Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has tried to defuse the firestorm over his 2021 remark about “childless cat ladies” by claiming that Democrats have taken him out of context. But in three separate Fox News interviews from the same period resurfaced by Media Matters, Vance repeated versions of the attack as he sought to bolster his Ohio Senate primary campaign by appealing to his party’s demagogues.

Vance’s comment that the United States is run by “childless cat ladies” like Vice President Kamala Harris, who he claimed control the Democratic Party but “don't really have a direct stake” in the country’s future, triggered a wave of revulsion and opprobrium when it resurfaced last week. (Harris, in fact, is a stepmother of two.) He offered the remark during a July 29, 2021, interview with the then-Fox host Tucker Carlson and has since tried to clean up the mess by telling right-wing interviewers that Democrats took him out of context. 

But Media Matters has identified three more Fox interviews in late July and early August of 2021 in which Vance similarly attacked Democrats for being “childless.”

Vance claimed during those appearances that “the left has effectively been taken over by a lot of childless people”; argued that this purported phenomenon ensures that the Democratic Party is “dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children”; and told “Kamala Harris, AOC, and so forth” to “have your own kids” and “lay off of mine.”

The night after he attacked Democratic “childless cat ladies” on Carlson’s show, Vance returned to the network and told Fox News Primetime host Tammy Bruce that he was “sick of these bureaucrats experimenting on my children” by requiring kids to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and recommending masking in schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Vance added: “That's experimenting on our kids. If you want to experiment on somebody's kids, Kamala Harris, AOC, and so forth, have your own kids — lay off of mine.”

The following week, on the August 4, 2021, edition of Fox News Primetime, Vance told host Ben Domenech that Democrats “feel comfortable experimenting on children” because they are “increasingly the party in the movement that doesn't have kids.” Vance argued that this situation distorts the party’s views on face masks and on immigration, saying, “If you're a childless adult living in New York City, you probably care more about your house cleaner than you do about the children of America.” 

“But if you’re a parent, and you see the effect that this nonstop lockdown and masking has on kids, then you’re going to care more about the kids,” he added. “I think basically what we’ve done is that we’ve allowed the Democrats to become dominated by a bunch of sociopaths who don’t care about America’s children. And we just need to call it out.”

On Fox’s The Next Revolution that Sunday, Vance told host Steve Hilton that he supported giving parents extra votes to represent their children. He explained that this would counterbalance “the left,” which he said “has effectively been taken over by a lot of childless people, by the AOCs of the world, the Kamala Harrises of the world. Those people now run the agenda of the Democratic Party, and we’ve got to push back against that.”

Vance fundraised off of his Fox comments about “childless cat ladies” with campaign emails disparaging “radical childless leaders” and “childless sociopaths” in the Democratic Party who “don't have a direct stake” in the country, CNN's KFile reported. Vance offered similar arguments in contemporaneous interviews on the Moment of Truth podcast and the Breitbart News Daily program, as Media Matters documented. He also repeatedly attacked Democratic “cat ladies” on Twitter.