Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.
The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … (but) they all find that that value system leads to misery”.
Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.
In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.
Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.
Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.
Now this latest recording raises renewed questions about Vance’s contribution to the Republican ticket, which is trailing behind Kamala Harris and her bid to be America’s first woman of color president.
In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.
Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in (their) own community”.
At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.
Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.
“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”
“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.
The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response.
‘Racial and gender resentment’
A video version of the podcast was published to YouTube on 20 September 2021, and events discussed in it suggest that it was recorded in the days immediately before. The liberal watchdog Media Matters had previously flagged the broadcast.
At that time, Vance was a relatively new political candidate. He achieved national prominence as a writer in 2016, but on 1 July 2021 he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. That March, the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel donated $10m to Protect Ohio Values, a Pac established to support a potential Vance candidacy.
The recording was initially published as an episode of the podcast of American Moment, a rightwing 501c3 non-profit whose website says its mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all”. At the time of the recording, Vance sat on the non-profit’s advisory board; he’s now listed under “board members emeritus” on the organization’s website.
Vance’s hosts were American Moment’s president and founder, Saurabh Sharma, and its COO Nick Solheim. Introducing the discussion, Solheim speculated that Vance “may end up with some angry texts after this one. It was a very spicy episode.”
In the recording, Vance repeatedly offered a dark vision of the lives of women who prioritized their professional careers.
At about 39 minutes into the recording, when asked what he saw inside elite institutions like Yale Law School that made him view them as corrupt, Vance answered: “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”
Vance added: “What they don’t realize – and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God – is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.
“The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” Vance said. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.”
Minutes later, Vance adopted the perspective of a hypothetical professional woman to answer Sharma’s question about where “the racial and gender resentment comes from”.
“OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible,” Vance began, “And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.”
He continued: “But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”
Last weekend, Vance tried to clean up previously reported comments about childless women by claiming it was “sarcasm”.
‘Soy boys who want to feed the monster’
On the other hand, Vance depicted men and boys as “suppressed”, saying 52 minutes in that “one of the weird things about elite society is it’s deeply uncomfortable with masculinity”.
Warming to the theme, Vance said: “This is one weird thing that conservatives don’t talk about enough … We don’t talk enough about the fact that traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood.”
Assessing his young son’s habit of fighting imaginary monsters, Vance said: “There’s something deeply cultural and biological, spiritual about this desire to defend his home and his family.”
He connected this with a hypothetical invasion: “If the Chinese invade us in 10 years, they’re going to be beaten back by boys like you who practice fighting the monsters who become proud men who defend their homes.”
By contrast, for Vance, “They’re not going to be defended by the soy boys who want to feed the monsters.”
“Soy boy” is a term, originating on the “alt-right”, which is used to impugn the masculinity of its targets.
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‘The left uses racism as a cudgel’
Looming over the conversation was the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which had been completed on the orders of Joe Biden on 31 August, just weeks before the recording was published.
These events led the trio to discussions of immigration and asylum, in which Vance expressed doubts about the suitability of Afghan and Somali people for immigration to the US, even those who had assisted the US military overseas.
At about 22 minutes into the recording, Vance mocked the claims of Afghan refugees to have helped the US military in its occupation, saying: “Apparently, Afghanistan is a country of translators and interpreters because every single person that’s coming in, that’s what they say is this person is: a translator and interpreter.”
He attributed the idea that the US should grant asylum to those who helped US forces to “the fraudulence of our elites”, saying: “You talk to people who served in Afghanistan. And one of the things they will tell you is, yeah, a lot of the translators and interpreters who helped us were great guys.”
Vance added, however, that “a lot of the interpreters who said they were helping us were actively helping terrorists plant roadside bombs, knowing our routes”, without substantiating the claim.
Vance continued: “The idea that every person in Afghanistan, even those who said they were helping us, are actually good people is a total joke.”
Vance expressed similar skepticism about another immigrant group, while characterizing himself and others as victims of the left.
At about 25 minutes into the recording, Solheim said: “There’s like a whole section of downtown Minneapolis that they call Little Mogadishu. Like that’s what they call it. There’s nothing in English. People are frequently hatcheted to death in the street.”
Solheim added: “I was just down there a couple of weeks ago. It’s like a totally different country.”
Replying, Vance said: “The thing that I hate about this is the left uses racism as a cudgel. And I myself was guilty of being a little worried about that. Like, I don’t want to be called a racist because I knew it can be career-ending and they can destroy a person’s life.”
Vance then asked, rhetorically, “Why don’t you want, you know, people getting hatcheted in the street in downtown Minneapolis? Is it because you’re a racist or is it because you don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in your own community?”
“Like, obviously, the answer is the latter,” he concluded. “But the left uses racism as a cudgel to shut us up and to make it impossible to complain about obvious problems.”
Last July, not long after being named as Trump’s VP pick, Vance suggested in a speech that Democrats would describe drinking Diet Mountain Dew as racist. The comment backfired and was widely mocked.
‘You would be living in a craphole’
Several times, the three steered assessments of migrant groups and their capacity for assimilation into negative personal commentary on the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
At about 28 minutes in, Sharma said: “You know, thinking about the Minnesota example, specifically, that’s how you get someone like Ilhan Omar, who despises the country.”
Vance replied, “I mean, (the US) gave her an incredible amount of opportunity and she has a complete lack of gratitude,” later adding: “My family has been here as far as I can tell for nine, 10, like many generations. I’ve never heard a person in my family express the ingratitude towards this country that Ilhan Omar does towards this country.
“And look, this is the way the laws work. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me,” Vance allowed.
“But my God, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a craphole if this country didn’t bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too,” he concluded.
Congresswoman Omar’s full response to the Guardian took Vance to task over the comments.
“The ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance is not just troubling – it’s dangerous and un-American. I love America fiercely, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to public service,” she wrote.
Omar added: “America deserves better than Vance’s hateful, divisive politics. We are a nation of immigrants, and we will continue to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – no matter how much it terrifies small-minded men like JD Vance.”
Vance also talked about institutions like universities and the media as components of a “broken elite system”, and portrayed their inhabitants as enemies whom conservatives would need to reckon with.
“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”