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.

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.

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.