Weird Democrats Think The Nuclear Family Is Weird

The reason political campaigns come up with talking points — and pay focus groups a lot of money to test them — is that it’s effective to repeat things over and over again. Even when people know they’re being fed a manufactured soundbite, and even if people know it’s a lie, it can still work to some extent at a subconscious level. 

Advertising slogans work on the same principle. If you constantly bombard people with the same message, eventually they’ll internalize it.

But talking points can backfire, especially when politicians go off-script. They can get themselves into a lot of trouble very quickly. And we’re starting to see that right now with a soundbite you’ve now heard a million times — and which we discussed yesterday — which is the refrain that JD Vance is “weird.” Every Democrat and media outlet has clearly been instructed to repeat this attack endlessly for the past week.

In an interview the other day, it was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s turn to repeat the line. But he didn’t just repeat it. He also attempted to explain what it means to be “weird.” And nothing he said made any sense, which suggests that Democrats don’t really understand the talking point they’ve been handed. Watch:

Manchin on Vance’s “cat ladies” dig: “I thought I’ve heard everything after as long as I’ve been around, but there are some things I haven’t heard. I thought that was a very weird way of putting it.”

— “I don’t think the news he’s making is the news they thought he would make.” pic.twitter.com/y1enZTaobp

— Alejandro Alvarez ???? (@aletweetsnews) July 31, 2024

You kind of have to feel bad for Manchin, because everyone knows that a 76-year-old man would never call another man “weird.” What are they going to do next, force Manchin to say that JD Vance gives him the “ick”? Maybe he’ll come out and tell us Vance’s vibes are cringe. The whole thing is, for Manchin, degrading and inauthentic, and everyone can see through it.

But the interesting part of that clip is Manchin tries to explain what the talking point means. First, Manchin says Vance is “weird” because he’s a smart guy who said something “out of the mainstream.” Then he suggests JD Vance is guilty of “name-calling” instead of clearly articulating what kind of policies he wants to pursue.

It’s a jaw-dropping claim because the entire point of JD Vance’s statements — the ones they’re claiming are “weird” — go to maybe the single most important issue facing this country, which is the decline of the family and the rise of childlessness. It’s the decline of the family that has led directly to skyrocketing rates of violence in major cities. It’s led to plummeting birth rates that are well below replacement level. And it’s led to a historic number of deaths of despair, including overdoses and suicide. But Manchin dismisses all of this. He simply claims JD Vance is insulting people, instead of talking about serious issues, whatever those may be.

This is what it looks like when a talking point unravels.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

None of the Democrats or media outlets want to address the substance of what Vance was talking about, which is the importance of starting families and having children. These are not fringe ideas; they’re what allow civilization to exist. So instead, to justify their soundbite that Vance is “weird,” Democrats are just making things up and attributing them to Vance. And it’s not just Joe Manchin who’s doing it.

The other day, CNN tried to push the “weird” talking point — this time, by claiming Vance called people “sociopaths” if they don’t have children. Then they show a video of what Vance actually said, and it completely contradicts that claim. Watch:

Any reasonable person watching that clip would agree with every word JD Vance said. There’s not even any hint of name-calling in that segment. He’s not saying childless people are sociopaths, as CNN reported at the beginning of that clip. Pretty clearly, he’s saying babies are good — they’re good for communities, they’re good for the country, and they’re good for parents. What he said is that only a sociopath would think that babies are a bad thing. 

That’s a pretty uncontroversial point. If you have an affirmative dislike for human children — if you think it’s a bad thing that people are reproducing — then you clearly have an extraordinarily antisocial and anti-human outlook. You’re also probably incapable of understanding the joy that children bring to their fathers and mothers. And all of these traits are hallmarks of sociopaths.

So CNN completely misrepresented what JD Vance said. There’s no argument he was describing people without children as sociopaths, as they claimed. This is the “name-calling” that Joe Manchin was referring to, and it’s a complete fabrication. But CNN wasn’t done lying. Here’s the rest of the segment:

We’re supposed to be outraged by this podcast interview too, even though again, there’s nothing insulting or confusing about it. He’s saying, on balance, societies are better off when people have children. For one thing, society can continue to exist, because dead people get replaced by children. That’s a pretty big net positive.

And as Vance said, having children generally makes people less narcissistic and less self-centered, by necessity. Parents are forced to consider the well-being of their child, which is obviously a fundamental and instinctual desire that’s encoded in our DNA. Up until about 15 minutes ago, everyone understood this. It wasn’t a controversial point.

It wasn’t long ago that Barack Obama was giving speeches in which he described fatherhood as, “the greatest gift.” That’s from a speech in 2008 that he delivered at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. Obama said, “If I could be anything in life, I would be a good father.” His whole speech was about how fatherhood made him less narcissistic — which really makes you wonder just how narcissistic this guy must have been before he had kids: “When I was a young man, I thought life was all about me — how do I make my way in the world, and how do I become successful and how do I get the things that I want. But now, my life revolves around my two little girls.”

There was no scandal when Barack Obama delivered this speech. No one thought it was controversial to say that fatherhood means caring more about other people, besides yourself. No one thought it was strange to suggest, as Obama did, that becoming fathers is often the most meaningful thing that men can do. So we have to ask: When and how did this change in American politics? When did it become unacceptable to point out that having a family is good in part because it involves caring for others? That’s a question we should all be asking. Instead, the media is pretending JD Vance is the outlier. Joe Manchin and CNN are accusing him of being “out of the mainstream.” It doesn’t make sense.

