Portside

Nakedly misogynistic comments that Ohio Sen. JD Vance made during a 2021 Fox News appearance spurred a massive backlash after resurfacing this week. Vance’s description of Democratic leaders including Vice President Kamala Harris as “childless cat ladies” who “don't really have a direct stake” in the country has been roundly condemned, drawing fire from across the political spectrum and fueling the argument that former President Donald Trump made a mistake by selecting Vance as his running mate.

But Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments fit comfortably alongside the unbridled sexism that has infested that movement for years and has been unleashed by Harris’ ascension to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. 

The fallout from Vance’s remarks points to a broader problem for the Republican Party. In recent years, the GOP’s far-right infotainers have become a critical GOP power center that its aspiring politicians must court if they wish to rise within the party ranks. But those figures are weirdos, and winning them over requires adopting their combination of bizarre fixations, paranoid conspiracy theories, and culture-war resentment politics — a toxic combination that Americans outside the right-wing media bubble find deeply off-putting.

Vance was trying to win over Tucker Carlson and his audience

Vance’s remarks came during a July 29, 2021, interview on Tucker Carlson’s Fox program.

“We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats it, be it 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 and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance told Carlson.

“And it's just a basic fact,” he continued. “You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — 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?” 

(Harris is stepmother to two children from her husband’s first marriage, Buttigieg and his husband were at the time preparing to adopt twins, and the right is apparently incapable of discussing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) without sounding insane.)

Vance’s comments were not anomalous. He has for years deployed “cat ladies” as a pejorative against his political foes and sneered at Harris and other political leaders without biological children when speaking to right-wing audiences. 

Indeed, the Trump campaign has tried to clean up Vance’s comments by claiming they were taken out of context — but their rebuttal points to a speech he gave at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute five days before his Carlson appearance in which he made similar arguments. 

Vance took a somewhat softer tone during that address, specifying that he was only taking aim at people who choose not to have children, not those who “struggled to find the right girl, find the right guy” or those who “for biological, medical reasons … can’t have children.” 

But Vance offered no such caveats in his interview with Carlson, who brought him on to respond to the backlash from the ISI speech. Instead, Vance turned up the hyper-aggression and resentment, and he attributed the criticism he had received to “miserable cat lady” journalists who “hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous D.C. and New York status games.” 

The resulting clip may appeal to Carlson and his audience — but it is radioactive outside the right-wing media bubble.

Vance’s comments came as he was retooling his public persona to appeal to the Ohio Republican primary electorate, in part by mimicking Carlson’s own maximally cruel affect and obsessions. Indeed, Vance’s reference to “cat ladies” during his July 29, 2021, interview echoed language Carlson used earlier in the same broadcast to describe Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Vance won over Carlson, and that relationship has proven crucial to his rise in GOP politics. Carlson showered Vance with airtime and accolades during his Senate primary bid and privately urged Trump to grant the crucial endorsement that secured his victory. Carlson’s intervention with the former president may also have proven pivotal in ensuring Vance’s selection as the vice presidential pick. 

People like Carlson are GOP kingmakers — and that’s a huge problem for the party

Carlson was the lodestar of the right-wing media ecosystem as a Fox host and following his defenestration from that network now hosts a popular podcast. But his influence in right-wing politics exceeds his media role: He can make or break Republican primary candidates, addressed the Republican National Convention on its final night, and has the ear of the Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees.

Carlson’s influence is a massive liability for the GOP because he is a weirdo who is wildly out of touch with the concerns of normal Americans. He favors the blood-and-soil nationalism of European autocrats from poor countries. He spends a lot of time making excuses for the Trumpists who stormed the U.S. Capital, finding ways to compliment Vladimir Putin, and talking about children’s genitals. His rants about global elites importing brown foreigners to replace “legacy Americans” resemble the manifestos of mass shooters. He has complained that the green and brown M&Ms have become distressingly unsexy. 

GOP candidates who want to appeal to Carlson either need to actually share those bizarre values, obsessions, and rhetoric, or pretend that they do. Either way, they may boost their chances of success in Republican primaries, but they end up losing ground once they need to defend themselves to a broader audience. 

Vance dramatically underperformed but narrowly won his Senate seat because Ohio is such a red state. But Blake Masters, another Carlson-like candidate, lost his Senate race in Arizona, a fate quite common among the candidates Carlson got behind in 2022.

Carlson isn’t the only right-wing media weirdo with a hold on the GOP — the movement is filled with people whose hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories garnered them huge audiences within the GOP but made them toxic outside it.

This week alone, Vance is also facing criticism for blurbing the book of podcaster Jack Posobiec, a notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theorist whose tome, titled Unhumans, claims progressives “oppose everything that makes up humanity.” 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. drew fire for headlining a planned fundraiser alongside Candace Owens, a podcaster whose extreme rhetoric has included Holocaust denial and discussions of the excessive power she has suggested Jews hold in the United States.

Owens was subsequently replaced on the program by Carlson, which is not much of an improvement.