oh boy

Senate candidate says childless people like Pete Buttigieg should have fewer votes

JD Vance spoke out against childless liberals
JD Vance (Photo: Gage Skidmore, via CC BY-SA 3.0)

JD Vance, a GOP candidate for the Senate in Ohio, has floated the bizarre idea that people with children should get more votes. He says they have a greater stake in the future.

Vance is a venture capitalist who also became a bestselling author with the publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It looked back on his upbringing in Appalachia and was turned into an Oscar-nominated movie last year.

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More recently, Vance has turned his attention to a career in politics. He hopes to take the Senate seat that will be vacated next year by fellow Republican Rob Portman.

Speaking to a conservative conference on Friday organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). Vance said that a lot of the problems in the US are down to the “childless left”. These people, claims Vance, have no “physical commitment to the future of this country.”

Vance, the father to two kids, highlighted Vice-President Kamala Harris, the transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Senator Cory Booker, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples.

He said, “Why is this just a normal fact of … life for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?”

It should be noted that Kamala Harris is a stepmother to two kids from her husband, Doug Emhoff’s previous marriage.

Vance continued: “The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds. Let’s do this instead. Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children.”

Answering whether that meant that “non-parents don’t have as much of a voice as parents” and “that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions”, Vance said the answer was yes.

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids,” he said.

“Let’s face the consequences and the reality; if you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

Vance went on to praise Hungary’s far-right, anti-LGBT President Viktor Orbán, for encouraging married couples to have children.

Orbán is currently trying to introduce a widely-criticized anti-gay propaganda law in Hungary. Within the Eastern European country, said Vance, “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids.

“Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

The Washington Post’s Dave Wiegel mockingly said Vance might want to check out the Democrats’ child tax credit if he thinks that a good idea.

Prior to his speech, Vance talked to the Daily Caller about the issues it would touch upon. He again opined about the problems with childless people, especially in the media.

“What you find consistently is that many of the most unhappy, and most miserable, and most angry people in our media are childless adults. Let’s just be honest about it.”

Vance’s ISI speech was discussed yesterday on Fox and Friends, with the hosts thinking it was an “interesting idea”.

Co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, who happens to have nine children, said, “it is absolutely true that people like AOC, Pete Buttigieg — you can name the left-wing politicians, people who think that we should legalize marijuana because they don’t have kids and they don’t really have a stake in what that looks like. I agree with him 100% that they don’t have a stake in the game.”

She added that although agreeing with Vance’s thinking, she didn’t think it was a “feasible” idea.

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JD Vance made headlines earlier this month when he praised former President Trump, reversing a position he took in 2016.

Back then, Vance said he would not be voting for Trump and posted a string of anti-Trump tweets. These have now been deleted. He told Fox News in early July, “Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016. And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy.”

He now believes Trump was, “a good president. I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.”

Both Portman and Vance have been regarded as fairly centrist Republicans. It appears Vance may now be taking a more right-wing position on issues if he holds up Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Trump, as good role models.

Vance’s ideas received short shrift from many online.

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