Trump, Vance and the Republicans

in February, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank that’s become central to mapping out policy objectives for the next Republican administration, recommended requiring public schools to collect data on immigration status when students enroll. Heritage also said schools should charge tuition for children who are undocumented or who have a parent who lacks legal status.

Barring children from the classroom punishes them for their parents’ decisions and disrupts families’ daily rhythm. Most searingly, perhaps, it undermines the hope of bettering the lives of the next generation — a reason for coming to the United States in the first place.

What’s more bizarre is that the couch joke was only one of the three most off-putting things Vance has been known for during his first 10 days as a VP nominee, and the only one that wasn’t verified as true. After Trump announced his pick on July 15, a clip from his 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson went viral in which he complained that the US was “effectively run” by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” naming Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children, and how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it,” he said, discounting Harris’s two step-children whom she co-parents with husband Doug Emhoff. Then, Vance tried and failed to get laughs at a Trump rally by making an awkward joke about drinking diet Mountain Dew and how “[Democrats] are going to call that racist.”

Vance already held extreme views on sex and gender; he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and has compared it to slavery. He has voted against a bill ensuring access to IVF and suggested a ban on porn. He called universal child care “a class war against normal people.” He opposes legislating codifying the right to gay marriage and suggested that people in “violent” marriages shouldn’t get divorced.

He is also among the nebulous group of young intellectual conservatives backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel loosely called the “New Right,” whose main project seems to be making techno-fascist and incel-adjacent ideas seem cool and edgy. On X, where Vance has spent a great deal of time, he at one point followed several white nationalist accounts, many of whom glorify bodybuilding and fascism while promoting the Great Replacement theory. He is, in other words, exactly the type of guy you could imagine claiming that couch sex robots were the beginning of a glorious future without women.