JD Vance attacks working women as being ‘on path to misery’ in unearthed audio
Support truly
independent journalism
Our mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.
Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.
Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.
In a resurfaced podcast interview from September 2021, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said that professional women “choose a path to misery” by prioritizing their careers over having children
Donald Trump’s running mate also claimed the masculinity of men in America is “suppressed”, and attacked immigrants and Democratic Rep Ilhan Omar.
The Guardian reported that the now-Ohio senator said of women, such as his Yale Law School classmates, that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.
Of Omar, he said that the lawmaker had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” if she had not moved to the US from Somalia as a refugee.
Vance made the remarks back on September 20, 2021 on an episode of the Moment of Truth podcast run by American Moment – a conservative organization of which the senator is a board member emeritus for the group – Media Matters reported.
American Moment is a partner for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led plan to provide staffing and policy priorities for a second Trump administration.
This is the latest example of Vance’s previous on-the-record comments, particularly about women, coming back to haunt him since he was chosen as Trump’s running mate.
He has previously called Democratic leaders “childless cat ladies” and lashed out at the president of the teachers’ union for not having “some of her own” children. The senator has since tried to address some of his previous comments by calling them “sarcasm”.
In the Moment of Truth recording, in which Vance is speaking with American Moment’s president and founder, Saurabh Sharma, and its COO Nick Solheim, the then-candidate for Ohio’s Senate seat was asked about what he saw inside elite institutions such as Yale Law School.
“You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”
Vance added: “What they don’t realize – and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God – is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.
“The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” Vance said. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.”
Continuing along that line, Vance adopted what he sees as the perspective of a professional woman and said: “Okay, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible. And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.”
Vance continued: “But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”
Earlier in the episode, the conversation turned to immigration and the then-recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, wheree Vance derided the claims of Afghan refugees who worked with the US in its 20-year occupation of the country.
“Apparently, Afghanistan is a country of translators and interpreters because every single person that’s coming in, that’s what they say is this person is: a translator and interpreter,” he said.
While he conceded there were a lot of “great guys”, he added that a lot of those who worked with the US “were actively helping terrorists plant roadside bombs, knowing our routes”.
He did not provide any evidence to back up this claim.
Minutes later, in a discussion about the Somali community in Minneapolis, in which Solheim claimed “people are frequently hatcheted to death in the street”, Vance said that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”.
“Why don’t you want, you know, people getting hatcheted in the street in downtown Minneapolis? Is it because you’re a racist or is it because you don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in your own community?” Vance said.
“Like, obviously, the answer is the latter,” he said. “But the left uses racism as a cudgel to shut us up and to make it impossible to complain about obvious problems.”
Turning to Omar of Minnesota, Vance said she has a “complete lack of gratitude” toward the US, unlike anyone in his family, continuing: “And look, this is the way the laws work. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me. But my God, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a craphole if this country didn’t bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too.”
Responding to the resurfaced comments, Omar told The Guardian the senator’s rhetoric was “ignorant and xenophobic” and not just troubling, but “dangerous and un-American” adding that she loves America “fiercely” hence having dedicated her life to public service.
She added that this is a nation of immigrants, “no matter how much it terrifies small-minded men like JD Vance”.
