It’s been a real challenge trying to keep up with Sen. JD Vance’s lengthy rhetorical record of condemning Americans without children. NBC News added to the outlandish list last week, but remarkably, the list keeps growing.
Over Labor Day weekend, for example, Media Matters uncovered a 2021 podcast interview in which the future Republican vice presidential nominee targeted people “who can’t have kids” because they “passed the biological period when it was possible” as “miserable” people who pursue “racial or gender equity” to give “their life meaning.”
This week, Media Matters added to the list again, highlighting a 2021 Newsmax segment in which Vance argued that the United States had become a “dangerous place to live” because of childless elites.
But as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, “new reporting on Vance’s stamp of approval for a 2017 document from the Heritage Foundation could lead to more backlash.”
The document in question is the “Index of Culture and Opportunity” put together by the Heritage Foundation to analyze cultural and economic trends from a conservative perspective. Vance … wrote an introduction for the report, praising it for “shed[ding] needed light on our country’s most difficult and intractable problems.” And as The New York Times has pointed out, he was also the keynote speaker at the release of the report.
That same New York Times report added that the Heritage Foundation document “proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families.”
In a series of 29 separate essays, conservative commentators, policy experts, community leaders and Christian clergy members opposed the spread of in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments, describing those treatments as harmful to women. They praised the rapidly expanding number of state laws restricting abortion rights and access, saying that the procedure should become “unthinkable” in America. And they cited hunger as a “great motivation” for Americans to find work.
For its part, the Trump/Vance campaign told MSNBC in a statement, “Senator Vance has long made clear that he supports IVF and does not agree with every opinion in this seven-year-old report, which features a range of unique views from dozens of conservative thinkers. He had no role in editing the report and outside of his own contribution, did not have any input on the commentary throughout. It’s bizarre that the New York Times wrote an entire piece attacking Senator Vance for the views of other individuals.”
Nevertheless, the fact that Vance volunteered to champion the “Index of Culture and Opportunity” adds a fresh chapter to a story about the Ohio Republican’s rather radical worldview.
It also brings up a related question that’s too often overlooked: Did Team Trump actually vet the former president’s new running mate? In theory, the Trump campaign’s research team was responsible for combing through potential vice presidential nominees’ backgrounds, looking for potential trouble areas. In practice, that leads to a couple of possibilities. The first is that Team Trump didn’t invest much time or effort into examining Vance’s far-right ideas related to American families. The second is that members of Team Trump conducted a thorough vetting process, learned about Vance’s record and saw nothing they disagreed with. So, which is it?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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