predicted that my career path would make me the perfect expert to talk to the press about couch memes. But here we are.

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That’s all for this week. I’ll be back next Sunday, same bat time same bat channel.