Ohio Sen. JD Vance is a man with an obsession. The video of Donald Trump's running mate raving on Fox News in 2021 about "childless cat ladies who are miserable" went viral in part because host Tucker Carlson's practiced "dumbfounded" face adds an extra layer of weirdness to any clip of right-wing absurdity. But fantasizing about the secret unhappiness of all those pretty single ladies hugging kitties on Instagram was pretty much Vance's full-time job for years. Media Matters dug up a whopping 13 other instances of Vance railing about childless women, calling them "sociopaths" who "must be stopped." Repeatedly, he singled out cat ownership as a sure sign that one belonged to the "cabal" of non-mothers he believes are single-handedly destroying the nation.
But while Vance views our feline friends as a medieval witch-hunter would — as a sign that a woman is dangerously independent and therefore evil — dog owners should not feel safe from the ire of Vance and his friends in the uterus-obsessed MAGA movement. Vance wrote the forward to "Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America" by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts is one of the leaders of Project 2025, which was developed to build Trump's policy agenda without the larger public finding out about it. (That failed, and now the campaign is pretending to reject Project 2025.) "Dawn's Early Light" was meant to be an airport book version of Project 2025, a snappy and readable volume that nonetheless displays the granular level of control MAGA Republicans want to assert over the choices of Americans in how to worship, whether to have kids and who they'll marry.
