Counter-Currents
The Worst Week Yet: July 21-28, 2024
J. D. Vance Defends His Remarks About “Childless Cat Ladies”
Jim Goad
1,969 words / 14:20
With only 99 days left until November 5, a hyperkinetic and implicitly schizophrenic election season kicks into full gear, meaning that both sides are flinging shit at one another like rabid island chimps, hoping that at least some of it sticks.
Sometimes the flung feces consist of old comments that came straight from the candidate’s mouth and which undermine their current persona. Other times it’s old e-mail snippets from estranged friends who seek to kneecap their former acquaintance’s political aspirations.
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In one case, it’s a five-year-old essay from a presidential candidate’s father claiming his daughter is descended from an aggressively cruel slaveowner.
In another case, it’s a disgruntled nephew accusing his uncle of dropping N-bombs and wishing death upon the disabled.
And finally, it’s a completely fabricated “confessional” wherein an author-turned-vice-presidential candidate says he used to copulate with a couch.
As I wrote here last week, I do not trust the mercurial, roly-poly, rabbi-endorsed Ohio Senator who went through many name changes until he settled on J. D. Vance. Unlike Vance, who seems to change his name and his political sympathies more often than most people change their socks, my opinion of him has remained steadfastly negative since I reviewed his book Hillbilly Elegy six years ago.
As far as I can tell, the main difference between J. D. Vance and Kamala Harris is that Vance married an Indian woman, whereas Harris plopped out of an Indian woman’s womb.
If Donald Trump picked Vance in the hope of securing disaffected voters in the deindustrialized Midwest, it has backfired spectacularly. One poll found that Vance is “the least-liked vice-presidential candidate since 1980” and that he has a net unfavorable rating of 16 points in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
So much for polls. Hitler clearly didn’t kill enough of them.
But since I am a fair and unbiased reporter, I am compelled to defend Vance against false rumors that in his younger years, he fornicated with a couch. The rumors started with some scamp who edited a pirated digital version of Hillbilly Elegy so that it contained this passage:
Years later, I looked at my wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, fucked a couch. All of us had found ourselves beheld by the eroticism of two cushions, side-by-side, with that lush, inviting valley between. We all knew how to respect one too: With a rubber glove and any lubricant you had on hand. All of us were lonely at some point, pushed away by the women in our lives. It was our outlet and an unspoken-yet-open secret. To want for a couch is to be, and to lay with one as one does? It is a rite of passage into the chambers of manhood.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.
Since nearly everyone these days has a terminal case of confirmation bias, those seeking to thwart Trump’s second ascendancy to the presidency gobbled this up like peach pie to the point where the story became so widespread that the Associated Press ran a fact-checking story which found it to be untrue, only to then delete it.
So, in case you were wondering, J. D. Vance never fornicated with a couch. Correction: He may have fornicated with several couches, but he never wrote about it in Hillbilly Elegy.
I also wrote last week about how Vance had previously made several disparaging comments about Donald Trump, only to suddenly, er, “evolve” and “see the light.”
Last week came news that a former classmate of Vance’s at Yale Law School — a male-to-female tranny who calls himself “Sofia Nelson” — forked over to The New York Times roughly 90 text messages and e-mails he and Vance shared from 2014 to 2017. The messages reveal political sympathies diametrically opposed to the MAGA conservative persona that Vance is currently peddling.
Referencing the police shooting of dunderheaded black thug Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Vance wrote:
I hate the police. Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t imagine what a black guy goes through.
Regarding his current running mate:
I’m obviously outraged at Trump’s rhetoric, and I worry most of all about how welcome Muslim citizens feel in their own country. . . . But I also think that people have always believed crazy shit and there have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit.
The more [that] white people feel like voting for Trump, the more black people will suffer. I really believe that. . . . He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.
But the former Vance comments that received the most publicity last week came from 2021, after his (pick one): 1) utterly sincere political metamorphosis; or 2) opportunistic heel turn which reveals that underneath his beard and flab lurks a vast expanse of nothingness.
