J.D. Vance Addresses ‘Cat Ladies’ Comment: ‘I Don’t Think We Should Back Down from It, I Think We Should Be Honest About the Problem’

[Excerpt]

Kelly: “As the Democratic Party ousts President Joe Biden and elevates Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of its ticket without a single vote having been cast for her in that role, in just a matter of hours, the media suddenly turning all of its focus seemingly to Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate. Donald Trump’s number two coming under intense criticism for comments he made three years ago about, quote, ‘childless cat ladies.’ Because this is what Americans who can’t pay their mortgages care about. Senator Vance is here to respond to this controversy. But first, we want to start by walking you through how it all began. Going back now to July 2021, Mr. Vance had just launched his campaign for senator in the great state of Ohio, and he gave a speech to a conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This was a speech essentially about declining birth rates. And they’re bad, by the way, in the United States. They’re at a 17-year low and they continue to go in the wrong direction. And what it means for the future of this country. Mr. Vance talked about how he wanted to see the Republican Party as a pro-family party. He discussed the importance of children and brought up the fact that many top Democratic leaders don’t have any kids, questioning what kind of a message the party as a whole is sending to young Americans. Take a listen.”
[Clip starts]
Vance: “I want to take aim at the left, specifically the childless left, because I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country. (...) Consider all of the next gen of the Democrat Party. (...) The names are obvious. They’re well-known people, Kamala Harris, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who’s now the secretary of transportation, Cory Booker, AOC. Think all of these people. They’re different. They come from different walks of life, different parts of the country. What is the one thing that unites every single one of them? Not a single one of them has any children. (...) Look, a lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons. (...) There are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons, that can’t have children. The target of these remarks is not them. It’s important to point that out. (...) It is one thing to recognize that there are people who don’t have children, it’s one thing to recognize that there are people who don’t have children through no fault or choice of their own. But it’s something else to build a political movement invested theoretically in the future of this country, when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country. (...) Kids are the ultimate way that we find healthy people, at least I think self-meaning in life. (...) We should treat this as a crisis in this country. (...) And we should send the signal to the culture that we are the pro-family party, and we’re going to back it up with real policy.” (Applause)
[Clip ends]
Kelly: “Now, because Mr. Vance named names in his speech, it caused some headlines at the time, mainly because Vice President Harris is not a mother of her own biological children, but she’s a stepmother. At the same time, Secretary Buttigieg did not have any children, but about a month later, he adopted twin babies. So a few days after those remarks back in 2021, Mr. Vance went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox to address some of the blowback, and that’s when he made the comments about the childless cat ladies. Watch.”
[Clip starts]
Vance: “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. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
[Clip ends]
Kelly: “Well, the Harris team recirculated the comments this week, leading Democrats and the media, the same media currently rewriting history to tell us Kamala Harris was never the border czar, to immediately pile on, on cue. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton shared it on X and sarcastically wrote, ‘What a normal relatable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms.’ Literally, your husband has been accused of repeated sexual assaults. So take a seat, madam. On Wednesday, actress Jennifer Aniston weighed in, writing, ‘I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States,’ and urged Senator Vance to think about his own daughter, hoping that she might never need IVF, which she accused Mr. Vance of being against, which, as we pointed out yesterday, is not true. And it did not end there. Watch.”
[Clip starts]
Goldberg: “How dare you? You never had a baby. Your wife had a baby. (...) You know who else didn’t have kids? George Washington, the father of our nation. (...) Like Kamala, he raised Martha’s children.”
(...)
Reid: “Because they invalidate even the idea of women who use IVF to get pregnant or women who don’t have children or women who are stepmoms. Like None of those are valid women to them. Those women don’t matter. (...) They’re trying to reinforce this message that the only valid version of America is the America where white women didn’t leave the home.”
(...)
BRZEZINSKI: “My kids are older. Does that make me childless? I want to qualify.”
(...)
UNKNOWN FEMALE: “He is falling into the line of Donald Trump, offending women, offending minorities.”
(...)
RYAN: “So if you have stepkids, J.D. Vance is saying that you should not have as many rights as everybody else. Like this is a person — him and the former president, they want to control women. (...) Jesus did not have children, right?”
[Clip ends]
Kelly: “Joining me now, GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. J.D., senator, welcome back to the show. It’s great to see you.”
Vance: “Good to see you, Megyn. Thank you.”
Kelly: “So Jesus didn’t have kids. Therefore, you are wrong. What are you trying to say?”
