J.D. Vance’s Wife Miserably Fails at Defending “Childless Cat Ladies”

Usha Vance tried to walk back her husband’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” but couldn’t quite explain away his misogynistic rhetoric.

In a taped interview that aired on Fox & Friends Monday, Vance spun her own toned-down interpretation of J.D. Vance calling Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies” who “want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” She said that, unlike everyone else, she’d actually paid attention to the “context” of his quote.

“The reality is, he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning,” said Usha.

“And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things, and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase, because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder,” Usha continued.

“And we should be asking ourselves, ‘Why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents?’”

Despite what his wife insisted, Vance’s statement was not just a quip. It was specifically an attack on Democratic leaders without biological children. He even listed them.

“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 said in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “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?”

Vance has since claimed that the remark was a “sarcastic comment” that was taken “out of context” by Democrats—but his claim was integral to a tax policy he once proposed that would levy higher taxes on childless adults to “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad.”

He also has a long documented history of disparaging people without children. During a podcast interview in 2020, Vance said childless people, particularly those in positions of leadership, were “more sociopathic” than people with children and were making the U.S. “less mentally stable.”

In response to those who were offended by her husband’s comment, Usha said J.D. would “never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that.”

“Let’s try to look at the real conversation that he’s trying to have, and engage with it and understand, for those of us who do have families, for the many of us who want to have families and for whom it’s really hard. What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it easier to live in 2024?” she said.

Meanwhile, last week, J.D. Vance skipped a Senate vote on a $78 billion tax-cut package, which included expansions to a $2,000 child tax credit that would have benefitted an estimated 16 million children.

Vance also previously voted against the Right to IVF Act in June, which would have protected accessibility and affordability to the service nationwide—and might’ve made the lives of Americans trying to have kids a lot easier.

Elon Musk may have denied reports that he would donate $45 million a month to Donald Trump’s campaign, but his social media platform appears to be helping the Republican presidential nominee in more covert ways.

Two deepfakes of Vice President Kamala Harris racked up hundreds of thousands of views on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, despite the fact that they appear to violate the website’s own terms of service.

One video, which altered footage of Harris and President Joe Biden on Friday during a historic prisoner swap with Russia, falsely depicted the Democratic presidential nominee as fumbling over her words and repeating the same phrases. Trump then shared the phony video on his account on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday with a caption claiming that Harris is “really DUMB” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter.”

“She has an extremely Low IQ, and our Country does not need someone who is unable to put two sentences together,” Trump wrote. “She can’t, and besides, we just got finished with that—His name is Sleepy Joe Biden!”

That clip was then recirculated by an account on X, which copies and pastes Trump’s Truth Social posts verbatim, garnering the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers before X marked the content as manipulated media.

Trump continued to elevate that lie during a rally in Atlanta that evening, insisting that Harris had a “low IQ” and was like “Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”

Another deepfake of Harris gained momentum after Musk himself shared a doctored audio recording of Harris on July 27 in which she appears to say she’s “the ultimate diversity hire” and accuses anyone of not voting for her as “sexist” and “racist.”

“This is amazing,” Musk wrote alongside a laughing emoji, disseminating the fake audio to his 192 million followers with zero additional context.

That clip has since been viewed by more than 132 million X users, and has not yet been tagged as manipulated media, despite the original poster’s comment that the clip is a parody.

Elsewhere on X, the platform’s A.I. chatbot Grok has been spreading false claims about Harris. Grok stated that Harris had missed the ballot deadline in nine states, which is untrue. But that didn’t stop millions of people from sharing the claim. Five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter on Monday calling on him to “immediately implement changes” to stop Grok from sharing disinformation.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in the news again for all of the wrong reasons: It was revealed on Sunday that he left a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park 10 years ago.

The bizarre news has left people confused and shocked, especially since Kennedy himself admitted his involvement with the bear in an interview with comedian and actress Roseanne Barr that he posted online because The New Yorker was about to break the story.

Kennedy posted the interview with Barr on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one” and tagging The New Yorker’s account.

Kennedy said he saw the dead bear on the side of the road while falconing in New York state one day, and had the idea to skin the bear and refrigerate the meat. So he put the bear in his van and continued falconing, before heading out to dinner and realizing that he had a flight to catch.

“And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said. But then he remembered that he had an old bicycle in his car, and remembered that there had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York at the time.

“I said, Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike,” Kennedy said.

At the time, the bear story quickly gained national attention, and in a bizarre twist, The New York Times’ 2014 story on the incident was written by Tatiana Schlossberg, a granddaughter of John F. Kennedy who was then interning at the newspaper.

After news that Kennedy was responsible for putting the bear carcass in the park broke, the internet had a field day with jokes and general bewilderment, helped along by a photo The New Yorker had of Kennedy with his fingers in the carcass’s mouth. He even joked to the magazine, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”

In his quixotic presidential campaign, revelations about Kennedy have ranged from his history of womanizing and sexual assault to his once having a worm in his brain. His conspiracy theories and opposition to vaccines have led to him falling out with the environmental movement, where he was once much admired for his activism. This latest piece of news is already prompting incredulity in media coverage and likely seals Kennedy’s fate as a losing weirdo third-party candidate.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posed for a shocking photograph with a dead bear cub he’d picked up on the side of the road in 2014, shortly before dumping its carcass in Central Park.

A photo published in The New Yorker Monday shows Kennedy sitting in the back of a car, with his hand placed in the mouth of a deceased bear cub. The animal is visibly bloodied from its accident, and Kennedy’s face appears contorted with phony anguish at the bite.

When asked about the photograph, Kennedy told The New Yorker, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”

After showing his furry find off to his friends, Kennedy brought the cub’s body to Manhattan, where he proceeded to mutilate it to make it appear like it’d been killed by a cyclist, according to The New Yorker.

Before the story broke Monday, Kennedy posted a video on X, in which he said that he thought the dead bear would be “funny for people” and “amusing for whoever found it or something,” he said, because of a recent spate of bike accidents in New York City.

Kennedy said he’d originally intended to take the bear cub home, skin it, and keep its meat but had run out of time before having to go to the airport.

Kennedy, who is running as an independent candidate for president of the United States of America, was polling at 5.5 percent Monday, according to Project 538.

In a painful twist for his campaign, Donald Trump now appears to be the belligerent old-man candidate that he had made President Joe Biden out to be.

During a packed rally in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, the Republican presidential nominee had several memorable verbal gaffes, including failing to pronounce simple words correctly and at one point completely glitching out after saying Vice President Kamala Harris’s name.

“Together we will stop Kamala Harris’s nation-wreckting—uh, I’ll tell you what, when you see what she’s done to our nation, she’s wrecking our nation,” Trump said. “The radicalism will take back our country from the worst administration in American history.”

At another point, Trump quoted Harris as saying “Let the violent marbs keep going,” claiming that she wanted to fund “the place” before correcting himself as meaning to say “the police.”

“She will not stop, she said she was endorsing defund the place, and, the police, and she said violent marbs, let the violent mobs keep going,” Trump said.

In reality, and outside of Trump’s twisted memory, Harris told The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2020 that the Black Lives Matter protests were “not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly boasted about having aced a cognitive exam and has since argued they should be mandatory for all officials running for higher office.

In the years since he “aced” the exam, Trump has invariably tweaked the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That’s despite the fact that the test’s authors claim that none of the three versions in circulation actually have a whale in them.