In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance opined:
We are 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, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.
After the excavated quote induced the predictable hissing and scratching from the childless cat ladies, Vance defended his comments in a sit-down with Megyn Kelly:
I’ve heard from a lot of conservative women, and frankly, a lot of liberal women who said, “I’m actually glad that you pointed out there’s become something profoundly anti-family in our public policy in our republic conversation.” Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. . . . I’ve got nothing against cats, I’ve got nothing against dogs, I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him. But look, people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. And the substance of what I said, I’m sorry, It’s true. It is true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child. It is simply true that it’s become way too hard to raise a family. . . .
I agree with Vance that structural economic changes — among them the outsourcing of industry and the importation of cheap multicultural labor — have made it much harder to raise a family than it was in the days when my dad, who didn’t even have a high-school diploma, was able to house and feed four kids and their stay-at-home mother.
But I strongly suspect that these structural economic changes preceded and thereby led to phenomena such as “childless cat ladies.” I’ve long felt that “feminism” wasn’t so much about “female empowerment” as it was about forcing women to compete for wages on a globalized economic plantation.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
Whereas you may believe that “culture is downstream of politics,” I’m inclined to think that both are downstream of economics.
The Fates, who in most historical depictions appear to be a trio of childless cat ladies, decreed that last week would also be when Pew Research released a study titled “The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children.”
I have never postured as a statistician, so perhaps I’m misreading the study’s page on “survey methodology,” but between April and May of this year, it seems as if Pew researchers quizzed “2,542 adults ages 50 and older who don’t have children and 770 adults ages 18 to 49 who don’t have children and say they are not too or not at all likely to have them.”
The authors claim that factors such as race, party affiliation, and gender were equally weighted. Again, tell me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t appear as if opinions diverged significantly among the childless among these axes, so it might be a tad unfair to place the blame squarely on Leftist feminists.
According to the researchers:
For the most part, the experiences of adults without children and the reasons they give for not having them don’t vary much by gender. This is the case across both age groups.
As much as I’d like to blame women for everything, this survey does not allow me to solely blame them for the fact that last year, American fertility rates reached an all-time low. Also last year came another Pew survey that found “47% of U.S. adults younger than 50 without kids said they were unlikely to have children, up 10 percentage points from 2018.”
At least in last week’s Pew survey, the main demographic factor that divided childless adults, at least along attitudinal lines, was age, which Pew divided into those over 50 and those from 18-49:
The top response for those ages 50 and older is that it just didn’t happen. Meanwhile, those in the younger group are most likely to say they just don’t want to have kids. Women younger than 50 are especially likely to say they just don’t want to have children (64% vs. 50% of men in this group).
Among the reasons that respondents gave for being childless:
- They just don’t want to have children (57% in the younger group vs. 31% in the older group)
- They want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests (44% vs. 21%)
- Concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment (38% vs. 13%)
- They can’t afford to raise a child (36% vs. 12%)
- Concerns about the environment, including climate change (26% vs. 6%)
- They don’t really like children (20% vs. 8%)
By even wider margins, younger childless adults said that abstaining from procreation made their lives easier:
- Having time for hobbies and interests (80% in the younger group vs. 57% in the older group)
- Affording the things they want (79% vs. 61%)
- Saving for the future (75% vs. 57%)
- Being successful in their job or career (61% vs. 44%, among those who don’t indicate this doesn’t apply to them)
- Having an active social life (58% vs. 36%)
Naturally, the gaping flaw in last week’s Pew survey is that it only interviewed childless adults, so it’s hard to get a bead on exactly who’s having kids, what their political leanings are, and whether they bother to vote.
