JD Vance's 'post-menopausal females' interview is even weirder than you thought

With inflation easing and Democrats basking in convention euphoria, MAGA pundits and political commentators all have the same suggestion for the flailing Trump campaign: the convicted former president needs to “get back on message.” “Stop with the personal attacks on Kamala Harris,” a reporter advised during a press conference last week at Trump’s Bedminster golf club. “Talk about the economy and talk about immigration,” an anonymous GOP congress member pleaded through CNN.

The problem is that race-baiting, misogyny, and a general obsession with supposedly in-born hierarchies aren’t distractions from the Trump team’s message. They are the campaign’s message. Even when confronted with an issue that genuinely concerns the electorate — such as the still-high cost of living, especially for those of us raising children — they can’t resist offering rhetoric and solutions that sound like they come from the minutes of a 1920s meeting of the American Eugenics Society, if not the pronatalist movement in Fascist Italy itself. The reason is simple: They really believe this stuff.

The latest evidence comes from an April 2020 podcast interview with Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. The interview, resurfaced last week by a Chicago-area progressive radio station, went viral thanks to a single line, in which Vance agreed with the host’s statement that helping care for grandchildren “is the whole purpose of the post-monopausal [sic] female.” This was thrown onto the pile of other weird stuff to come out of Vance’s mouth, such as his 2021 claim, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that the United States was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives … and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

A Vance spokeswoman insisted that the gaffe was a case of the media “dishonestly putting words in JD’s mouth,” and that, “JD reacted to the first part of the host's sentence, assuming he was going to say: 'that's the whole purpose of spending time with grandparents.’”

To find out, I listened to the entire two-hour podcast. The first thing I can say is that the spin isn’t true — Vance quite clearly says “yes” right after the host says “post-menopausal.” But more importantly, that moment was neither an isolated part of the interview nor even the weirdest thing that Vance or the host said. It wasn’t even the only time the phrase “post-menopausal female” got thrown around.

The podcast in question was “The Portal,” hosted by Eric Weinstein — a hedge-fund manager and coiner of the term “Intellectual Dark Web” who claims to have discovered the elusive “theory of everything” that has stumped the most brilliant theoretical physicists for over a century. (Working physicists think he’s full of it.) The episode came out in late April 2020, during those heady days when everyone was stuck at home. Vance, it seems, was doing some early promotional work on the movie adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard. Vance and Weinstein’s connection to one another was their mutual patron: the anti-democratic billionaire Peter Thiel. ¹

Listening to the setup, I got the sense that Weinstein was hoping for some kind of anthropological foray into the “Appalachian culture” of which he imagined Vance was some kind of ambassador. (At one point, Weinstein proposes a program he calls “Birthright Ohio” — to be explicitly modeled on Birthright Israel — in which “people from the coast” would be taken on tours of Ohio and encouraged to settle there, by showing “what kind of standard of living they could have if they moved to the interior and brought some of their technical know-how and got over their bigotry.”)

But the episode quickly turned into Vance and Weinstein bro-fully bitching about two topics closer to their hearts: One was the elite liberals in their cohorts at Harvard and Yale — people they consider their intellectual inferiors, who, they believe, are holding back the “freaks and the mutants” like themselves from using their unmatched brain power to save America (and/or the world). Possibly the strangest moment came when Weinstein praised Jeffrey Epstein — yes, that Jeffrey Epstein — as a science-funding alternative to the National Institutes of Health, saying that he wished someone would “take Jeff Epstein and all the sort of weird stuff he was doing and get rid of the creeps and do it as a government project.”

The second topic is directly related to the first, as Vance and Weinstein complain about “political correctness,” which they seem to think is the scheme that is holding them (and by extension the human race) back from their ultimate destiny. It will surprise no one familiar with this style of self-congratulatory tech-bro “contrarianism” that what they are referring to is the denial of inherent genetic differences between different groups of people, including based on gender and nationality. To cut to the chase: This pseudo-biological determinism is the full context for the “post-menopausal females” lines. Or as Vance says, “I mean, obviously, like, I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of biological differences.”

Weinstein takes it further. He claims at one point to not “like the IQ in race or IQ in gender stuff.” (“Sure, neither do I,” Vance replies.”) Then he immediately continues on a rant, already in progress, about how women are inherently inferior in the game of chess² . At another point, Weinstein says: “I love the idea of ‘all men are created equal.’ [But] I know from marathon running that Ethiopians and Kenyans are not quite created equal.” “Right,” Vance replies.

