JD Vance Caught Making Creepy Comments About Childless Women Again

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Newly unearthed audio reveals Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) disparaging childless women again — and just like his “childless cat ladies” comments to Tucker Carlson , he is once again attacking someone who is actually a parent.

Vance has attempted to defend his comments by claiming he was joking or that he didn’t mean people who were trying to have children but couldn’t, but new video and audio clips keep resurfacing where he has argued that people who don’t have children don’t care about the future of the country, should get fewer votes than Americans with children, and so on.

As countless people have pointed out, Vance’s attacks on “childless cat ladies” included Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg . Harris has proudly spoken many times about how much she enjoys being a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s children — they call her “Momala” and even Emhoff’s ex-wife effusively praises Harris’s co-parenting role in their family. As for Buttigieg, and he and his husband Chasten Buttigieg are parents to twins now; at the time of Vance’s interview with Carlson, they were trying to become parents but had not yet.

Earlier this month, comments Vance made on a 2020 episode of a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein , a fellow Peter Thiel acolyte, resurfaced and — I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here — he made comments that women, regardless of cat ownership, found creepy. During a discussion about how Vance’s mother-in-law took a year sabbatical from her job as a professor to help care for his infant son, Weinstein commented that grandparents helping care for grandchildren was “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female , in theory,” as Vance immediately responded, “yes.”

That podcast was first flagged by Heartland Signal , the newsroom for Chicago-based progressive radio station WCPT 820 AM, and the same media outlet dug up another Vance gem on Tuesday.

In this new clip, Vance was speaking at a Center for Christian Virtue forum in 2021, and criticizes Randi Weingarten , the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union.

A transcript of Vance’s remarks:

And I think our conservative idea is that parents and families should determine what children learn, what values they are brought up with. You know, it’s so many of the leaders of the left — and I hate to be so personal about this — but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children.

And that really disorients me, and it really disturbed me.

Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country — she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.

In 2018, Weingarten married Rabbi Sharon Anne Kleinbaum , who has two daughters from a previous marriage. In an April 2023 Congressional hearing when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) criticized Weingarten over pandemic-era school policies, and demanded to know if she was a “mother,” the union head replied, “ I am a mother by marriage ,” and pointed out that Kleinbaum was attending the hearing with her. Greene retorted that she was “not a biological mother,” drawing sharp criticism for her disregard for families with stepchildren or adoptive children.

Besides the fact that again Vance erroneously attacked someone as “childless” who is actually a parent, the tenor of his comments reveal that he, like Greene, is gripping tightly to a contempt for the millions of Americans whose families don’t look exactly like the “mom, dad, 2.5 children” nuclear family idealistically portrayed in classic black-and-white television programs.

Vance’s declaration that the thought of a childless person working in the education system “disorients” and “disturbed” him is yet another admission that he has a personally classist view of America, with divisions not necessarily on wealth or family pedigree, but where people without children don’t deserve a say in the future direction of our country and their voices are less valid on any topic.

It’s laughably easy to come up with examples of childless Americans who have done wonderful things, many specifically for the benefit of children. Wrestler and actor John Cena has granted more wishes to children with terminal or life-threatening medical problems through the Make-A-Wish Foundation than any other person, more than triple the second place finisher. Dolly Parton , herself the fourth of twelve children in an Appalachian family she’s described as “dirt poor,” has donated more than 100 million books to children, in part to honor her own father, who never learned to read or write. That’s in addition to millions more dollars she’s donated to a wide variety of causes ranging from the American Red Cross, cancer research, natural disaster relief , Covid-19 vaccine research , and even efforts that helped the bald eagle population recover from the endangered species list.

Back in the pre-Trump times, the conservative activists I used to know often described themselves as “originalists,” expressing a deep knowledge and fondness for our founding documents. Well, the Declaration of Independence declares that it is a “self-evident” truth that we are all “created equal” and “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The U.S. Constitution, throughout all its amendments over the years, never demanded that we help hundreds of children with cancer or save the bald eagle from extinction in order to deserve our rights.

Moreover, the core problem with Vance’s derision towards childless Americans is that the exception he offers — that he doesn’t mean those people who tried to have children but couldn’t — still demands more than he has the right to ever ask.

There are a million different reasons why someone might not have children, and none of them should be the business of JD Vance, Donald Trump , or any other meddling government bureaucrat. Some have struggled with fertility. Some have had miscarriages and decided they can’t bear grieving another lost baby. Some have been in abusive relationships and feared bringing a child into an environment they’re thankful they managed to escape. Some have medical problems that might not be physically observable but would still make a pregnancy incredibly difficult or even deadly. Some have worked through mental health issues and have legitimate concerns they wouldn’t be able to maintain their hard-fought stability under the pressure of caring for a child.

These are among the most personal and painful situations our fellow Americans can ever experience. It’s despicably, deplorably cruel to demand someone share this information with anyone outside of their medical providers and trusted family and friends. It’s damnably un-American to expect anyone to disclose their most private heart of hearts in order to claim their part of the American dream.

UPDATE 8/28 10:00 am ET: The Vance campaign issued a statement to Mediaite broadly attacking Randi Weingarten, but did not address specifics about the unearthed audio, including the fact that he accused a woman who is a stepmother of not having children. Notably, the statement did not deny that it is Vance in the audio clip or claim his words were not reported accurately.

Readers can read the transcript and listen to the audio above and judge for themselves, as they can with the two-and-a-half hour long Eric Weinstein podcast Mediate reported on earlier this month, in which Vance also made comments and agreed with comments that have been sharply — and rightfully — criticized.