For almost two weeks now, J.D. Vance has been getting well-deserved hell for remarks made in 2021 in which he described Vice President Kamala Harris, along with a host of other Democratic leaders, as miserable, “childless cat ladies,” unfit to wield political power because they haven’t sexually reproduced. Further comments like this are being uncovered almost daily, making it clear that this is part of who Vance is: weird and creepy. But some of these recently resurfaced remarks go beyond the “weird” to something more dangerous and destructive: Democrats, including Harris, want to steal “our kids,” Vance has said. And he is far from alone in pushing that line of attack—Trump allies are devoting millions of dollars to getting this fearmongering message in front of voters.
Most recently, Charlie Kirk, head of the far-right group Turning Point USA, accused Harris of wanting to “kidnap” children using “the trans agenda.” Kirk made these comments on his self-titled online show on July 29, part of a segment praising Trump’s protection of what the Christian right calls “parental rights.” Kirk has styled himself a parental rights defender; he railed against a new California law meant to protect trans students, claiming it signaled “the destruction of the nuclear family as we know it.”
The law, signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom this year, came about in response to local school boards adopting policies that targeted trans students and their supportive teachers. These policies required teachers and other school staff to inform a student’s parent or guardian if they changed their name or pronouns, and they spread to multiple California counties and school districts. Harris had no role in passing the 2024 law to halt such school board policies; she wasn’t in California state governance at the time because she had been elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016. Her successor, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, sued a school district over its policy of forcing the outing of trans students—not Harris. Kirk however warned “every Christian in the country … that if Kamala Harris becomes president, she will nationalize this California law and make it so that the state can kidnap your child under ‘trans-related issues.’” In case that wasn’t clear enough, he added that “Kamala Harris seeks to kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Trump, by contrast, would protect children “from the trans mafia.”
Kirk may sound like a fringe cultural warrior, but he’s spent the last decade building influence on the right, at the same time as his group, Turning Point USA, has taken an increasingly Christian nationalist (and often antisemitic) turn. Kirk’s group also produced the event where he said Trump vowed to protect children “from the trans mafia.” At this same event, Trump promised his “beautiful Christians” that after voting in this election, they wouldn’t need to vote in the next one.
The idea that leftists want to “kidnap” children to advance a trans “agenda” is a variation on messaging being pushed this election season by the American Principles Project, veterans at deploying anti-trans political messaging in service of Republicans. “We’re going to make sure that voters all across the country know just how extreme Kamala Harris is when it comes to protecting our kids, when it comes to protecting normalcy and decency, and when it also comes to protecting parental rights,” Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, told Fox News last week. “Our job is to make sure that every voter in the country knows that Kamala Harris will take away your rights as a parent to protect your children from all these nefarious influences in our culture.” APP’s ads have spread misinformation about trans youth, such as their failed intervention in the high-profile 2023 Wisconsin state Supreme Court race, in which they sent lurid text messages suggesting that liberal candidate Judge Janet Protasiewicz “and her woke allies want to TRANS our children without notifying parents.” (This is entirely made up, and Protasiewicz won.)
Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, meanwhile, continues to make news for his past remarks on children and families. In an appearance on America First, hosted by the white nationalist–adjacent former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka on July 12, 2021, Vance said the Democratic Party is “like this childless cabal.” While this remark, recently rediscovered by journalist Jacqueline Sweet, is in the same vein as Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comments, the “cabal” language adds a new twist. And a few months after the America First interview, Vance returned to the theme in an appearance on Breitbart Radio. “One of the things I’ve beat up on the left about,” he said, “is that so many of their leaders, their next-generation leaders, you know, the AOCs, the Cory Bookers, the Kamala Harrises, they don’t have kids. And so there’s this weird way where they want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.” Addressing those leaders, Vance said, “If you want to brainwash children, have your own kids to brainwash. Leave your hands off mine.”
Take Vance’s remarks as a whole: We have a “cabal” assuming power—specifically, a “cabal” of people of color. Their power is framed as lesser or illegitimate because they are childless and, implicitly, because they are not white. They are dangerous, and they are trying to take over—as Vance said in an August 2021 fundraising email unearthed by CNN, “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths—they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children.” And they are coming for “our children,” to “brainwash” them.
This kind of talk, of a powerful cabal coming for your kids, trafficks in the same threats and themes as QAnon, with its claims of Democrats stealing children for their own nefarious purposes, from child sex slavery to harvesting their bodies. Vance, of course, would deny being a conspiracy theorist, racist, or antisemitic. But Vance, like Trump, is skilled at getting right to the edge of blood libel and white supremacist rhetoric without going all the way and losing his fig leaf of plausible deniability.
Portraying childless people as trying to take your children because otherwise they can’t reproduce themselves and hold onto power also calls to mind another California fight—over the Briggs Initiative in the late 1970s. At that time, the burgeoning Christian right was fighting the ground gained by the gay rights movement, and attempted to reframe gay, lesbian, and bisexual people as child predators. In California, this took the form of a ballot initiative asking the state’s voters to bar gay and lesbian teachers from employment. Fifty-eight percent of voters rejected this.
“As it was put to a popular vote in the biggest and gayest state in the country, the Briggs Initiative was seen by the religious right and gay activists alike as a trial balloon that would test how far that backlash could go,” wrote Slate’s Christina Cauterucci, who has a new podcast looking back at Briggs. “The urgency of the threat forced thousands of gay people who’d never previously considered themselves political to get angry and get active in defense of their own rights.”
Kirk and Vance seem to share an instinct for moral panic. But they also may be focused on the image of leftists “stealing” children in an attempt to distract from the fact that conservatives are the ones attacking children—trans children. Vance and Kirk want to make forced outing policies a national standard. (You can find these plans laid out in Project 2025, of course.) And they are the ones spreading moral panics and conspiracy theories in an attempt to make “parental rights” a presidential campaign issue.
