The “childless cat lady” thing is as ridiculous as JD Vance is. But it’s not stupid. It’s tapping into something powerful, because it’s shameful.
Vance’s fantasy that childless cat ladies are miserable in their lives is another case of every accusation being a projection.
In actuality, he’s speaking to that swath of parents out there in general—and particularly on the right—who are actually miserable in their lives, regretting their choices, wondering why God saddled them with 4-5-6 kids in a country that does so little to support families.
But it’s illegal to say any of this. Children are gifts from God, right? They have to disown it and pretend that their families are perfect and perfectly fulfilling.
An editorial-style Brief from Matthew, who’s been parenting as a stepdad and biodad for long enough to know that parents and the childless absolutely need each other.
Show Notes
Full text of "GHETTO DIARY - ENGLISH - JANUSZ KORCZAK"
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and Threads at Conspiratuality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
This is an editorial page brief called J.D.
Vance taps into parental rage.
So by now we've all heard about J.D.
Vance's incredible overture to Childless Cat Ladies, and hopefully you've also heard the great analyses put out there on how his comments mesh with manosphere, obsessions with pronatalism, and the Great Replacement Theory, and how insulting it all is to the huge demographic of blended families out there in a world with a 50% divorce rate.
Which Vance wants to magically wave away through Project 2025's removal of no-fault divorce.
There's also been stellar commentary on how debased his fertility politics is in a country that's so hostile to the idea of supporting parents, and particularly mothers.
I mean, do women who question the viability of having children not have an investment in the state?
Or is it the state that's refusing to invest in women through basics like government maternity leave, child and health care?
There's also a thousand tweets pointing out that Pope Francis of the Catholic Church, into which Vance was just baptized, is a bit of a childless cat lady, and maybe Jesus was as well, and it's pretty dumb to suggest that these guys have no direct stakes in the world.
I'd like to add to this a few reflections on what Vance is suggesting about parenthood, specifically fatherhood.
How he's taking resentment that men don't even have the strongest claim to and weaponizing it, adding it to the many layers of the MAGA grievance-based identity, and making it seem like parents are happier and morally superior to non-parents, which makes me wonder about an alternative universe in which his own mom might have been happier as a childless cat lady.
Now I'll look at all of this as a cisgendered heterodad myself, but with a little more age and experience on board than he has.
Vance's eldest son is six.
And during that six years, Vance has been extremely busy flying coast to coast, watching his pseudo-liberal street cred fall and his trad-cath star rise, giving countless interviews.
Now, I don't want to make any assumptions about his capacity to really pay attention to his kids while conquering the podcast world and becoming a senator, or about how much house help is available with his net worth pegged at around $10 million, and his partner Usha working at a top DC law firm up until Vance's nomination by Trump.
But I'm willing to bet that with my 27 years of being a stepfather and father combined, an on and off homeschooling parent, always working freelance, usually from home, which means that it's always a fluid schedule that has allowed for spontaneous parenting tasks and chores.
I've had more time to observe, contemplate, take it all in, especially the tortured relationship between parenting, identity, time, and work.
I've been wading through the contradictions between care and capitalism for a long time, and I don't think J.D.
Vance would have a clue as to what that last sentence means.
But he does know enough about capitalism to know how to tap into resentment.
That's his entire shtick.
Appalachians drag themselves and everyone else down.
Childless cat ladies are privileged complainers without any responsibilities, and with enough time on their hands to foist their secularism on everyone else.
Coastal elites browbeat good-souled Americans with made-up charges of racism.
And the fight for queer rights is destroying the American family.
But beneath the cheap culture war tropes, Vance targets rustbelters who remember what NAFTA was, with a vague and hypocritical economic populism that taps into the brutality of globalized inequality.
But he doesn't do it to offer solutions.
But rather to seek out scapegoats in the old nationalist style.
It's immigrants taking your jobs, not manufacturers sending them offshore.
And why is that plant hiring immigrants?
Because of Ibram X. Kendi and all that DEI bullshit.
So these are well-worn themes.
