When JD Vance appeared as a special guest at the 2021 summer conference of the Napa Institute, a Catholic organization that seeks to “advance the re-evangelization of the United States,” he was weathering a storm for a talk he had given that week to a conservative group in which he assailed the Democratic Party for being led by childless people. He had also proposed that parents be granted more of a say at the ballot box than people without kids. During that speech, he had called out Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for being non-parents. (Harris was a parent to two stepchildren, and Buttigieg adopted twins the following month.) Asked at the Napa Institute event about these remarks, Vance did not blanche. He doubled down and even singled out AOC for promoting what he called a “sociopathic” view of the family.

Vance, then a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, told the crowd of Catholic activists that he had gotten into “trouble” for his earlier comments. But he stood by his remarks, saying “My basic view is that if the Republican Party, the conservative movement stands for anything… the number one thing we should be is pro-babies and pro-families.”

He emphasized that not enough Americans were procreating: “We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country, where we have unhealthy families, we have families falling apart. We have the rise of childhood trauma. And even among healthy intact families, they’re not having enough kids, such that we’re going to have a longterm future in this country.”

Vance then went even further and claimed that childless people were responsible for the rottenness of the nation’s political discourse: “So many of the most miserable and unhappy people in our media and in our public life are people without kids. And I think that they were trained to chase credentials, to chase degrees, to chase money, when the thing that is ultimately going to give you the most fulfillment in life is your family.”

Vance turned this into a partisan issue, blaming the left and Democrats:

My goal here is to not criticize every single person who doesn’t have children. My goal is to point out a very simple fact that it’s one thing to have a society where some people don’t have kids. It’s another thing to build an entire political movement that is explicitly anti-child and anti-family. And thats what the left in this country is. It is anti-child and anti-family.

Vance ignored the fact that the Democrats have long pushed for education, childcare, health care, family leave, and other social programs that assist families and young people. To make his case, he singled out AOC:

Just one example. One of the politicians that I criticized is AOC. Maybe AOC hasn’t found the right person, whatever the case may be. AOC has said basically—if you look at her public remarks on this—that it’s immoral to have children because of climate change concerns. Right? This is, let’s just be direct, a sociopathic attitude towards family.

The audience applauded.

Vance did not cite a specific comment from Ocasio-Cortez to support his assertion that she had taken a “sociopathic” stance by saying it was wrong to have kids because of climate change. Two years earlier, during an Instagram Q&A, she had addressed this subject. She noted that unless extensive action was taken to reduce emissions, there was little hope for the future. And she remarked, “It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?” AOC had not declared it immoral to bear children.

Vance continued his dig at the Democrats:

And I think somebody just has to point this out. And it’s a little bit weird….What does it say about our civilization that so many of our leaders don’t have kids? What does it say about the incentives that are built into the Democrats’ entire movement that they reward the young people who don’t have families instead of the young people who do? I think it’s just pretty sick… and it suggests something pretty broken.

More applause.

Vance did not address the fact that most of the Democratic presidential candidates of 2020 had children and that the Democratic leaders of Congress were parents.

Ocasio-Cortez did not respond to a request for comment regarding Vance’s attack on her. But on Monday, she posted a tweet that seemed to reference Vance’s remarks about “childless” Democrats: “Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.”

A few years prior to his talk at the Napa Institute conference, Vance, with the success of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, had emerged as a public intellectual of a center-right bent who focused on the intersection of cultural norms and economic matters. But by the time of this event, Vance was running for the Senate as a hard-right political warrior, bashing the left and Democrats for supposedly being the enemies of families. Casting his foes as malevolent and childless extremists, Vance had himself become an extremist.