Context around JD Vance's Childless Cat Lady Remarks surfaces the media owes him an apology
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The controversy over Vance's comments began in earnest on Monday, when liberal journalist and former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski posted to X a 28-second clip of Vance speaking in 2021 with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
"We're 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, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too," Vance said.
The then-candidate for U.S. Senate identified Vice President Kamala Harris, presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, along with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, as present and future leaders of the Democratic Party who, because they have no children, "don't really have a direct stake" in the future of the United States.
Vance specifically used the phrase "miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made." In other words, he clearly meant to refer to a certain kind of person who remained childless by choice. He even mentioned Buttigieg, which proved that he did not have only women in mind.
Leavitt's 30-second clip, which had more than 3.8 million views on X as of Friday morning, showed Vance speaking to the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2021. The comments he made there refer the ones he made in his interview with Carlson.
"A lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons," Vance told ISI event attendees.
"The target of these remarks is not them. It's important to point that out. There have always been people like that, who even though they would like to have kids [are] unable to have them. Let's set them to the side," he added moments later. In other words, Vance specifically excluded from his remarks the unfortunate and heartbroken women to whom Aniston and McCain referred.
"As a new mom, my heart aches for women who are unable to bear children. @JDVance words are being taken out of context and unfairly attacked," Leavitt wrote in an accompanying post.