Vance's "childless left" comment was a coordinated New Right talking point

A little-remembered incident from 2021 hints at just how sophisticated New Right messaging has become.

JD Vance is dealing with yet another round of controversy, this time for his remarks on Tucker Carlson back in 2021 about “childless cat ladies.” But while Vance dismisses those comments as sarcasm today, they were actually part of an earnest and persistent messaging campaign. And one that appears to have been coordinated and funded by Peter Thiel’s Rockridge Project.

Vance’s comment about “cat ladies” was not his only attack on childless Americans. In an extended interview with Chris Buskirk in November 2021, Vance made his position quite clear:

You go on Twitter, and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are the people who don’t have kids at home.

Buskirk, recall, was the founder of the Thiel-funded Rockbridge Project, which aspired to build “a new conservative ecosystem by sponsoring...public relations and messaging...influencer programs...and other projects for cultural influence and renewal.”

Remarkably, another guest Buskirk promoted on his podcast — Red Scare’s Anna Khachiyan, who also happens to be another Thiel beneficiary — had been embroiled in her own scandal about the childlessness line just a few months before. In June of 2021, Khachiyan and disgraced racist Pedro Gonzalez tweeted out nearly identical attacks on socialist writer Nathan J. Robinson:

Despite Khachiyan’s past pleas of independence and insistence that she doesn’t coordinate her messaging in backchannels, it was clear that Gonzalez and Khachiyan had workshopped the tweet but failed to clarify who would post it.

This may be a tangential connection, but it gives us real insight into how New Right messaging actually works. Powerful actors on the right are constantly cultivating a kind of farm league of influencers who they keep at arm’s length but also look for ways to promote; the most infamous example of this was the promotion of Libs of Tik Tok by Glenn Greenwald, who called himself the account’s “godfather.” (Greenwald was also, incidentally, an aggressive promoter of Gonzalez.)

It’s entirely probable that low-level influencers are not getting their messaging from the top-down, at least in the ordinary sense. Khachiyan and Gonzalez probably were not a part of some Official Thielbux Group DM; they were just friends in a groupchat. Like every groupchat I have ever been in these forums usually become vehicles for messaging and engagement coordination online; I can disclose here that I lurked in a group chat with Khachiyan several years ago where such things went on regularly.

The primary difference between your group chat and these group chats is that rich people probably aren’t using yours for message-testing. As I wrote in 2022, right-wing media seems to operate as a hierarchy of message testing, with higher levels keeping an eye on what’s working and what’s failing the next level down. Thus when creeps like Gonzalez and Khachiyan get it into their head to start calling everyone childless in July, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll start seeing higher level messengers promoting them and then running with the line themselves by the end of the year.

Thus in August of 2021, Elizabeth Bruenig noted that the “childless left” line had already started taking off:

Desperate times demand that America’s babies and children stand up and man the ramparts of the culture wars...It’s no armed insurrection, but it’s still a sorry fate for a generation of children who, by no fault of their own, are being transformed into a political talisman for the right.

Three years later, we still find Buskirk guests like Sohrab Amhari using their platform to defend this line by publishing a ridiculous Michael Toscano piece in Compact:

Many senators on the left have a vision of family policy, too. Vance disagrees with it. So, we could be having a debate about which one is better suited for the American people, and on what grounds. Instead, we are down the rabbit hole of an electronically fragmented public discourse, in which we are being memed into believing that Vance’s views on family policy are reducible to a hatred for “childless cat ladies.”

It doesn’t seem worthwhile to entertain Vance’s pleas of sarcasm when his own defenders insist he was quite earnest, but setting that aside I think this whole sorry episode is an excellent illustration of how New Right media actually works. Racist freaks in chat rooms test out new attack lines, mid-level creeps like Glenn Greenwald and Chris Buskirk grant them selective promotion, and somehow all of these mid-level creeps have various connections to PayPal Mafia money. If a line seems to be working it’ll eventually get so much promotion that even your Manchurian Senator will start using it. Until, at least, he gets in trouble.