Other studies on politics and childbearing reach different conclusions. Here’s one from 2020 titled “The Conservative Fertility Advantage,” asserting that counties who voted for Trump in that year’s election “have higher birth rates” than counties that voted for Biden, which seems contradictory when one takes into account that whites have lower birth rates than non-whites:
This is particularly astonishing given that Democrats perform very well in counties with many Hispanic and black voters, who have higher birth rates than non-Hispanic white Americans (and indeed, the more non-Hispanic whites in a county, the lower its birth rate in my models). The relationship is also unchanged if the sample is restricted to only very-high-density counties, such as those representing the center of major cities. In other words, the Republican “fertility advantage” does not arise from more rural counties with higher birth rates, and it exists despite the fact that much of the Democratic Party’s electoral base is among racial and ethnic groups with higher birth rates in general. The split I identify isn’t about race or urbanization or region of the country: it’s about family. Within racial- or ethnic-groups, within states or urbanized areas, the more conservative areas tend to have more babies.
That 2020 report, published by the Institute for Family Studies, says that although blacks and Hispanics — who tend to vote Democratic — have more babies than whites, “the more conservative areas tend to have more babies.” Perhaps liberal whites — both men and women — are so uniquely childless that they skew the stats?
At this point, the swirling maelstrom of seemingly contradictory statistics is giving me a headache. More studies are needed, and I’d be glad to conduct them if you’d be so philanthropic as to supply me with the proper funding.
But for now, I think it’s deeply sexist to blame only the childless cat ladies. Clearly the childless cat men are also a problem.
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32 comments
The more I read about J.D. Vance the more suspicious I become of him. He has spoken at fundraisers at Jeffery Epstein associate Leslie Wexner’s house. That in and of itself sets off alarm bells.
I always tell people that my biggest regret in life was not having more kids.
The more I read about [insert POLITICIAN NAME] the more suspicious I become of him.
This Wexner connection is a HUGE red flag. Anyway, looks like Trump didn’t learn his lesson with that snake Pence. Don’t mess with snakes!
As a TOTALLY deaf person, I CURSE “podcasts” and videos without sub=titles or closed captions in the vilest scatological terms. Content is lost to me. Give me text, that I can READ>
Those who dislike that can go to the Outer Darkness.
When I first heard JD Vance was running for senate, I assumed it was as a Democrat: Ivy League graduate, married to an Indian, a biography novel that sounded a bit like an old school union labor Democrat.
Flipping forward, he ticks many boxes as a Trump running mate: Ohio is a critical swing state for Republicans, might curry favor with Asian voters (many of whom believe in meritocracy), and he is a media star with a movie. Trump is probably asking how he can get his own Netflix deal).
But elections are not about the candidates you wish you had…
The idea that feminism relates to forcing women to compete for globalized wages is an interesting one, though not fully borne out by the utterances of feminists. The great US post-WW2 economy was driven in part by much of the developed world being in rubble except for the territories of the US, China and India. The US jumped ahead but not forever.
I don’t see that the PEW study looked at liberal vs conservatives. Some report conservatives have more children. Though it is more complicated than that as new immigrants tend to have more children and they veer left. Living in a diverse area is associated with fewer children. Among whites, Mormons do well financially and in childbirths… they’re an odd group but their results make them worthy of study.
Pedantic of me, I know, but China was very much exhausted after a civil war and a Japanese invasion following a century of more or less chaos.
“might curry favor with Asian voters…”
Heh heh….
There was some Deep State support for feminism for basically that reason. (That was part of the picture, even though there were other influences, including grassroots support.) Aaron Russo’s video, made one month before his rather fishy death, goes into some of that, in which he describes a Rockefeller scion and CFR member discussing this. In that light, Gloria Steinem’s connections start to add up.
I agree China took a drubbing from the Japanese, though in the lands more proximate to Japan. China was set back some and India didn’t begin growth till the 70s, taking off in the 00s. With so much competitive cheap labor in a global economy the rich get richer and the middle class seems to erode. It might be good PR to suggest to women that a deep state lures them to work, but there certainly are successful high achieving women who like to insinuate that what fits them should be sought by all. The diversity movement also has its progressive allies, but Blacks themselves have some role in this and steal from the feminist playbook (as do the LGBT groups).
