J.D. Vance’s Weird Thoughts on Older Women Exposed in New Audio

J.D. Vance’s views on gender and parenting have come back to haunt him, again.

In 2020, long before he entered politics, Vance appeared on a podcast where the host said that having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”

Vance agreed—and that wasn’t all of what was discussed on the episode.

The host also said that grandparents helping to raise children is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” and Vance again agreed, recounting how his mother-in-law, a biology professor in California, took a sabbatical from her job to help look after his newborn son.

“Painfully economically inefficient,” Vance said, making a larger point of what he saw as a societal problem. “Why didn’t she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do.”

The point that Vance seemed to be trying to make in 2020 was that this kind of economic thinking was at the root of today’s political problems. But it’s definitely strange to hear him agree that the entire purpose of a woman who is too old to bear children is to raise grandchildren. Not only is that offensive, but it’s also dismissive of other abilities or choices that women make.

The point about Indian culture is stranger still, as if Vance thinks his experience with his wife Usha’s parents represents all of Indian culture. It is true that intergenerational households are common in Indian culture, but the podcast’s tone coupled with Vance’s previous remarks (and proposed policies) on women without children evoke a less than sincere interpretation.

Over the past few weeks, Vance has had to repeatedly explain and defend his comments about “childless cat ladies” made to Tucker Carlson in 2021. It seems this podcast will also have him on the defensive, as it again shows that he has some archaic views about family life.

Not even a booming stock market could rescue Donald Trump’s terrible Truth Social stock.

The Dow Jones Industrial average gained more than 200 points on Wednesday, following the release of a Labor Department report found that year-over-year inflation had reached its lowest point in three years, according to CNBC.

However, not even the good news about inflation could rescue Trump’s struggling social media stock, which took a dive earlier this week after Trump posted on X (formerly Twitter) for the first time in more than a year. Truth Social hit its lowest rate in months, valued at $24.60 per share.

By Wednesday, Trump’s stock was valued at just $23.97 per share. Trump will be stuck with his company’s stubborn, stagnant stock for just one more month, when he is legally allowed to sell his shares without board approval.

Trump’s campaign attempted to reframe the good inflation news on Wednesday by skewering Harris over consumer prices, which did not decrease. Incidentally, he appeared to cite “Kamalanomics” as the apparent cause for what is ultimately an improved economic situation.

Last week, Trump tried desperately to blame Harris for a dip in the stock market, dubbing it a “KAMALA CRASH!” Unsurprisingly, the nickname didn’t quite catch on.

J.D. Vance on Wednesday doubled down on Donald Trump’s comments about firing striking workers.

As Vance addressed a small crowd at a campaign event in Michigan, a CBS News reporter gave Vance a chance to clean up the mess Trump made during his conversation with Elon Musk earlier this week.

“The UAW president said that Donald Trump and Elon Musk sneered at labor workers when talking about how Elon Musk fired folks looking to organize. The Teamster president who also spoke at the RNC called this ‘economic terrorism.’ What’s your reaction to the backlash that Donald Trump’s getting from that interview?” asked the reporter.

“Well look, I like Teamsters’ president, I think he’s a good guy,” Vance said of Sean O’Brien. “But I think he’s wrong about this.”

“Donald Trump was not talking about firing Michigan autoworkers,” he continued. “He was talking about firing the employees of Twitter who use their power to censor American citizens. Those people ought to be fired.”

Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

It looks like no one briefed Vance on how to answer this question. Regardless of their workplace, threatening to fire workers for concerted labor activity, such as going on strike, is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

Musk was accused of violating labor law at X (then known as Twitter) when he fired an employee who was attempting to organize against return to office plans. He also retaliated against unionized janitors, laying off the Twitter custodial staff right before the holidays.

Vance’s faulty logic of pitting autoworkers organizing in Michigan against workers wronged by Musk at Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX won’t hold up.

On Tuesday, the United Auto Workers filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk. They accused the billionaires of “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers who stand up for themselves by engaging in protected concerted activity, such as strikes.” Maybe they can now add Vance into the mix too?

Donald Trump may be too much for Palm Beach, Florida, to deal with.

The town is reviewing legal options, including closing his Mar-a-Lago country club, to help residents feel safe following the assassination attempt against Trump last month. Since then, the Secret Service has closed the main road to the club, South Ocean Boulevard, with security around the property increased. Local police say it won’t be opened again before Election Day in November.

Despite the road’s closure and increased checkpoints, Mar-a-Lago has remained open, with hundreds of people attending different events, including ones hosted by the president. That has touched a nerve with the town’s leadership.

“In my mind, if the road is closed, the Mar-a-Lago Club is closed,” Mayor Danielle Moore said in a council meeting Tuesday. “There’s no way in God’s green earth that they can bring 350 people into that club. It’s completely illogical that you’ve got a road closed and then you’re going to let 350 strangers into your club.”

“However, you can’t have it both ways, boys and girls,” Moore added. “Either the club’s open or not.”

The mayor, the town council, and the residents all said at the meeting that they didn’t want anything to happen to Trump, and that politics didn’t play a role in their discussion, which was prompted by concerns that the town won’t receive a reply to a July 22 letter it sent to the Secret Service asking for “the legal authority authorizing it to implement the road closure for the specified duration and even when protectee(s) are not in residence in the Town.”

Trump may not take the town’s concerns kindly. The events the club hosts rake in money, and Trump enjoys getting feted by the right and far right who come to sing his praises, sometimes literally. And he certainly doesn’t have a history of recognizing how much his presence costs the residents of the places he visits.

Trump is still holding firm on his conspiracy that Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t possibly pull large crowds to her campaign events and is using artificial intelligence to digitally enhance images of her rallies.

When asked by a reporter to follow up on his comments earlier this week that an image of thousands of people attending Harris’s Detroit airport rally was fabricated using A.I., Trump doubled down.

“You said Harris’s crowds were A.I. and that there weren’t people there. There’s all kinds of video evidence from people who were there who have proven that false. Can you tell us about why you made that claim?”

“Well, I can’t say what was there, who was there,” Trump responded.

“We have the biggest crowds ever in the history of politics,” Trump continued, getting defensive.

Well, here’s an easy fact-check: An estimated 15,000 people showed up to Harris’s airport rally in Michigan.

Trump has long been obsessed with crowd sizes. Last week, things got weird as he tried to claim his January 6 crowd was larger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, and you look at ours ... we had more.”

The vice president’s campaign vehemently denies that the image of her Detroit crowd was faked in any way despite Trump posting on Sunday that Harris “CHEATED” or “‘A.I.’d’ it” and that the massive crowd “DIDN’T EXIST!”

Perhaps Trump is lashing out due to his insecurity about his upcoming micro-event strategy, where the former president will hold smaller “messaging events” rather than large-scale rallies.