When Weinstein explains that his brother, the disgraced evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein, thinks that maybe East Africans “radiate heat really efficiently,” Vance seems ready to believe it. “Is that true?” he asks.

“That’s what his belief is,” Weinstein says. (To which Vance replies simply: “Oh.”)

Weinstein rounds this out by calling the idea of inherent human equality one of “our founding fictions.” “Every smart person is supposed to know that our founding fictions are fictions,” he says. Vance offers no disagreement here either, offering his belief in “biological differences” — specifically that “that men and women are better at some things” in response as soon as he is given a chance to talk. When Vance starts stumbling, perhaps considering the way his words might play in a future campaign, Weinstein jumps into say that there is “another part of [his] brain that’s not at all comfortable with this” as well.

The couching³ is performative, but there’s also a point to it. Weinstein’s main point is to hold up “deep thinkers” like himself and Vance as having the exact right mix of bigotry and discomfort, and condemning anyone who, in his words, would “socially execute” — i.e., criticize online — “anyone who is struggling with these conflicts.”

As with much of the anti-"cancel culture" rhetoric from around 2020, there is an enormous quantity of bullshit involved. At one point Vance recounts a story in which an unnamed, supposedly prominent neuroscientist criticizes an Atlantic article's claim that there are no structural differences between male and female brains. The neuroscientist, portrayed as a Hillary-supporting Democrat, allegedly insists that while all his colleagues agree with him, they’re too afraid to say so publicly.

This claim unravels when you read the actual article — a 2018 entry by Taylor Lorenz titled “Are Male and Female Brains Biologically Different?” — which not only acknowledges ongoing debate but calls the “unisex organ” claim a “bold statement, and one science is divided on.” Vance’s narrative serves to position figures like him (and Weinstein) as bold truth-tellers, even though the very premise of their “silencing” is demonstrably false. Vance then leaps forward, claiming that this non-existent censorship is “like, threatening our civilization” itself.

Which brings us to childcare. To understand J.D. Vance’s views on women — post- and pre-menopausal alike — it’s essential to grasp his panic over declining U.S. birthrates. To Vance, this decline is a sign of societal decay and moral collapse — portents of a coming national apocalypse. A society that is “not about babies,” Vance says, “is a dying society.” Weinstein agrees.

Nevermind that this is a trend seen not only domestically but also in Europe and East Asia, or that some view the trend as a sign of success: “the result of young people, especially women, having more options and freedoms than ever before,” as Vox’s Anna North wrote last year. Or that there are clear transnational solutions to the biggest economic issues — labor shortages and a lack of future funding for Social Security — namely, increased immigration. Like his running mate, Vance sees immigration — at least from countries and classes other than those that produced his wife, the former Usha Chilukurki — as far more threat than remedy.

Vance further tells Weinstein that liberal cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are “bizarre … wasteland[s] with no children.” Ignore for a second that the statistics contradict this.⁴ Also forget that the CDC has found that U.S. birth rates have been falling everywhere since the mid-2000s — in big cities, rural areas, and small towns alike. Vance doesn’t care about the facts; he sees liberals as a class of child-hating people who lack “what makes life worth living,” resulting in an “entire world of professional America” that is “kind of sociopathic and icky.”

The opposites of this are, of course, JD and Usha Vance. The lead-in to the “post-menopausal” comment was Vance recounting the couple’s decision to have the first of their three children in 2017. It was a busy time: Vance was a newly minted bestselling author and professional Trumpism explainer; Usha was about to start her job as clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. As he says: “In hindsight, maybe it [getting pregnant] was a little stupid.”

Then Vance shared his secret: His wife’s mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri took a year-long sabbatical from her job as a biology professor and provost at the University of California, San Diego, to move in and help them raise their newborn son.

This is when Weinstein interrupts with his “post-menopausal female” observation — the second time in the course of an hour that he has stated the only reason human women survive past menopause is to serve as “grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” (And the second time that Vance either tacitly or verbally agreed.) Weinstein further calls Chilukurki’s decision to move in with the young couple, “this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” (Weinstein’s wife, Pia Malaney, grew up in India, as the daughter of a well-to-do Hindu father and a Syrian Jewish mother. These are the “right kind of immigrants” for his crew.)

