Based on tech journalist Kara Swisher, the issue with JD Vance isn’t that he hates “childless cat ladies” who haven’t carried out their function as organic child factories, stamping out new copies of a person’s genetic code. It’s easier than that. Vance simply appears to hate ladies.
“I’m not joking about it,” Swisher informed Fortune. “Go pay attention to what he’s saying.”
What Vance has been saying consists of demanding an finish to no-fault divorce leaving ladies trapped in abusive relationships. He feels that abortion ought to be fully outlawed with no exception for rape and incest. Vance explains that “federal action” must be taken to stop ladies from crossing state traces to acquire a secure abortion. And Vance isn’t simply demeaning ladies who don’t have kids or calling them mentally sick, he’s declared that “we have to go to war” in opposition to the entire concept that ladies can decide out of getting kids.
The place does Vance get these sick concepts? From the identical place he will get his cash: a gaggle of billionaire techbros who see Vance as their likelihood to seat a figurehead on the throne.
Vance’s positions are so clearly anti-woman that Republicans have already pushed a few of his members of the family in entrance of the highlight to speak about all of the robust ladies in his life. However Vance doesn’t appear to be doing something to reasonable his previous statements.
Given an opportunity to stroll again his “cat lady” feedback on Megynn Kelly’s podcast on Friday, Vance as an alternative doubled down.
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” he said. “I’ve got nothing against cats.”
Which appears to underscore Swisher’s level.
It’s not concerning the cats, it’s about wresting management of girls’s lives away from ladies and making them into the property of males the place they will validate their value by means of replica. It’s nearly as if Vance thought “The Handmaid’s Tale” was an instruction handbook.
As HuffPost reviews, Vance didn’t maintain again in a 2021 interview throughout his run for a Senate seat in Ohio.
“To be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” stated Vance. He ripped into the concept ladies might have a satisfying life with out kids as a “ridiculous effort by millennial feminist writers.”
“You’re going to be a sad, lonely, pathetic person and you’re going to know it internally,” Vance stated.
That newest not-so-hidden assertion follows earlier interviews or speeches through which Vance known as for folks with out kids to pay larger taxes and for folks with kids to get extra votes in elections.
As Vox reviews, the demand that oldsters ought to get further votes illustrates one supply for Vance’s concepts. “Vance’s intellectual debt to peculiar segments of the conservative elite has led him to embrace a brand of politics that’s alien to the vast American middle.”
Lengthy earlier than the Harris marketing campaign began utilizing the time period, Vance himself stated that he’s “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” But it surely’s not simply neofascist dictators who seize the eye of Trump’s operating mate.
By far an important of Vance’s influences, The Washington Put up reviews, is a community of tech billionaires led by would-be vampire Peter Thiel.
Vance described a speech given by Thiel as “the most significant moment” of his years at Yale. After commencement, Thiel adopted Vance into his community, helped him get his first big-money tech job, after which introduced him into his funding agency. Only a 12 months later, Vance was again in Ohio, making a nonprofit that spent extra on a advisor to launch his political profession than it did addressing the problems it was presupposed to be tackling. When Vance was able to run for the Senate, Thiel was there with a $15 million contribution to bankroll his marketing campaign.
Because the Put up reviews, Thiel’s community “orchestrated Vance’s rise in Silicon Valley—and then the GOP.” They really feel that his temporary however profitable foray into the tech trade, and the ties they’ve maintained with rivers of money, make him “one of them.”
When it got here time for Trump to pick a brand new operating mate to switch the one he tried to have killed, Thiel’s community—together with fellow tech billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks—was there to make it clear they needed Vance within the function.
Based on Swisher, who labored with Vance within the tech trade, his actual function in any Trump authorities can be appearing as a “butler” for the tech billionaires who put him in place as Trump’s operating mate. His job can be to see that Trump’s coverage was their coverage, together with their attitudes towards ladies.
Vance is a stalking horse, there handy over energy to Thiel, Musk, Sacks, and different techbroligarchs. It does not matter what number of Republican senators suppose Vance was a foul alternative, the facility behind the throne is on his aspect.
Politico warns that “If there is a Trumpism after Trump, it might look a bit like Thielism.” That’s not an excellent factor.
If Vance is “weird” he will get a number of his weirdness from these guys, whose insurance policies are chaotic, self-serving, and disconnected from actuality. Their goals are billionaire goals—dwelling eternally, constructing cities on Mars, and ruling over a techno-feudal future the place synthetic intelligence and robots make staff superfluous whereas the tech lords trade cryptocurrency in a world stripped of presidency regulation. They do not give a rattling who will get harm within the course of.
Neither does Vance. But when he can harm a couple of childless ladies whereas doing his masters’ bidding, he will surely see that as a bonus.
