So much has happened in the past two weeks that it's difficult to keep up with the news cycle. Donald Trump was hit by a would-be assassin's bullet in Pennsylvania. The Republican National Convention went off with a lot of enthusiasm. President Joe Biden disappeared with "COVID" for five days and then announced via a letter posted on X that he was dropping out of the presidential race. Within a day, the entire Biden campaign had rebranded as the Harris campaign and the media ran with her as the new Democrat presidential nominee, despite there being no vote.
During the RNC, the media's job was to find fault with everything said at the convention and to destroy whomever Trump announced would be his running mate. Trump picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, so we got to enjoy pieces like this one:
OPINION: JD Vance has a bunch of weird views on gender.https://t.co/HoKY9mo4o3
— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) July 24, 2024
Weird views on gender? Like there are only two?
POLITICO reported on Vance's snark at "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 appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
…
Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
…
As for Vance’s comments about miserable cat ladies, they sound like the tamer musings of far-right extremists like Costin Alamariu, whose 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset popularized the concept of “the Longhouse,” a disparaging description of a political culture dominated by women, or Stephen Wolfe, who similarly rails against a “gynocracy” society where women have outsize control in his 2023 book The Case for Christian Nationalism and believes that in the ideal state women would not have the right to vote.
That cat ladies line sure got to Laura K. Field. Notice she says Vance's views "sound like the tamer musings of far-right extremists." When did Vance ever mention "the Longhouse" or "gynocracy"? He didn't. Her subhead? "Overt chauvinism is the unifying thread of the New Right."
He believes there are two, which is correct.
— JWF (@JammieWF) July 24, 2024
Wait until you find out how Democrats think men can become women through the power of magical thinking
— Sunny (@sunnyright) July 24, 2024
The weird views on gender of @JDVance1 are the same views literally every single person on earth except for a few niche university weirdos took as a just 10 years ago. https://t.co/iXHRIG6ECd
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 24, 2024
Weird is not believing there are 72 genders. https://t.co/SRikl1kn5B
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) July 24, 2024
You mean like he knows what a woman is?
— $8 Bartemy (@BartemyS) July 24, 2024
You mean that men shouldn't be in women's sports?
What is a woman?
— Wonkapotamus Pug (@Wonkpug) July 24, 2024
He believes science?! That bigot
— The Dank Knight 🦇 (@capeandcowell) July 24, 2024
Your views are more weird, trust me
— The Truth Is Here (@AliensExist4200) July 24, 2024
As you can see by this ratio, his views on gender aren’t weird, yours are.
— Rich McMahon 🥩 (@RMcMayoMonkey) July 25, 2024
I'm looking through the article for those weird views....but I can't seem to find them.
— Jay at AmericanTorah.com (@AmericanTorah) July 24, 2024
They are the same views your grandparents had and theirs before them. They are normal. Yours are perverted.
— Jim From Cleburne (@JimFromCleburne) July 24, 2024
JD Vance has solid and informed views on family, gender and sex.
— Dr Patrick M. - AI Builder (@patmcguinness) July 26, 2024
Gender-bending radicals who can't define what a 'woman' is, think there are 87 genders, and don't recognize that chemically castrating a 12-year-old is child abuse, call it 'weird'. It's not.
How many cats do you figure Field has? She certainly has read a lot of books about Christian nationalists and gender and is writing her own book on the New Right.
In all of this, Vance fits squarely within (and identifies with) the faction of the American New Right that typically refers to itself as “postliberalism.”
Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, captured the basic outlook on gender and feminism among this cohort in his 2018 hit Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen’s argument is that liberal modernity is based on an irreparably individualistic view of human nature, which leads to a culture that values autonomy over community and family life. “Liberalism posits that freeing women from the household is tantamount to liberation,” he wrote, “but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage,” because work outside the home is submission to the forces of market capitalism. Somewhat bizarrely, in the postliberal mind, even gay marriage — people coming together and uniting legally into family units — becomes a form of social dissolution, because it is based on individual choice rather than traditional moral forms.
Vance is an admirer of Deneen’s work and was a featured speaker at the launch of his most recent book, Regime Change, at Catholic University in May 2023.
So forget the far-right … now the bogeyman is the New Right, which embraces "overt chauvinism."
***
Join the conversation as a VIP Member