J.D. VANCE: IF NOISY KIDS ON A PLANE ANNOY YOU, YOU'RE A SOCIOPATH

I haven't watched Lulu Garcia-Navarro's New York Times interview of J.D. Vance, but I've read the transcript. I have many thoughts about it, but for now I'd like to talk about Vance's attempts to clarify his earlier slanders of childless people.

The interview reminds us that Vance really doesn't like taking responsibility for his own words and deeds when they're criticized. Garcia-Navarro asks him about his frequent past references to ideological opponents as "childless cat ladies," and he apologizes half-heartedly, implying that anyone could have done what he did:

... look, they were dumb comments. I think most people probably have said something dumb, have said something that they wish they had put differently.

But most people aren't mega-best-selling memoirists contemplating a high-level career in politics, as Vance was when he said these things. Under those circumstances, he should have been more careful when speaking to the media. (Most people never speak to the media.)

Garcia-Navarro asks him about Kamala Harris:

We don’t know why Kamala Harris did not have children, but do you include Kamala Harris in the category of women that you’re talking about?

Vance decides to give what I call the Rob Corddry answer. Twenty years ago, when torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, Corddry, then a performer on The Daily Show, said this in a mock defense of the Bush administration:

"Remember, it’s not important that we did torture these people. What’s important is that we are not the kind of people who would torture these people."

Here's Vance's answer regarding Vice President Harris:

No. Everything that I know about Kamala Harris, that I’ve learned about Kamala Harris, is that she’s got a stepfamily, she’s got an extended family, she’s a very good stepmother to her stepchildren. I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines.

I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. Dude, you literally did accuse Kamala Harris along these lines, in 2021 on Tucker Carlson's show:

"We are 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 said.

"It's just a basic fact," Vance continued. "You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats are controlled by people without children."

"How does it make any sense we turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?" he asked.

It's not important that Vance did attack Harris this way. What he thinks is important for you to see is that he is not the kind of person who would attack Harris this way.

Vance goes to great lengths to let us know that he has nothing against childless people, really:

What I was trying to get at is that — I’m not talking about people who it just didn’t work out for, for medical reasons, for social reasons, like set that to the side, we’re not talking about folks like that.

I don't know what he means by "social" here, though I think he means "women who are too unpopular to attract a man who'll marry and impregnate them." Because I can't think of any other "social" reason he'd accept female childlessness. (In other settings, he's criticized childless teachers even though his own Catholic Church runs schools in which many of the teachers are celibate nuns, priests, and brothers.)

Vance works hard to reassure us that he's tolerant. But there are limits. Did you know that if you've ever been annoyed by an unruly child on a plane or a train, your frustration is "pathological"?

What I was definitely trying to illustrate ultimately in a very inarticulate way is that I do think that our country has become almost pathologically anti-child. I put this in a couple of different ways, right? So, there’s one, it was actually when I was in law school — I was on a train between New York and New Haven, I think I was doing, like, law-firm interviews or something. And obviously I didn’t have kids then. And there’s this young girl who gets on the train. She’s probably 21 or 22. She’s a young Black female. I could tell by the way she was dressed, she didn’t have a whole lot of money; she had a couple of kids with her, and I remember just watching her and thinking, This is a really unbelievably patient mother. The reason I noticed her is because her kids, like a lot of kids that age, are complete disasters, especially on public transportation, they turn it up to 11. But she was being so patient. But then everybody around her was also noticing the kids being misbehaved, and they were so angry, and they were sighing and staring every time her 2-year-old made a noise. And that was a moment that stuck with me, and of course I’ve had similar experiences riding with my own kids on various modes of public transportation, and again it just sort of hit me like, OK, this is really, really bad. I do think that there’s this pathological frustration with children that just is a new thing in American society. I think it’s very dark.

So Vance admits that "childless cat ladies" was a bad thing to say, but he says that any person who is even mildly frustrated by a poorly behaved child has a belief system that's "pathological" and "dark." (And this is a new phenomenon -- apparently, no one was ever annoyed by unruly kids in Vance's imagined Golden Age, whenever that was.)

Wait, there's more:

I think you see it sometimes in the political conversation, people saying, well, maybe we shouldn’t have kids because of climate change. You know, when I’ve used this word sociopathic? Like, that, I think, is a very deranged idea: the idea that you shouldn’t have a family because of concerns over climate change. Doesn’t mean you can’t worry about climate change, but in the focus on childless cat ladies, we missed the substance of what I said.

So if you don't want children because you think the planet we're leaving to those hypothetical children will be unlivable -- remember, Vance is speaking after the back-to-back wallop of Hurricanes Helene and Milton -- you're "sociopathic" and "deranged."

This is too much for Garcia-Navarro.

Sorry, I just want to clarify something. So women who don’t have children because they’re worried about climate change, that’s sociopathic? I think that is a bizarre way of thinking about the future. Not to have kids because of concerns over climate change? I think the more bizarre thing is our leadership, who encourages young women, and frankly young men, to think about it that way.... if your political philosophy is saying, don’t do that because of concerns over climate change? Yeah, I think that’s a really, really crazy way to think about the world.

Let's toss "bizarre" and "crazy" into the mix, in addition to "pathological," "dark," "sociopathic," and "deranged."

And while Vance absolutely wouldn't attack Kamala Harris on this subject (even though he did in 2021), he might attack her if it were revealed that she'd crossed his uncrossable line in the sand:

I would never accuse Kamala Harris along these lines. What I would say is that sometimes Kamala Harris, she hasn’t quite jumped over the “You shouldn’t have kids because of climate change.” But I think in some of her interviews, she’s suggested there’s a reasonableness to that perspective. But again, I don’t think that’s a reasonable perspective. I think that if your political ideas motivate you to not have children, then that is a bizarre way of looking at the world.

Sorry, ladies -- he's married!

J.D. Vance hates people who disagree with him politically or culturally. Given the fact that our political establishment believes he'll become our 48th president one way or another, that hatred scares me.