But it appears to be a widespread problem now. A lot of people seem to be thinking along these lines. Yesterday I talked to a Wall Street Journal reporter who’s doing a piece on this controversy. The guy was nice enough and didn’t appear to be going for the “gotcha” moments, but the premise behind his line of questioning was totally confused. He wanted to know about the “rise” in pro-family rhetoric like the kind we hear from Vance (and me). I tried to explain that our view is not some new political phenomenon. Our view is the one held by every reasonable person who has ever lived up until approximately last Tuesday. It’s the anti-family view, the view that celebrates the “child free” lifestyle, that has recently arisen. It is the sudden and very modern phenomenon that he should be trying to explain. 

Of course, the idea of attacking the nuclear family isn’t new. Karl Marx called for the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto. Friedrich Engels claimed that the family is “founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.” Soviet schools taught children to report their own parents for wrong-think. And in Hungary’s soviet government, which lasted only a few months, schools began indoctrinating children on various explicit sexual topics, as a way of driving a wedge between the children and their parents. 

As the biographer of one Hungarian commissar put it:

Special lectures were organized in schools and literature printed and distributed to ‘instruct’ children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bour­geois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the church, and to ignore precepts of morality.

Sound familiar? We’ve obviously been seeing this same creeping influence in American politics for some time. Teachers are now instructing kindergartners about topics like gender identity. Children are receiving hormones that can sterilize them for life. California is hiding students’ so-called “transition” from their parents. In some cases, children are being removed from homes because their parents won’t affirm their delusions. 

The difference is that, unlike the Soviets, today’s Democrats generally don’t come right out and admit that they want to destroy the nuclear family. Yes, sometimes the mask does slip. At the height of the George Floyd hysteria four years ago, for example, BLM had this passage on their website:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

Eventually, BLM had to take that down — not because it was posted in error, but because they had said the quiet part out loud. 

Now, suddenly, it’s fine for Democrats to say the quiet part out loud. Advocating for strong families is now prohibited on the Left. They’re saying that, if a critical mass of people decide to stay single and self-serving for their whole lives, then that can’t possibly have any negative ramifications whatsoever for society. This is the view that Democrats push — and it’s very much “out of the mainstream” of conventional thought in this country since it was founded. Democrats are importing Marxist views on the family, and they’re calling you “weird” for noticing what they’re doing. 

And they’re doing it relentlessly.

The other day, New York Magazine ran a piece that — like CNN — completely misrepresented what JD Vance believes:

Conservatives have long staked out a claim to be the movement of traditional values, of families, of normal people, all in contrast to liberalism. The weirdness attack works so well because it flips that script and fights on important cultural terrain. It’s weird to care about how many children people have. It’s weird to treat women like incubators. It’s weird to care about people being drag queens. It’s weird to lose your sh— because some people are trans. It’s weird to obsess over alleged sex differences. Most people aren’t like this and don’t want to be like this, either. The GOP has become the party of internet poisoning, and it’s important to say as much. Everyone likes to tell a freak to shut up.

In other words, Democrats can give sterilizing hormones to children. They can make every single day on the calendar some kind of LGBTQ holiday — from the Trans Day of Remembrance to International Pronouns Day to Gay Uncle Day to Pride Month and so on. They can pretend that basic biology — which makes all life possible — is completely meaningless and entirely subjective. And if you complain about any of this, you’re the one who’s making an issue out of it. You’re the one who’s “weird” and “name calling” and “out of the mainstream.”

As with everything else we see from these people, this is projection. And it’s all they have. The only way they can accuse JD Vance of being strange is to tell you to shut up, which is why New York Magazine explicitly says “Shut up” in the article. For good measure, like CNN, they also invent things that JD Vance didn’t even say. For example the article continues:

None of this is normal, and voters know it. Most parents don’t have kids simply to own the libs or because they’re worried about getting outbred by immigrants. People are childless for many reasons, and none is Vance’s business.

Of course, JD Vance didn’t say that people should have kids to own the libs, or that people should have to explain why they ‘re childless, or that people should have kids because they’re worried about being “outbred.” None of this is tethered in any way to reality.

The truth is that they’re not attacking us for any of the reasons New York Magazine claimed. They’re attacking us for promoting family life and parenthood as a positive good, which it obviously is. Everyone throughout history has recognized that.

What we’re seeing now is just part of their years-long campaign to demonize the nuclear family. If they’re smart, Republicans will use this issue as an opportunity to remind voters about the Democratic attacks on parents and families, especially in recent years. With JD Vance, for the first time, a major Republican politician has done exactly what BLM did, inadvertently, four years ago. He told the truth about Democrats’ efforts to destroy the nuclear family, which is the foundation of all civilization — and also the solution to so many problems that Democrat-run cities are suffering from right now. Strong, stable families are the way to fix all of it. It’s obvious to everyone.

But what’s become clear over the past week, amid the Left’s obsession with their dumb talking point, is that they’d rather watch the population of this country wither and die out than admit what everyone knows, which is that JD Vance is right.