Crude memes and toothless, backwards critiques of capitalism delivered while he bootlicks Trump.
But I think there's yet another, perhaps more immediate and intimate and generalizable layer of resentment buried within his comments about childlessness.
I think Vance is aware that many people who have children are secretly and shamefully resentful of the time and energy and suffering it takes to raise them.
And he's saying, I see you.
Now, if you are halfway attentive to the parenting you find yourself in, you know that it changes your life in an utterly choiceless way.
Even if the Vances have a ton of house help with their three kids, he knows this choicelessness.
Because if any of his shitty book is true, he understands the stress of parenting and poverty, with bad luck, being paid nothing for all the work and love.
And like reactionaries from Time Out of Mind, he is naming and picking at the wound of unpaid labor that he will not or cannot address with the obvious solutions of feminism and socialism.
Now, he might only last a few more weeks before being chased off the ticket by couch and dolphin memes.
Which have taken off because they're all about the weirdness of his sexual politics.
But I think this chord that Vance is striking deserves a really close look nonetheless, because he's not stupid.
He's handling something really powerful here.
And I know he is, because even as a progressive who despises guys like him, I have a parental rage button that the right comment at the right time can push to unleash a series of cursed and childish feelings before I touch grass and check myself and realize that my grievance is with capitalism, not with how other people's lives have turned out.
So I might as well describe it.
When I hear my childless colleagues talk about their lives, I can get some feelings.
The casual references to dinner parties, going to see bands, hikes, vacations, adult summer camps, stable exercise hours, low stress traveling, Netflix binges, Dungeons and Dragons parties, cooking for two instead of four, Lego building for self-regulation.
I can't stop myself in certain moments from saying, you know, my life couldn't be more different.
And suddenly, all of the images and sensations of parenting overwhelm rush in.
The sleeplessness, consoling the inconsolable, endless housework, impossible ethical decisions, the scarcity of privacy, being the support for a young tortured mind that triggers the young tortured heart in yourself, your life never being your own.
I often start to laugh involuntarily at the contrast.
And if I don't watch the next few moments of that mental track carefully and catch myself, I can feel that resentment rise, along with a venal, bitchy little voice inside me that begins to echo the emotional logic behind that red-pilled mantra, there rubbing it in our faces.
Now if you'll remember, that's what QAnon people would say about the elites supposedly blatantly flaunting their debauched and profligate lives.
What was really happening was that the Anon had noticed something obvious in their surroundings, then twisted it beyond all recognition, and then adopted an instant persecution complex around it.
Wayfair is selling cabinets named after children.
They must contain, therefore, trafficked children.
And how are they doing this out in the open?
Because they're rubbing it in our faces.
It's totally cooked.
So, for a micro-moment, the childless, even my friends and allies, even those I know, are doing important work in the world that no one else could do.
They become, for me, the elites.
It's absurd and childish.
But it's undone by the simple question of, well, what would you have your childless friends do differently?
To which my saner mind gives the same answer I'd give about any friend with or without children.
I would work with them for a world of mutual aid in which our lives and houses don't feel so separate and isolated.
I hope this exercise in self-reflection here makes the logic of every accusation is a projection very clear because that's what Vance is grabbing onto.
The projective flip of his childless cat lady insult is that people with children can easily feel miserable about our own choices.
I think he's actually jealous of the childless cat lady.
He may even want to get close to her supposed sexual freedom and childless sexuality, but he can't, at least not openly, and maybe that's what the couches and dolphins are about.
But I do want to question whether choices is the right term here.
Or whether this too is part of Vance's hyper-individualist framing.
Because do we really choose or not choose to have or not have children any more than we choose or don't choose to be sick or well or when or how we'll die?
Are we not also largely carried along by circumstance, conditioning, and impulse like Appalachian folk riding inner tubes down the creek and the holler towards the whitewater?
I'm not saying people don't plan to have children or not have children, and then attempt to take the steps towards enacting one or the other.
It's more like this.
Where do any plans begin, and how does luck intervene?
