Vance's birtherism is weirder than you think
JD Vance's birthing fixation has roots in Silicon Valley's belief in pro-natalism
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I’ve got to hand it to JD Vance. When he went on the Tucker Carlson show in 2021, for once the host wasn’t the one yabba-dabba-dooing Nazicore idiocy when Vance complained that the country was being in part run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
His words became newly relevant when the world suddenly sped up again and everything everywhere happened all at once: Donald Trump picked the fauxbilly as his running mate, Joe Biden decided not to run for re-election and, less than an hour later, endorsed the very-memable Vice President Kamala Harris, and Gen Z launched a digital Dunkirk of TikToks to ferry Harris out of polling oblivion, whereupon someone made a joke about living room furniture, and baby, it was on.
As the Internet consumed Vance, the sharks required chum, which is how his “cat lady” comment became a political controversy that forced Vance to apologize. To cats. Not ladies.
“I’ve got nothing against cats.”
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said before realizing he’d excluded a very important constituency. “I’ve got nothing against dogs. I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him,” he added.
What, you thought he was going to apologize to women for judging their life choices? Actually, he doubled down on the odious portion of what he said. “Look, people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. And the substance of what I actually said is true,” he said.
For a guy whose moral core spins off kilter—claiming hillbilly status while growing up in Ohio, accepting the nomination of a president he’s called “America’s Hitler”—Vance has been surprisingly consistent on the subject of motherhood. Actually, he seems less interested in women raising children as he is in their birthing them, and he’s not alone in this weird fixation.
Vance seems to be part of a new birther movement, also called pro-natalism. Pro-natalism is a belief popular in tech-bro and venture capitalist circles (ie., the “broligarchy”) that declining birth rates create a moral imperative for intelligent, successful people like themselves to repopulate society. And the more you look into it, the more you reach for the word weird. And when you think of weird tech-bros, you think of one dude: Elon Musk.
Musk floods the zone with so much weird that it’s hard to focus on any single aspect of the blinding multi-faceted blinginess of it all, but a couple years ago he gave us a peek behind the curtain at his pronatalist motivations.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” tweeted Musk. “Mark these words.” And if we don’t do something about it—that is, have a bunch of babies—“civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers.”
“Civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers.”
Can we dispense quickly with the superficial nonsense? Birth rates are falling, but our population is increasing, and global warming will kill us all long before our population dies off or the Dallas Cowboys win the Super Bowl again, whichever comes first.
What Musk and his wealthy friends are really worried about is which people are reproducing.
“Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have,” tweeted Musk. “I am a rare exception.” And boy howdy is he. Musk is the father to at least a dozen children if you count the one who has disavowed him: six with his first wife, Justine Wilson, three with his ex-girlfriend Grimes, and three with Shivon Zilis, an executive with Neuralink, the company that is implanting Bluetooth-enabled computer chips into brains. Musk fathers so many children that one time Grimes and Zilis, unbeknownst to each other, gave birth in the same hospital at the same time.
And because this is Musk we’re talking about, things get even weirder. He’s not really trying to re-populate Earth. It appears that pro-natalism is one of his motivations for colonizing Mars.
“I'm trying to set a good example! Population collapse is a much bigger problem than people realize and that's just for Earth. Mars has a great need for people, seeing as population is currently zero.”
On a podcast in 2022 to talk about his pharmaceutical startup, businessman Mark Cuban told this story about Musk:
“He had another kid, right? This was before the last 3, or whatever it was,” Cuban shared. “I’m like, ‘Dude, congratulations, how many are you going to have?’ He sends me a text back, ‘Mars needs people.’”
Although Cuban said he sent Musk a message in response, the businessman and philanthropist never replied.
“I don't think he likes me,” added Cuban.
Not all tech bros or venture capitalists are dead-set on populating Mars. Others, such as Vance’s mentor, former employer, and biggest donor Peter Thiel, are hoping to capitalize on a global fertility-services market predicted to reach $78.2 billion by 2025. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Musk, and Steve Jurvetson, a Tesla and SpaceX director with his own weird2 little history, are funding what Business Insider has called “a spate of new assisted reproductive technology startups.”
One such company touts a genetic test that allows prospective parents undergoing IVF to choose which embryos to use based on what it calls “polygenic risk factors.” Said one executive, “We are the Underground Railroad of 'Gattaca' babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.”
Expect more of this. Stanford University offers a class called “The Frontiers of Reproductive Technology.”
“We are the Underground Railroad of 'Gattaca' babies.”
Pro-natalism also shows up in politics. In a 2021 appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, the host asked Vance how he would mainstream seemingly extremist ideas, or as he put it, “moving ideas from unthinkable, to sensible, to popular, to policy.”
Vance started by saying we should “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad” before bringing up the now-infamous example”
“So, you talk about tax policy, let's tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” said Vance. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you've got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don't have any kids. It's that simple.”
Vance’s proposal to cut taxes for women who give birth is seen less as a way to give upper-income parents a version of the Child Tax Credit than a nakedly pro-natalist policy. And Vance didn’t pluck this idea out of the air at a wine bar in Napa. This particular policy didn’t spring out of a Stanford University lecture hall or at a dinner party of Thiel’s. In fact, the policy doesn’t even have American roots. Like much of Project 2025, we imported it from Hungary, where women with four or more children are exempt from paying income tax for life.
“We do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children,” said Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.”
Russia has a similar policy with its “Mother Heroine” award. If you birth and raise 10 Russian babies, you get one million rubles3 on the 10th baby’s first birthday.
“I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
It’s possible I’m incorrectly ascribing pro-natalist beliefs to Vance. It could be simply that he “hates women,” as tech journalist Kara Swisher recently said. Or, as Vance said in his sorry dustup with actress Jennifer Aniston, maybe he just has an affinity for traditional family structures. “I believe families and babies are a good thing,” he said.
Or we can accept that Vance, whose political existence is a creation of Peter Thiel and the tech-oriented VC culture that regards pro-natalism as not just a good thing but an existential necessity, is espousing beliefs and policies perfectly aligned with that deeply creepy, authoritarianism-adjascent worldview. And that’s, well, you know…
“No matter how you frame the issue, pro-natalism often comes across as extremely strange,” wrote New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat. I might have used a different word, but regardless, you know something’s amiss when Douthat and I agree.
Weird, huh?
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
Further Reading
I Know You Are but What Am I?
How Elon Musk may have just ruined everything
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-13/steve-jurvetson-resigns-from-his-vc-firm-after-misconduct-claims