Usha Vance took a stab at defending JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark on Monday, saying in an interview that her husband—who has also said people without kids are more likely to be mentally unstable sociopaths—would never want to hurt people trying to have kids. The problem’s just the heathens who actively choose not to have them, you see!

Speaking to Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt for a prerecorded interview that aired this morning, the would-be second lady insisted the vice presidential candidate “would never ever, ever, want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family.” She then claimed that if people would take a moment to try to “understand…the context” of her husband’s comment and focus less on the “three-word phrase,” they would understand that he was simply arguing that “it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.”

In fact, that’s not actually what one takes away from the Ohio senator’s conversation with Tucker Carlson in 2021, during which he said, “We’re effectively run in this country…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 then name-checked Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as being among the “childless” people “we’ve turned our country over to...who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” As Buttigieg himself argued last week, Vance’s comments were not only insulting but patently absurd, with the transportation secretary telling Jon Stewart: “When I was deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids back then, but I will tell you…my commitment to this country felt pretty physical.”

Vance’s interview with Carlson is far from the only time he has denigrated people for not having kids. In fact, he appears to be absolutely obsessed with the topic; on at least one other occasion, he claimed that child-free Americans were “more sociopathic” than those with kids, adding that they made the US “less mentally stable.”

Donald Trump attempted to do damage control last week over his running mate’s remarks, boldly claiming to Fox News that rather than being offended by what Vance said, women without children “understand” what he was getting at and appreciate where he was coming from.

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