Independent Senator Joe Manchin has taken aim at Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance for making “very weird” comments about adults who choose to not have children.
Vance, a U.S. senator for Ohio, has been under fire in recent days over resurfaced comments denouncing the “childless cat ladies” that he says are running the country. He has also said that adults without children have no “stake” in the country and are “sociopathic” or “psychotic.”
Manchin, a former Democrat who still caucuses with the party, echoed recent Democratic remarks describing Vance and former President Donald Trump as “weird” while commenting on his Senate colleague’s recently uncovered stance on childless Americans.
“That truly is just a weird position to take,” Manchin told Associated Press reporter Laura K. Garrison on Tuesday. “I’ve never heard that before. It was very weird. I couldn’t believe it.”
Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk said the following in a statement emailed to Newsweek: “Once again, the leftwing media have twisted Senator Vance’s words and spun up a false narrative about his position on the issues. As he has clearly stated, he was talking about politicians on the left who support policies that are explicitly anti-child and anti-family.”
“The media can obsess over it all they want, but he’s not going to back down when it comes to advocating for policies that protect parental rights and encourage people to have more kids,” Van Kirk added.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung previously said in a statement to Newsweek that Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, were “actually projecting their weird and creepy vibes” and described the “weird” rhetoric as “gaslighting from her moronic, too-online campaign.”
While Vance and Trump have been called “weird” by their critics over a variety of policy positions and public remarks, Vance’s past comments on those without children have been under particular scrutiny in recent days following the unearthing of a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
During the interview, Vance argued that “we are effectively run in this country” by Democrats, “corporate oligarchs” and “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.”
“It’s just a basic fact that if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said. “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 also suggested during a 2021 speech to conservative group Intercollegiate Studies Institute that parents should “have more power” and be granted the ability to cast more votes in elections than those without children.
“Let’s face the consequences and the reality,” Vance said during the speech. “If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
CNN reported on Tuesday that Vance had referred to those without children as “sociopathic” and “psychotic” during an interview on a conservative podcast in November 2020.
“I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable,” Vance said on The Chris Buskirk Show. “You go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”
Vance has defended his previous remarks as “not a criticism of people who don’t have children” but instead criticism of “the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” while adding that he has “nothing against cats.”
Update 7/30/24, 8:54 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to include a statement from Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