In my personal sample of N equals 1, I didn't expect or really choose to be a step-parent.
And I certainly didn't expect to wake up in the middle of the night at the age of 39 as one marriage was dissolving and think, oh wow, I really, really want to be a dad, and I don't even know what that means.
But that's what happened, for reasons I cannot fathom.
And from that point, a die was cast.
But with another turn of the screw, I could have easily been a childless cat laddie.
I think the truth is that some of us simply wind up with children and some of us don't.
And we all pay unequally for it, distributed over so many variables of love and fortune.
And with children comes unpaid labor, mostly for women.
That unpaid labor is the engine of social reproduction, without which nothing else could happen.
There's no tech industry without childbirth and childcare.
No time to amass and manage hedge fund or venture capital wealth.
No workers in Chinese factories with nets over the top floor windows to make the phones that play the Hello Prayer app, one of Vance's key investment holdings.
So if you feel, but you don't understand, this unfairness of unpaid labor, you can be on your way to finding a scapegoat in the childless cat lady, who you delusionally believe is not working.
And I'll get to that.
And it all accelerates through the realization of the grimy reality of your own regret.
Why did I do this to myself?
Why am I here?
Is this really going to last 20 years?
Oh, actually forever?
From my own experience and from watching the commodification of parenting virtues on social media, it's clear that we have many ways of mitigating these shameful thoughts.
And they all point to having children makes me a better person.
It's the most important work I've done.
It's my main reason for living.
And half of Instagram seems to be about proving how good you are at it, how important and unique this utterly common human activity is.
Vance is tapping into that grandiosity as well and I'm sure we can look forward to several months of photo ops with the Vance kids.
But the thing is that being a parent is the most important thing I've done is one of those duplicitous assertions that can be utterly true and utterly performative at the same time.
It's like an intuition about something real.
that can twist into a conspiracy theory, but in this case it's a private feeling that twists
into a public morality. I'm all on board with parenting being the most meaningful part of my
life and the lives of other parents.
I know this is true.
It's the thing I find hardest to communicate with my childless friends.
It's the thing that when I speak of it with other fathers, the feeling is, if you know, you know.
And how easily those silent nods become the smug confirmation of an imagined universal value.
Here's the thing no one tells you about marriage, about family.
How much you can resent the people you love.
For everything you had to give up for them and there's never even a thank you.
You just give it all up because that's what having a family demands of a woman.
That's Annette Bening in Apple's Never Fall, the streaming series based on Leanne Moriarty's novel about the idealized Delaney family.
Bening plays the matriarch coming to some retirement-age conclusions about her life as a woman.
And then you wake up one day and you realize the person that you were meant to be is gone.
You gave her up for people who don't even see you.
And there's no time to grieve her because there's too much damn laundry.
You just wake up one day and you realize that half of you, maybe the best part of you, is dead.
And you take it for granted that when push comes to shove, your sacrifices will be remembered and appreciated, and the people closest to you will show you some grace when you need it, and then they don't.
So this trailer from the series is viral on Instagram and TikTok because I think it nails something with the precision and grace of Chekhov.
In parenting, you transfer your life into others, and you have no guarantee of any miraculous reward.
Whatever meaning or joy you muster, it's against these odds and you can't take it with you.
You make your peace with it by valuing the acts in themselves and not in any illusion you might have about the future.
It's against this existential knowledge that I suspect all parents hold to some degree that Vance takes his flimsy but hopeless position that having children equals having a stake in the world.
It makes sense for a hedge fund manager to talk about children like stock options.
It makes sense for the Silicon Valley simp to be profoundly deluded about the difference between relationship and ownership.
To always be looking for the payoff.
Vance is saying that those whose participation in capitalist accumulation is not fully biological and imperialistic are not really bought in.
But Joy Delaney is telling America through Apples Never Fall that there is no magical pot of gold at the end of the family rainbow.
Your reward is the person you become.
Now, Vance is only the latest inheritor and manipulator of the theme of family values, which I first heard the phrase in the late 1980s, and then the Bushes really took it up.
