J.D. Vance Has No Empathy

 A lot has happened in the past two weeks, Trump named J.D. Vance as his running mate and Joe Biden announced he has decided not to run for re-election then endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. Republicans are now in disarray as their whole campaign strategy was centered on Biden being “too” old. Now that gimmick won’t work and J.D. Vance’s ugly remarks about women and his flip flops on significant issues are making his nomination a drag on the Trump campaign instead of broadening support.

In a 2021 Fox News appearance Vance discussed controversial remarks he’d made to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute earlier that month. In it, he called a number of prominent Democratic leaders the “childless left” whom he said had “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”

During the Fox interview Vance said "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

Vance added that “if we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support more people who actually have kids. Because those are the people who ultimately have a more direct stake in the future of this country.”

There is so much to take apart in Vance’s statement so let’s start with the inaccuracies. Kamala Harris is the stepmother of her husband’s two children and had been for over 6 years when Vance shot his mouth off. Pete Buttigieg and his husband had been working toward adopting a pair of twins for quite a while and the adoption was finalized just months after Vance’s insulting assertion. As to AOC, yes she is currently childless and she is also young enough at 34 that she may just not feel ready to have children but then again so what is she chooses not to have kids. AOC has done far more to insure the well-being of Americans and especially children than Vance has.

Then there’s Vance’s claim that people without children have no direct stake in the country. We already know that Republicans have no empathy toward those outside their own families and close friends. Vance can’t see how anyone without children of their own can have the best interest of others unrelated to them in their hearts because he doesn’t and simply projects his feelings on others.

Vance’s utterance regarding a “health ruling class” is the final nail in his coffin. That tells you he sees the world as a place divided between those ordained to rule and those who serve. That’s like the divine right of kings that George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson fought for this nation’s independence from.

Vance is also being taken to task for his flip-flops on issues like climate change where he’s gone from being a big investor in green energy solutions to climate change denier and pushing legislation to provide government support for dirty coal fired power plants.

Perhaps the biggest flip-flop is Vance’s conversion from privately calling Trump “America’s Hitler”, a “moral disaster” a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people and “reprehensible” to accepting Trump’s offer to be his running mate.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - August 31, 2024