More studies are needed as they always say. But I’m convinced that a bigger family (or any one at all) is more easily achieved in the suburbs and less diverse areas. More in-group mating opportunities, lower taxes, a lifestyle more suitable for kids (playgrounds, crime rates, less traffic getting to school, etc). I’m pretty sure Mr. Goad once covered some angry white lesbians aggrieved that they were erroneously given black sperm when trying to conceive. Even they clearly had a slant for in-group mating.
Not just currying favor, many claim Curry powder is a romanticized British version of the tastes of Indian cuisine. Nothing wrong with admiration or curiosity for worldwide cultures. But we continue to have a romanticized vision that all diversity is good… diversity is our strength… Many spices can be pungent, bitter and with a real bite to them.
The masthead picture of Vance – a fine cross between Benny Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio
I’m a guy who doesn’t look like a cat lady, but after seeing the kind of horrendous things ppl do to cats (and animals in general), and after adopting a few, I took some offense to his comment.
I think Jim Goad is right when he emphatizes the influence of economy on culture and politics. Just because the marxists think that everything derives from economic relationships and the ownershio of the means of production, does not mean that these matters don´t have a big impact. One cannot understand the mess that the West is now without a look at what has been going on in the economy for the past 45 years. The global, mostly white elite doesn´t give a damn about the nation states. It´s the new Middle ages. We are just serfs for them, man.
Very accurately stated, and it’s not the nation “States” as in State authorities, but the grand majority of non elites from every middle class corner.
I can’t get past Vance’s fat, stupid face. I realize this isn’t reasoned criticism, but that face… If my daughter brought him home I would find it difficult to be polite. And I am polite to people I haaaate.
Same for me. He is the epitome of testosterone deficient, man-child, soja boy, turn coat, opportunist, degenerate, insecure, nasty little hypocrite.
He makes me think, psychologicaly, of Quentin Tarantino. Always around and worshipping Jews and non whites, to take revenge of his white mother.
Kind of funny since the guy did make it through Marine boot camp as an enlisted man and spent time in a combat zone, although as a Marine reporter and not a grunt. Still, that means he probably has a higher T count than 99% of the “men” walking around American cities. I guess he’s just not as attractive as Pete Buttguy or Kamala?
It’s not unusual for veterans to become fat and soft years after leaving the military.
Not uncommon for everyone to become soft and fat as they age. At least here in America. The qb on my high school football team is obese today. Life in America. Too much good food.
It seems all of this was a sinecure. Oh, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings : if this Vance is your favourite.
I just wanted to reply to someone who, like many, can’t suffer this ” guy ” .
It’s okay, I don’t have any feelings. Vance isn’t really my favorite, I lean more towards George Wallace or John Calhoun, but he’s still way better than most of the modern politicians who grew up wealthy and never had to throw a punch in their lives.
I’d forgotten all about Jim Goad’s takedown of Vance in VDARE, which he linked in a comment to my comparison of book and movie of Hillbilly Elegy, in late 2020. Good to revisit that again. I often thought I was all alone out there in my Vance-slagging.
