In resurfaced clip, JD Vance co-signs idea that "postmenopausal females" exist to help raise kids

Vance's strange take on older women gives his "childless cat lady" comment a run for its money

Published August 14, 2024 8:05PM (EDT)

U.S. Senator and Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance speaks during a campaign rally at Cordes, Inc., an industrial trucking company, in Byron Center, Michigan, August 14, 2024.  (JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
U.S. Senator and Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance speaks during a campaign rally at Cordes, Inc., an industrial trucking company, in Byron Center, Michigan, August 14, 2024. (JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

Republican VP nominee JD Vance seemingly endorsed the idea that “post-menopausal females” exist to help parents raise children, expressing his gratitude to his mother-in-law for the “unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman," in an unearthed podcast clip.

In a 2020 appearance on the Portal podcast — hosted by Eric Weinstein, the Managing Director of Peter Thiel’s Thiel Capital — the then-venture capitalist expressed his weird take on elderly women and how his mother-in-law has helped raise his son — he now has three children.    

“There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren — it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents,” Vance told Weinstein.

“That's the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female, in theory,” the podcast host said, as Vance chimed in, “Yes.”

Vance agreed that the “weird, unadvertised benefit of marrying an Indian woman” was the support network of Vance’s mother-in-law, who took a sabbatical from her role as a biology professor at the University of California, San Diego to help raise Vance’s youngest child at the time.

Vance proceeded to launch into an attack on liberalism, which he claimed demanded families have less of a hand in their children’s lives.

“Why didn’t she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Cause that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do,” Vance said, concluding that it was more advantageous for older women to work in the domestic sphere than return to their workplaces.

Vance, who has garnered scrutiny for his past suggestions that women should remain in abusive marriages for the sake of their children, and his assertion that “childless cat ladies” who run the Democratic party should have less of a say in how the country is run than parents, has proved to be somewhat of a liability for the Trump campaign in the early weeks of his candidacy.

Vance was chosen to join the Republican presidential ticket after the Trump campaign compiled a 271-page opposition research dossier that has now reportedly been obtained by hackers, who have apparently unsuccessfully attempted to leak the dossier to news outlets including the New York Times and Politico for publication.

Vance holds a roughly 50% unfavorability rating, per recent polls.


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