Janie B. Cheaney: A new normal

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 7th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Next up, WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney on a misplaced political insult from Kamala Harris’s new running mate.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: It appears the Democratic 2024 campaign has settled on a word for their opponents: weird. Republicans are weird people with weird ideas and weird positions. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s newly-minted running mate, boosted himself to national attention a few weeks ago by using it over and over: “These guys” he said “are just plain weird.”

We may as well admit that Donald Trump is weird, in that he doesn’t fit the traditional mold. But the spark that lit this bushfire was a throwaway comment by J. D. Vance in a 4-minute interview with Tucker Carlson, three years ago. Vance was running for Ohio Senator at the time, and Carlson was intrigued by a speech he had made on July 23, 2021, in which Vance claimed that childless leaders on the left lacked “physical commitment to the future of this country.” That is, an overcommitment to individual freedom vs. family has resulted in an obsessive focus on the here-and-now, to the detriment of the longer term.

To Tucker, Vance explained that “What I was basically saying is that we’re in effect run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices they made, and they want to make the rest of America miserable too.” After naming names (Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandia Ocasio-Cortes), he added, “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?” Just asking, he said, but perhaps if he’d known he’d be running for Vice President in three short years he would have asked more diplomatically.

Donald Trump almost never asks anything diplomatically, but we all know that about him. Vance has yet to define himself, and the opposition is making sure that this one clip says everything voters need to know about him. “Childless cat ladies” is going to be hanging over him for the entire campaign, rather than the point he was trying to make. Which is, children literally are the future. How can a commitment to nontraditional marriages, radical individualism, and abortion on demand—none of which are friendly to childbearing and child raising—ensure a stable future?

Last year the American fertility rate was 1.62, the lowest on record and well below replacement level. The Biden administration advocates fertility-damaging transgender treatments to children nationwide. DINKs, or Double-Income, No Kids couples, are overwhelmingly leftwing, and single women are a major voting bloc of the Democrat party. And when the public is polled about which party is stronger on a given issue, the widest margin for Democrats is almost always abortion—which, since its legalization, has wiped out a significant percentage of subsequent generations. Sociologists are predicting demographic catastrophe, and one high-profile politician is getting buried for even talking about it.

That’s just . . . weird.

I’m J. B. Cheaney.

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