The media’s relentless attacks on GOP Vice Presidential nominee J. D. Vance increased tenfold when the Kamala Harris campaign repackaged a 2021 Tucker Carlson video in which Vance told Tucker that the Democrat party is being led by a bunch of “childless cat ladies.”

Although the word “cat” in Vance’s comment was meant as sarcasm, Vance was making a far more serious point in that Tucker interview, namely the declining birth rate in the United States — the worst it has ever been in its 248-year history — something that the Democratic Party seems to celebrate given that its interest in the nuclear family has given way to the green new deals and the ideology of climate change which proposes that people have less children — or no children — because there’s no future for them in a world that is falling apart.

So, for the sake of “green conservation,” woke couples forgo children (but maybe adopt) or go the dog or cat route.

The “childless cat lady” label has been around for decades and is often used by men and women of both political parties to describe a certain type of woman who, upon hitting middle age, morphs into someone who can only think about cats or animal rescue missions. 

Often these women are single, widowed or divorced and become “cat crazy” after a slow metamorphosis in which they at first care for a cat or two — a great thing, to be sure — but then that same cat love extends any feral cat that happens to wind up on their doorstep.

Suddenly the woman in question is feeding fifteen homeless cats and has arranged ten cat bowls of food and water all over the sidewalk in front of her house. Walk around any Philadelphia neighborhood and you’ll see many examples of this. 

This is largely an urban phenomenon. For some reason men tend not to fall into this sort of behavior. It’s strictly a ladies’ endeavor, so Vance is right and not being sexist or misogynist when he talks about “childless cat ladies.” I’ve known liberal women who voted for Hilary Clinton that talked about “cat ladies” as if it was a disease that widowed or bored middle-aged women should guard against.  

This brings me to second-wave feminism, when the struggle for women’s rights had a respectful patina. Agree or disagree with the polemics of the beginnings of feminism, many of the women involved were serious intellectuals who had something to say. While there may have been frivolous slogans like, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” many women from this era — namely Kate Millet and Susan Sontag — at least when Sontag wasn’t saying things like, “The white race is the cancer of human history” — brought interesting things to the table.

But feminism in the age of woke and Kamala Harris’ candidacy has become an ugly parody of itself. In 2020, we saw women in pink “pussy hats.” We saw the abuses of the #MeToo movement. We saw “I’m with her” T-shirts supporting Hilary Clinton — these t-shirts are resurfacing now with Harris’ candidacy.

This is “slap and grab” feminism of the nose-ring/purple hair variety. It is mostly a cosmetic show and tell act: women who should know better with armpit hair; near nakedness in the streets during the summer months — the new brand of ultra-woke feminists we see who love to bare everything; shoulders, shockingly low cleavage and dungaree ultra shorts so tight they cut off the air supply to the bottom half of their bodies. 

Yes, you are Wonder Woman and you are voting for Kamala Harris.  

Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment brought back to life the pussy hat chorus in spades. Left-leaning movie star Jennifer Aniston quipped: “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”

Newsweek reported: “In an interview with WCMH-TV, an Ohio NBC affiliate, in late February, Vance said he, former President Donald Trump and ‘pretty much every Republican that I know is pro-fertility treatments.’”

USA Today jumped into the fray, as did Fortune.com. New York Magazine —“Cat Ladies Are People Too,” the headline clamored. On Billboard.com we heard from Bette Midler. The Nation — Gore Vidal’s old home base — raised the intellectual bar in describing its objection to Vance’s comment: “Patriarchy, plutocracy, and ethnonationalism fuel the vice presidential candidate’s bizarre slur…”

The “childless cat ladies” controversy reminded me of the time a married couple who attend my Philadelphia Orthodox parish church went to the pastor on the eve of their wedding to get his blessing on a plan they had to not have any children for the duration of their marriage — despite both of them being healthy and capable of having children. 

The pastor gave his blessing, and the perfectly fertile young couple went on their merry way to acquire several cats instead of having children. (The couple happened to be Democrats, by the way.) 

The media’s distortion of Vance’s comment to mean that he placed blame on people who cannot — but want to — have children for health reasons was also truly misguided.  

And yet Vance is being criticized and sideswiped from all sides, and for many reasons. 

The Hill published a piece by Mychael Schnell (a woman) claiming that a number of House Republicans were privately bashing former President Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate. 

The anonymous sources quoted by the writer claimed that the selection of Vance could harm Trump’s chances of winning in November. Republican after Republican was quoted in the piece until it seemed that Schnell was just filling in the gaps with made up lines of dialogue. It was obvious that The Hill took special delight in publishing this story.

Who are these Liz Cheney RINOs, one wonders. 

Talking anonymously to a left-wing reporter and saying bad things about your candidate’s VP pick to someone who probably supports the Border Czar is a really an act of partisan betrayal. 

“The woke American left hates Vance because he is an anti-woke, socially conservative Catholic,” ran an article in Spiked. 

That much is true, although Vance would probably find fault with the view of the former pastor of my church who told that newly married couple that they didn’t have to inconvenience themselves by having children when raising cats was just as “spiritual.” 

Spiked elaborated on why some people hate Vance: “The foreign-policy establishment hates him for his criticisms of US interventionism. The corporate wing of the Republican Party hates him for his populist – they would say ‘anti-capitalist’ – heresies.”

In many ways, the mainstream media is worse than it was before Biden capitulated to Democrat coup leaders. Vance is now well on his way to becoming their newest public enemy no. 1 as Trump reframes his rhetoric in a slightly gentler fashion as a result of his near escape from death on July 13.

As the left says, hate has no home here — but it has found a new home in J.D. Vance.  

As the media attempts to re-brand and remake Kamala Harris with excessive publicity — Ari Fleischer stated that the media’s goal is to make her into a female version of Obama — the propaganda spin coming from the same old problem media networks is more obvious than ever.

Even when the most obscure poll finds the race between Harris and Trump neck-and-neck, it becomes a breaking news story, splashed all over AOL and The Hill like a NYT editorial declaring that Trump is not fit to be president. 

You’ve only to look at the current news to see what trouble lies ahead: Biden’s attempt — in these his last days before he folds over in complete mental and physical collapse — to draw up a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court decision regarding immunity for Donald Trump before House Republicans get a chance to activate the 25th amendment to strip him of his powers and sweep him out of office well before January.

In the meantime, we will have to deal with the media — the ever persistent and increasingly poisonous fly in the ointment. 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.