J.D. Vance Says He Gets Bad Press Because Most Journalists Are "Childless Adults"

GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was slammed this week when a video of a 2021 Fox News appearance emerged in which he smeared Vice President Kamala Harris: He described her as being one of 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.” Vance faced an onslaught of bad press, as many commentators—including Harris’ step-daughter, Taylor Swift fans, Democratic officials, actor Jennifer Aniston, and several conservative women pundits—decried his comment.

Yet Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, might have had an easy way of dismissing the criticism, for not so long ago, while speaking to a group of conservatives, he blamed the negative media coverage he often received on “childless” reporters.

It turns out that his remark about Harris was not a one-off soundbite. This dig was part of a larger schtick that Vance has deployed to explain the challenges faced by the conservative movement, including derogatory stories in the media. In 2021, Vance presented the full pitch when he spoke at a conference outside Washington, DC, organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a rightwing outfit co-founded by William F. Buckley Jr. to promote conservative thought on college campuses. During this talk, Vance said he had been victimized by childless journalists. But first he noted that the conservative movement was screwed:

We have lost every single major cultural instiution in this country—Big Finance, Big Tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media, and the government. There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control. But there’s one of them, just one that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future, and that’s the consitutional republic that our founders gave us. We are never going to take Facebook, Amazon, Apple and turn them into conservative institutions. We are never going take the universities and turn them into conservative institutions… We might just be able to control the democratic institutions in this country… This is a raw fact of cynical politics. If we’re not willing to use the power given to us in the American constitutional republic, we’re going to lose this country.



https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/jd-vance-childless-adults-media/