JD Vance takes aim at culture wars, childless politicians

Venture capitalist and Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance spoke on Friday about the “cultural wars” being waged by the left and took aim at politicians without children who “don’t have a personal indirect stake” in improving the country.

Vance, during the Future of American Political Economy Conference hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, said that the left was waging “cultural wars” against the entire country saying, “The left isn’t just criticizing our country, it’s not just making us ashamed of where we came from, it’s trying to take our very sense of national pride and national purpose, away from us because you can’t have one without the other.”

“If you don’t know where you came from, you will have no idea where you’re going. When they take us away from that sense of pride in our own history, they make us completely unable to direct where we’re going to go in the future,” he continued. “That’s what this is about. It’s not about correcting systemic racism or systemic wrong. It’s about making us easier to control. It’s about making us ashamed of where we came from.”

Vance said that the culture war is a “class war” against middle and working class Americans, and also claimed that it’s an economic war against conservatives.

Vance said in a “pure, raw cynical political claim” that conservatives “have lost every single major cultural institution in this country.”

“Accept that, think about it. Big finance, Big tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media and the government…There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control, but there is one of them, just one, that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future and that’s the constitutional republic that our founders gave us,” Vance said. 

“My argument is that we need to fight woke capital, woke corporations and the governments that enable them, because we can’t win anywhere else,” he continued. 

In his speech, Vance also took aim at the Democratic Party, saying that it had “become controlled by people who don’t have children.” He also claimed that politicians running the country do not have a “personal indirect stake” in improving it because they do not have children. 

“And why is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal indirect stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren,” Vance asked, noting that he was not referring to people who are unable to have children.

He noted that potential future presidential candidates in the Democratic Party, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), all do not have children.

Harris has two step-children, Cole and Ella, who are from her husband Doug Emhoff’s previous marriage.

Vance said that parents who go to the polls should have more power than adults who do not have children. 

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids,” he said. “Let’s face the consequences and the reality; if you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”