J. D. Vance is truly the tossing dwarf that keeps on giving.
Can’t stop the Moll Pott & the Kamala Rouge….you’ll work harder with a transitioned kid and bowl of crickets a day…
“Women younger than 50 are especially likely to say they just don’t want to have children (64% vs. 50% of men in this group).” – Pew, which you quote. So yeah, it’s more the childless cat ladies, aided by their childless male cucks/simps/gayfriends, which are usually male feminist liberals. Yes, I know this writer and this website hate the celibate and the Christian among the rightwing; but even as rightwing male inceldom has increased (while priests monks and nuns haven’t, mind you), there’s that long quote of the study of conservatives being on average more fertile than liberals, right in the article. Combine that with the fact that men are on average more conservative than women – and there you have it, you can easily conclude it is childless catladies the origin of the damage. Yes, the liberal catboy Adam takes the bite out of the apple too, but it was liberal catlady Eve the one who did it first conned by the serpent – both must be corrected accordingly, the former the vessel, the latter the root. Yes, industrial economics/lifestyle has to do with it, but even in countries in better economic shape and more free healthcare/childcare/gibs/free time/etc, feminism ruins their demographics too. You might say more fertile immigrants veer left – but only on economics, in social values they veer right, specially on gender issues. In fact, feminism arose in the more secularized developed world, among bourgeois lowkey lesbian suffragettes, who coopted poor industrially enslaved women and cucked/gay men to their cause. Which again proves my point. Not to rub it on women’s faces, as men have the responsibility to know better and stop them, but again, that proves the point; check the root, and then the vessel, both must be done, but in proper order. For the catboys will rather listen to the catladies than to their fellow men, while checked and purified former catladies will encourage catboys to listen to their fellow men and grow testes. Furthermore, there’s way better things to criticize JewDogger Vance about.
Several years ago Vance converted to Roman Catholic Church in a ceremony covered in minute detail by rod dreher on amconmag.
Vance is a politician. So is Trump, so is Biden, Obama and Kamala. If you’ve ever known any politician, they’re like used car salesmen, saying whatever needs to be said to make the sale. They’ll worry about the bad transmission when you come back in a couple months. As politicians go, Vance, and even Trump, are still way better than Kamala and the rest of the democrat party. The dems exist as a party based on their hatred of Whites. It’s their sole reason for existing. Neither Vance, nor Trump, hate Whitey. Since Lester Maddox isn’t on the ballot this year, we’ve got to take what we can get. Even if it’s a Ford escort with 230k miles on it.
Jim I feel compelled to defend Vance’s political conversion as plausibly sincere. Vance is about my age, is an attorney like myself, and the evolution of his views mirrors my own. I too went from a RINO with libertarian leanings who didn’t pull the lever for Trump in 2016 to a guy who, well, posts comments on Jim Goad essays on counter currents. What I came to see, largely through your work, that of Steve Sailer, and Bronze Age Pervert (whom Vance follows on Twitter haha); is that the modern left exists solely to expropriate and annihilate whitey. I started treading in these waters during the Trump years when the media went mask off in their open hated of normal white people. 2020 made me realize that not only is everything fake and gay, but there are no guardrails to protect against the depredations of the left. Given the above, I actually think Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies is the most refreshing and honest thing I’ve heard from a GOP pol in years. I have young children of my own and it’s only when you take them to a culture that doesn’t hate kids that you realize how profoundly anti family and nihilistic American shitlib cities are.
This is rambling, so back to my main point: Vance may indeed be a duplicitous snake, but I think it is plausible that he’s actually another case of “when the Saxon learned to hate”
I agree with this. He wouldn’t be the first white man to wake up to anti-whiteness after mixing his genes with an Asian woman, either.
I feel compelled to say here that I married a middle eastern woman during this time
How has that worked out?
I can agree with all this. At the same time it’s useful that politicians ought to feel that they should earn votes and not just take demographics for granted. Vance and Trump shouldn’t just assume whites have their vote, and then make all their efforts about trying to get 0.24% of the black vote with a bunch of over the top concessions.
What I’ve learned about Vance is that he is a swamp-approved creature and that Donald Trump has been saddled with another swamp-approved VP rather than personally choosing (whose choice is it really?) a MAGA loyalist like his son Don Jr. or someone like Vivek. With hindsight we understand now what Pence’s ultimate purpose was; to sign off on and legitimize the 2020 regime change of his boss. With Vance, we take a wait and see…
I give you a choice — Trump and Vance, or the quadroon Ms. Harris, and whichever one of the ‘Squad’ (such as Ms. AOC, etc.) she names sometime this week to help her — as her new V.P. — run your country and your life.
Myself, I’m placing my many valuables in a bank safety box in case I have to get the hell out of Dodge fast in case Ms. Harris and her hordes of cat ladies take over the country in the next 2-1/2 months.
See you in St. Kitts or south Australia?
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