THERE'S A THIN LINE BETWEEN BEING A NATIONAL CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL AND BEING A HIGH SCHOOL BULLY

Here's Matt Gaetz, a shallow jerk:

How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) May 4, 2022

And here's J.D. Vance, an intellectual and deeply cerebral "national conservative" thought leader:

Vance ... for a solid week in July kept using the term “childless” in an effort to insult his foes on the left.

“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 the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Tucker Carlson at the time.

As examples of childless cat ladies, Vance pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris (who has stepchildren); progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the youngest woman in Congress; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who announced a month later he and his husband had adopted infant twins.

Vance has been clear on his position that the American government should incentivize its citizens to have children, and that having kids is the ultimate calling in life.

In a speech during his week of bashing Democrats without children, Vance proposed giving people with kids additional votes at the ballot box, arguing they have a greater stake in the future of the country because they’ve reproduced. When American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted that week in support of requiring masks in schools, Vance jumped in to slam her, too, as part of a group of “miserable, childless lefties.”

Vance dresses this up in a cultural argument about society's need to encourage thriving families, but he and Gaetz are just overgrown high school assholes who seek status by encouraging everyone to mock the serious girls in glasses. Men whose emotional development ended in high school, or who've chosen to revert to that emotional age, inevitably enjoy an opportunity to attack people they can portray as weird and unnatural. Rank-and-file Republican voters want to purge America of anyone who makes them uncomfortable, so this is the contemporary right's political philosophy boiled down to its essence.