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I saw the full context somewhere but now I am totally unable to find it.
The antinatalism stuff is, as far as I can tell, how he's trying to spin those comments now. The original sentiment was clearly "these people without children don't have a stake in our future" or something like that. Maybe you could even argue that just because he thinks they don't have a stake doesn't mean he dislikes them, but that also seems weak.
I think you can read it akin to in democrat culture there is an anti natalist streak. These people are an example of that (ie it isn’t a coincidence that a lot of their leaders don’t have kids). That streak is bad and we don’t really want those kind of leaders as they raise the status of being child free / won’t be as child motivated. That seems…right to me. It isn’t good to have so child free leaders. Babies are great—we should be having more kids. My wife and I are doing our part!
As an aside, it is gross how hard it is to find transcripts to give full context. All you can find are media reports that quote X but don’t provide links for the transcript. Just another example of bad journalism and Google being awful.
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It's not the full interview but you can see a longer clip here.
I think your interpretation is pretty much correct. He's saying "people like Kamala Harris are miserable because they don't have kids and want to inflict their misery on the rest of us."
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Here's an article someone posted elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c147yn4xxx4o
I don't have a strong opinion.
On the one hand, it is in the national interest to be more positive about children, and influence more people to have more children, since we're below replacement levels of fertility throughout the wealthy industrialized world. I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.
On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good. It sounds like something to say on an anonymous message board, or to your good guy friend in private, but maybe dress it up or change the subject in public spaces?
He wants to give net taxpayers huge tax credits/refunds(there's very little difference between the two) for fertility.
Seems hard to fund.
Probably, but he's not a deficit hawk.
Who is, these days? How about we spend as much on this as we did on invading and rebuilding Iraq?
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He included Pete Buttigieg in that list also.
The internet says he's gay married with adopted kids? That's its own problem from a conservative perspective (and I'm personally in favor of prioritizing married man and wife couples for adoption, since there's a shortage of adoptable children, and "well off, but your dads are in the public eye all the time" isn't a clear win for a child), but doesn't seem like the same problem.
This was mentioned earlier (I think in this megathread), but the Vance interview clip was from a couple of months before Pete Buttigieg finalized the first adoption.
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