This J. D. Vance clip has been at the forefront of media coverage of the election campaign.

In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “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.”

“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And 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?”

For more detail, a lot more detail, on the cat-lady trope by all means read what NPR had to say: CLICK HERE

My friends are aware of my long term interest in the point of view which Nietzsche offered of late industrial age European society, and by extension, of our American headspace.  Nietzsche was by no means right about everything though. In fact he was massively mistaken about women.  

The J. D. Vance smear of half of our population is an echo of what Nietzsche wrote about women.  I doubt that Vance would be aware of this source, given his role, a half educated, anti-woman Trump-politico.

What inspires respect
and, often enough, fear of women
is their nature

(which is “more natural” than that of men),
their truly predatory and cunning agility,
their tiger’s claws inside their glove,
the naivete of their egoism,
their inner wildness
and inability to be trained,
the incomprehensibility, expanse, and rambling character
of their desires and virtues . . .

What inspires pity,
in spite of all the fear,
for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman”

is that she seems to suffer more, be more vulnerable,
need more love, and be condemned to more disappointments than any animal.

Fear and pity…

Beyond Good and Evil, By Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 239

(Should you feel a discomfort of rage upon reading these lines, congratulations! You are still sane!)