And of course, I knew that it stood for socially and fiscally conservative positions, but it confused me with its vagueness.
I mean, what families were they talking about?
It made me think of the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
And the joke there, of course, is that he's going to be going on for 800 pages describing a very unhappy family, but in such relatable terms that it becomes impossible for any reader to imagine all those happy families somewhere, all alike, as being more than fantasy.
But it doesn't take much for that fantasy of happy families to reveal its shallow nature.
One learns about gendered labor, about how deeply siblings can hate each other, about intergenerational abuse.
One learns that stranger danger is a massive cover-up for the fact that child abuse and child sexual abuse happens within the family for the most part.
It becomes clear that the satanic panic was a massive backlash against women with children moving into the workforce.
And through Marxist literature, one can learn that the nuclear family is the social reproductive unit of the bourgeoisie.
And if one is paying any attention at all, one learns that those who crow loudest about family values usually have a lot of family problems.
At this point, it seems to me that the appeal to family values does the same labor that all conservative rhetoric does.
It tries to conceal a really unpleasant truth.
It's a deflection from the fact that families are often all we have and all we know.
They are crucial to our survival and identities, but they are also often brutal, non-consensual power constellations from which we can never fully escape.
And how much must the freedom-loving American hate that?
And so, what do you do to the walls of a prison you can't quite name for the shame of it?
You wallpaper them with stories and myths.
And all of this hits even harder in a culture that centers its religious imagination on the image of a crucified man, the child and son of God himself, whose torturous death somehow represents freedom.
But I want to finish up by talking about the people without children that I know, and how absurd it is to imagine that they somehow care less about the world.
In fact, many of them, I think, wind up having more to give to the social food bank than I do.
Why don't they have children?
To use Vance-type language, it's really in the hands of God.
Too many reasons to be fathomable.
Except, there are also biological facts, or feelings that swim hard enough against the current they have to become somewhat conscious.
On the bio side, some literally couldn't.
Or they didn't have the right partner and they knew they couldn't do it alone.
Or IVF was just too expensive.
Or they lost key years in cults that advocated celibacy.
But among the more conscious frameworks, there are four that I find really moving.
One is that I have friends who have enough self-knowledge to say, I'm too wounded to be a good parent.
It would be too triggering for me.
I would be impatient and resentful, and a child deserves more than that.
And I know that because I deserved more than that.
So this cycle stops with me.
And I find that incredible.
And if everyone had to do therapy on that question at the age of 18, we'd be in better shape, I think.
Secondly, I have friends who have realized, as queer persons, that they do not wish to perpetuate heteronormative power structures and how they support capitalistic forms of accumulation.
They realize they can forge a new way through found family and mutual aid.
They realize that being the aunt or uncle is a crucial, if less visible, role, Now I've watched these friends make everything that the family values people pretend to have, and they make it in crafting circles, D&D communities, churches, pagan retreats, obscure scholarship on unique ways of living, and organizing for the poor.
They adopt rescue animals.
Third, I know people who have taken religious vows of poverty, celibacy, and service.
And we might wonder how anyone can commit to these institutions so completely, but what if they provide the space to engage an anti-capitalist life?
I'm thinking of the tiny groups of nuns and monks I know in the Buddhist and Catholic worlds.
They're doing all of the queer found family stuff, but they've also laid claim to the resources of religious heritage, which are not passed down through families, but through a kind of public trust.
Now the fourth category I can think of is those who take their carbon consumption seriously enough to forego whatever biological urges they have.
They can't see any part of the climate disrupted future that is ameliorated by raising another first world consumer.
These are really austere folks who paradoxically express an extreme parental urge while denying themselves for the sake of the future.
And that's the weird part about all of these groups of friends.
Every day of their childless lives shows me what good parents they could possibly be.
And none of this is to say that childless people have to be moral giants to get off the hook.
Of course, it's fine to not have children without any of these high-minded ideals, just as a preference.
But my point is that Vance is utterly ignorant of these sublimations of parental impulse into society at large.
Because that's what is happening.
All of that love is going somewhere.
