GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance in 2021 made yet more disparaging comments about people without children, this time turning his ire to teachers.
Part of Vance’s remarks were resurfaced on Tuesday by Heartland Signal, a digital outlet based in Chicago. NBC News later reviewed and shared video of the entire event.
During a forum for Republican Senate candidates in Ohio hosted by the Center for Christian Virtue in October 2021, Vance weighed in on the question of how to make schools more responsive to parents.
Vance claimed the left wants “to control what our children learn.”
“I think our conservative idea is that parents and family should determine what children learn, what values they are brought up with,” he said.
Vance went on to call out Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, accusing her of trying to “brainwash” children while not having “a single child.”
“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. That really disorients me,” Vance said.
“Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teaching union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child,” he added. “If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Weingarten, who is a stepmother to her spouse’s two children and has previously described herself as “a mother by marriage,” called Vance’s words “gross.”
“JD Vance’s comments are sad and insulting to millions of modern families, and school teachers including Catholic nuns, none of whom should be targeted for their family decisions,” Weingarten wrote.
Vance’s spokesperson told NBC News the Ohio senator will continue speaking out in defense of children.
“There is no bigger threat to American children than the left wing indoctrination being peddled in our schools by radicals like Randi Weingarten, with the support of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,” Taylor Van Kirk said.
Vance has previously come under fire for referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a Democrat who is part of the “childless left” during a speech in 2021.
He doubled down on those comments in a Fox News interview in the same year, also singling out Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).
“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance said.
“It’s just a basic fact: You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he added. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people that don’t have a direct stake in it.”
Vance has since claimed those comments were “sarcastic.”
“What I’ve simply said is that I think that it’s really a profound change that’s happened in our country, where we’ve become anti-family,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview released Sunday. “And I would like to change that.”