Vance one-ups the racial essentialism, saying that marrying an Indian woman was “in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family.” He then half-jokes that Dr. Chilukuri’s decision to take a year sabbatical was “painfully economically inefficient” — that it would have made more sense from a neoliberal standpoint for her to simply keep her job and pay for a nanny.⁷  

The reason Vance and Weinstein believe she didn’t, it should obvious by now, is their understanding of biology: That women care more about raising children than men is simply an “obvious biological difference,” as Vance explained earlier in the interview it. (Or, as Weinstein puts it, upping the weirdness quotient on cue, because: “sperm is cheap and eggs are dear and paternity is uncertain.”)

The vice-presidential candidate concludes:

Yes, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and great influencer of medieval Christian doctrine, who taught, among other things that: “the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying”; and “for the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority,” and who summarized “the female is a misbegotten male.” Those virtue politics.

Vance has done us a favor here by shifting from a critique of neoliberalism to simply “fundamental liberalism.” It isn’t market logics and the upward redistribution of wealth he is fundamentally objecting to here. But rather the core liberal idea of choice — or, more specifically, any kind of individual or societal choice that defies what he sees as a fundamental biological reality, as ordained by an Aristotelian God, via the Catholic Church and the Stanford French department.

Weinstein ends the session by asking Vance to join him in performatively naming and thanking the women who care for their children. “I just think that … one of the things we need to do is to recognize that these are really celebrated roles. And that if you get any notoriety behind you, you should be able to say thank you and to put that out there.” (Weinstein reiterates, as he has done throughout the interview, that Vance is giving the ultimate honor to his grandmother by having her role played by Glenn Close in a Ron Howard film.)

All of this goes a long way toward explaining why Vance supports an expanded child tax credit⁵ but not universal daycare⁶ . It also explains why he, and others of his ilk, would react so viciously to any woman who does not conform to his worldview — who chooses, of her own free will, to not have children (with or without adopting cats). And why this movement puts such a premium on taking control of other people’s uteruses, even if they have been raped or the victims of incest; not to mention anyone who would blur the lines of strict gender boundaries, whether by refusing the roles prescribed for them, or living as a gender other than the one they were assigned by a doctor at birth.

It’s because none of this is about curing actual social problems — whether future labor shortages, grocery prices, or improving the lives of actual children in the world today. To be MAGA is to live in the world’s most cloying morality play, in which everyone else — women, immigrants, racial and religious minorities — are bit players to be used or cast aside at will. At the end of the day, it’s a handful of rich, powerful white men like Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their billionaire hangers-on who are, in their minds, destined by God and biology to be the stars.

1  Weinstein was the managing director of Thiel Capital at the time. Thiel bankrolled and guided Vance’s political rise and entire post-Yale Law School career. He also convinced Vance to convert to a reactionary sect of Augustinian Catholicism, as interpreted by Thiel’s former Stanford professor, the French literary theorist René Girard.

2  Wei Ji Ma, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU and a chess master wrote months later, based on the scientific literature, that the gender imbalance at the top levels of chess is almost certainly based on the fact that women have been historically excluded from the game and still face high barriers to entry in it.

3  No pun intended.

4  The under-19 population of the city of San Francisco, for instance, grew by 3% between 2010 and 2020, accounting for roughly 14% of the total population. In raw numbers that is 118,500 children and teenagers — more than double the total population of Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio. Zoom out to the whole San Francisco-Oakland-Berkley metropolitan area, and you’ve got something closer to Middletown numbers: 19% under 18 vs 21% in the small Ohio town, according to the U.S. Census.

5  As North writes, paying and cajoling people to have more kids hasn’t worked historically — not even under Mussolini. Policies like increasing the child tax credit — a proposal that both Harris and Vance have championed — should be championed because they save existing children from poverty, not because they will result in more native-born Americans.

6  Vance tweeted in 2021, “‘universal day care’ is class war against normal people.” He made this case by linking to an op-ed in the Church of Latter-Day Saints-owned Deseret News by W. Bradford Wilcox, the head of a right-wing marriage institute at the University of Virginia who has been cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center as having “used [his] platform to engage in extremist anti-LGBT rhetoric.”

7  To be clear, I have no problem with multigenerational families. They’re great! My wife and I have had the full support of my (non-Indian) parents in raising our girls, without whose help we could get very little done. They also deeply enrich our daughters’ lives. Not everyone can make that work though, which is where government social support networks — including universal childcare and universal health insurance — is key.