And there are real benefits to not keeping it locked up in the nuclear family.
Because it's very easy for parents to go on about how selfless they are, but are we always?
Isn't it often a struggle to extend that grace beyond the home, even to the children of our neighbors?
I'm reminded of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata.
And a line that's spoken by Kunti, one of the matriarchs of the Pandava heroes, who had this interesting Jezebel-type boon.
She could recite a secret mantra and call down whatever god she wanted to impregnate her.
It's typical Indian spirituality, like overdoing everything.
Just imagine the Virgin Mary being visited by five different archangels.
Anyway, Kunti says something amazing, even as the mother of these amazing boys.
She says, when one prefers one's own children to the children of others, war is near.
In closing, I want to give you a thumbnail of a man named Janusz Korczak.
He was a Jewish pediatrician born in 1878 in Warsaw.
He was a child advocate, a founder of orphanages, and the host of a popular children's radio show.
He wrote a lot of kids books and also books about parenting that were really progressive at the time and directly opposed to the fascist parenting manuals radiating out from Germany, in which it was common to advocate forcing children to sit up straight in wooden braces or to prevent pubescent children from masturbating at night by making them sleep in straight jackets.
In 1919, Korchak wrote and circulated a Declaration of Children's Rights.
1919, so war has devastated Europe, the Spanish flu is raging, and Korchak is thinking about how we should radically reconsider the rights of children.
Here are some of his principles.
The child has the right to love.
Love the child, not just your own.
The child has the right to optimal conditions in which to grow and develop.
We demand to do away with hunger, cold, dampness, stench, overcrowding, overpopulation.
The child has the right to live in the present.
Children are not people of tomorrow.
They are people today.
The child has the right to be himself or herself.
A child is not a lottery ticket marked to win the main prize.
Listen to this one.
The child has the right to fail.
We renounce the deceptive longing for perfect children.
The child has the right to be taken seriously.
Who asks the child for his opinion and consent?
The child has the right to resist educational influence that conflicts with his or her own beliefs.
It is fortunate for mankind, he writes, that we are unable to force children to yield to assaults upon their common sense and humanity.
So that's 1919, which blows me away.
20 years later, Germany invades Poland.
They occupy and partition Warsaw, and the Jewish orphanage that Korczak is directing is forced to move into the ghetto.
Every day, they come to empty out a new apartment block to send people to the camps.
Now, Korczak was much beloved amongst the Polish intelligentsia outside of the walls, and they offered him sanctuary over and over again.
We can get you out of there.
But he refused to leave, saying, it is impossible for me to leave the children.
His Ghetto Diary records how he spent his final year in the ghetto begging and borrowing for moldy potatoes for the children in his care while he became increasingly weak from malnourishment.
About three weeks before he dies, he writes, it is a difficult thing to be born and to learn to live.
Ahead of me is a much easier task, to die.
After death, it may be difficult again, but I am not bothering about that.
The last year, month, or hour.
I should like to die consciously, in possession of my faculties.
I don't know what I should say to the children by way of farewell.
I should want to make clear to them only this, that the road is theirs to choose freely.
The last reports we have of Janusz Korczak are from the 5th or 6th of August, 1942, when the SS came to collect him and his staff and the 190-plus orphans from their building to send them off to Treblinka.
He knew exactly what was happening and where they were going.
And he made a haunting and dignified choice that bent the rules of his own declaration, but also followed its spirit.
Here's how Wladyslaw Spilman writes about it in his novel, The Pianist.
He told the orphans they were going out into the country, so they ought to be cheerful.
At last they would be able to exchange the horrible, suffocating city walls for meadows of flowers, streams where they could bathe, woods full of berries and mushrooms.
He told them to wear their best clothes.
And so they came out into the yard, two by two, nicely dressed and in a happy mood.
Now here's the thing about Janusz Korczak.
He was a lifelong bachelor.
He had no children of his own.
And maybe that was what was required for him to act so lovingly and without favor in this moment of dread.
To leave this world as a childless man modeling a serene and generous fatherhood.
