Since Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate, Democrats have been eagerly digging up every remark he’s ever said, looking for phrases to distort and take out of context. They’ve pounced on statements he’s made praising women for choosing to have children, trying to use it as a wedge issue to alienate career women.
But there’s not actually a conflict. Everyone knows that children bring parents joy. Everyone knows that children turn out better on average if a parent at home is raising them — even better if homeschooled. You can be a career woman and admit this; there is no contradiction.
During a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance said that people run the U.S., including "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." He criticized people without children running the country since they “don't really have a direct stake in it.”
In an interview with American Moment, Vance said, "You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle … instead of starting a family and having children.” He called the former a “path to misery.”
There is nothing wrong with either of those statements. We have all worked with an unhappy childless feminist who takes her rage out on the rest of her co-workers. A job that requires 90 hours a week working in a cubicle is horrible for life happiness. And parents with children are more concerned about political issues related to children than nonparents. The problem is that the left side is taking Vance’s remarks way out of context.
Vance is only referring to women who have a clear choice whether or not to raise children, who instead abort them or refuse to change their minds about children even though their husbands really want them, etc. He’s not referring to all of the alternative scenarios out there that do not involve selfish reasons. Many women don’t have children because they can’t afford them — they have a lazy husband who can’t hold a job, they have aging relatives who take up all their money and time caring for them, or they’ve married a man who already has children of his own. So there is not enough money left over to have more children. Maybe they’ve just been unsuccessful in dating.
With DEI policies firmly in place across corporate America and in government, a lot of men can no longer find jobs in their fields since a minority or woman is always hired before they are. This is forcing more women into the workplace. While women’s employment numbers bounced back to pre-COVID-19 levels after COVID-19 ended, men’s numbers never did, leaving 2.7 million out of the job market. About 14 percent of males age 25 are not in the workforce. When Boomers were that age, only 7 percent were unemployed.
Unfortunately, the left has become quite skilled at doctoring studies to pretend that not having a parent at home raising children is better for the children. Since they now control so much of the government, they provide government grants to researchers who will produce the fake outcome they want. Most people see through it, but not all — especially those who do not have children so they aren’t around children much. Whose children are usually the best behaved and get the highest grades? It’s the ones with stable nuclear families and a parent at home.
Another important aspect missing from this debate in order to provide full context is that it doesn’t have to be the mother who stays at home to raise the children; if a couple prefers a stay-at-home dad, that should be up to them. Dr. Warren Farrell, who has written extensively about families, especially men and boys, found that children who are deprived of their father’s involvement in their lives suffer. Since 1948, 26 out of 28 of the deadliest mass shootings (between 8 and 58 killed) were marked by dad deprivation.
Farrell discovered that children raised predominantly by dads are 15 percent likely to have ADHD. At the same time, children raised by moms are 30 percent likely to have ADHD. (This is despite the fact that dads get the more challenging children to deal with.) Farrell went over ten different ways fathers’ parenting style differs from mothers’ in his book “The Boy Crisis.”
Much of the irritation with childless cat ladies — it’s not just feminists’ prickly personalities — is due to their poor career choices. Many of them take out huge student loans they’ll never be able to repay (taxpayers bail out government-backed loans), majoring in fields like Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Sexuality, and Gender Identity. The left whines about the so-called gender pay gap, claiming that women only make 86 percent of what men do but continue to funnel women into those useless majors.
Since employers are trying to fill quotas, they hire more qualified white males with applicable college degrees or work experience. And since those degrees are obtained by progressives with an ax to grind, their colleagues are stuck in a work environment being preached at. We’ve all received those inappropriate mass emails, inserting their leftist politics into the professional environment. They pretend that promoting DEI is not political.
Conservatives are waking up and realizing not everyone needs to go to college, especially since higher ed has become an indoctrination mill. Gallup found that Republicans’ support for college began decreasing in the mid-2010s. Only 33 percent of Republicans have confidence in colleges, compared to 56 percent of Democrats.
Vance’s own wife continued working as a high-powered, Yale-educated lawyer after they had children, so clearly he wasn’t stating that all women have to stay at home and raise children. But just like the Democrats gaslight women about abortion, they’re preying on them with distortions and telling them how to think.