Vance: “I guess they’re comparing Kamala Harris to Jesus. I don’t know. That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, Megyn. But look, I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down on this, Megyn. But the simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way. This is something, of course, we’ve recognized for hundreds of years in this country that human civilization has always recognized. But there’s a deeper point here, Megyn. It’s not a criticism of people who don’t have children. And I explicitly said in my remarks, despite the fact the media has lied about this, that this is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn’t have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child. We have to ask ourselves, Megyn, why do we have masking of toddlers years after the pandemic ended? Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning, Megyn, and saying that we should not have the child tax credit, which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid. And I’m proud to stand up for parents. And I hope that parents out there recognize that I’m a guy who wants to fight for you. I want to fight for your interests. I want to fight for your stake in the country. And that is what this is fundamentally about. The Democrats in the past five, 10 years, Megyn, they have become anti-family. It’s built into their policy. It’s built into the way they talk about parents and children. And it’s time that we call that out. I don’t think we should back down from it, Megyn, I think we should be honest about the problem.”
Kelly: “Here’s what’s crazy. It’s not just Senator J.D. Vance, Republican, and running mate to Donald Trump, saying that. Just recently, there was a long piece, June 10th, 2024, in ‘The New York Times,’ and another one in ‘The New Yorker,’ highlighting a book that’s called, ‘What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice,’ in which the authors, leftists, liberals, got deep into this very problem and chastised their own side for the reluctance to have children and the messaging to young women about priorities. It’s not just a Republican thing. The honest liberals will admit themselves that somehow the Democrats are running away from family as one of their previous, old, core values. I’ll just give you a couple of excerpts from ‘The New York Times’ piece by these two authors, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman. Again, this was a month ago. They write, ‘For progressives, waiting to have children has become a kind of ethical imperative.’ They go on to say, ‘The success narratives of modern liberal life leave little room for having a family.’ They say, ‘This is not just a recipe for unhappiness. It also reflects a deep confusion.’ And they go on to write as follows, ‘The question of children ultimately transcends politics. In deciding whether to have them we confront a philosophical challenge, is life, however imperfect and however challenging, however fraught with political disagreement and disaster, worth living?’ So this is not — and I could go on. I mean, ‘The New Yorker’ piece had the similar point. We’ve seen it from AOC. We’ve seen it from the hardcore environmentalists on the left in particular, urging people not to have children because they don’t see a future for the country or the world.”
Vance: “Yeah, Megyn. And I think it’s profoundly weird and dangerous rhetoric. As you know, I think most parents would say professional achievements, whether you’re a mom or dad, all that stuff eventually fades away. The thing that you’re most proud of is having kids. What your kids do, the relationship that you have with your family, that is what I think brings the most meaning to life, is family, not all these weird little accomplishments and degrees and everything else, right? It’s family that really brings the most meaning to our lives. And Megyn, this comment that I made was actually motivated in part by a conversation I had with my wife where, you know, she at the time had two babies, we hadn’t yet had a third, and she was talking about how she felt this incredible professional pressure to not have kids because it set back her professional advancement. And what a weird society that we’ve set up where moms who want to work, the thought that a lot of them are having is I can’t have more babies because it’s going to be bad for my career. How about we make the workplace more accommodating to working moms and working dads so that we can promote a real culture of life. And you started your monologue, Megyn, talking about how we have the lowest birth rate basically in our history, in this country. What our young moms and dads are telling us is they don’t feel comfortable in this society, bringing new life into the world. That is a catastrophic problem. And it’s interesting when I raised this issue about we don’t have enough babies, a lot of liberals and a lot of people on the left will say, well, we can just replace American children with — with immigrants. Well, look, there’s nothing against immigrants. Obviously I’m married to the daughter of immigrants, but if your society is not having enough children to replace itself, that is a profoundly dangerous and destabilizing thing. You look across history, that’s a real problem. So I just think that we have to say, Megyn, having kids is good. Being a parent changes your perspective on the world. That is not a bad thing to stand up for parents. In fact, it’s the best thing. If our politics isn’t standing up for parents, then what the hell are we doing, Megyn?”
Kelly: “All right. I’m giving you ‘The New Yorker’ again. This is a — the first was from ‘The New York Times.’ Here’s ‘The New Yorker,’ ‘How liberals talk about children,’ by Jay Caspian Kang. This is from June. This is a month ago. And it ends with the following. He talks about how — this person Jay — talks about how the messaging from leftists around children is all about their economic value, how much they’re going to cost, what kind of a burden they’re going to be, as opposed to the goodness they bring into the world and our lives. And the piece ends as follows, ‘We should talk about them as a universal and immutable good.’ So that’s exactly what you did —“
Vance: “Yes.”
Kelly: “— in those remarks, J.D., and I understood it completely. And I think even the left, if they’re honest, understands that piece of it.”