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The New York Times’ Weird Attack on JD Vance
Once again, corporate media is painting a conservative lawmaker’s mainstream views as out-of-touch and bizarre.
In 2017, JD Vance, then known for authoring his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” wrote an introduction to The Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index for Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays and charts looking at the state of families and prosperity in the United States.
Cue the freakout from The New York Times and others.
“Years before he became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance endorsed a little-noticed 2017 report by The Heritage Foundation that proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families,” wrote New York Times reporter Lisa Lerer in an article published Tuesday.
Others quickly piled on.
“The vice-presidential candidate previously endorsed a collection of almost 30 essays by ultraconservative thinkers on restricting reproductive rights and other freedoms,” wrote The Daily Beast. Business Insider fretted that “JD Vance endorsed a report that criticizes people watching pornography.” MSNBC said Vance’s introduction “has come back to haunt him,” saying the index “includes essays that espouse right-wing talking points, targeting single-parent households, divorce rates, welfare programs, and housing assistance.”
The Times, for its part, decided to use a sentence I wrote for the 2017 index to show just how insane they think Vance is.
“Authors argued in the 2017 report that women should become pregnant at younger ages and that a two-parent, heterosexual household was the ‘ideal’ environment for children,” wrote Lerer.
She added, “‘The ideal situation for any child is growing up with the mother and father who brought that child into the world,’ wrote Katrina Trinko, a conservative journalist, in an essay detailing the ‘tragedy’ of babies born to single mothers.”
Now to be clear, as both Vance’s spokesperson and The Heritage Foundation have said, Vance had no editorial control or approval over my essay or any of the others in the 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity.
And for the record, while The New York Times couldn’t be bothered to include it, I also wrote in that essay, “Every parent who chooses life in adverse circumstances should be commended. Many single moms and dads, whether due to later circumstances or a surprise pregnancy, have nobly risen to the task and done an amazing job of raising their children …”
But let’s look at my supposedly radical claim that the ideal should be kids growing up with both parents.
First, my view is actually the mainstream view.
Nearly half of Americans (47%) think that single women raising kids on their own is bad for society, while only 10% think it’s a good thing for society, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll.
That’s not surprising—because the data clearly shows that kids do best when raised by a married mom and dad.
In fact, if Lerer had just read her own outlet, she would know that. In a 2023 commentary headlined, “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing,” economics professor Melissa Kearney writes, “The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood.”
In Kearney’s book, “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” she explored whether the disadvantages children of single parents faced could be explained by income or education differences between single parents and married parents.
But the data shows that it’s the family formation, not simply parents’ education and income, that affect the children. “A child born in a two-parent household with a family income of $50,000 has, on average, better outcomes than a child born in a single-parent household earning the same income,” writes Kearney.
Meanwhile, among kids who have a married mom with a bachelor’s degree, 57% have a bachelor’s degree of their own by age 25, according to Kearney. But among kids who have a single mom with a bachelor’s degree, only 28% have a bachelor’s degree by age 25.
Funnily enough, while the elites may attack Vance for daring to espouse traditional values, their own behavior suggests they actually agree with him.
“Many elites today—professors, journalists, educators, and other culture shapers—publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage, the two-parent family, and the value of doing all that you can to ‘stay together for the sake of the children,’ even as they privately value every one of these things. On family matters, they ‘talk left’ but ‘walk right,’” observes Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in a February Atlantic essay.
Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” noted that a 2022 survey found that a mere 30% of college-educated liberals agreed that children are better off if they have two married parents. (In contrast, 91% of college-educated conservatives agreed with this.) But these college-educated liberals are not themselves going on to become single parents: “69% of the parents within this same group [college-educated liberals] were themselves stably married,” writes Wilcox.
So apparently, Vance’s real crime isn’t daring to live by traditional values. It’s that he actually shares those views out loud.
Vance, as many known from his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” did not grow up in a stable, two-parent family. His parents divorced when he was young, with his dad essentially disappearing. His mother married five times and struggled with drug addiction. Vance was ultimately raised by his grandparents.
There was eventually a happy ending for his mom—Vance proudly shared at the Republican National Convention that she was 10 years sober from drugs—but it came long after Vance’s childhood.
Vance’s essay in the 2017 index highlights how, years before he became an Ohio senator, he was frustrated by the refusal of the elites to look at how culture shaped outcomes of Americans.
“[P]urely economic questions miss something important about our current moment. Too rigid a focus on the material permits us to divorce concerns about opportunity from those about culture. In some ways, this is understandable: The comfort zone of many elites, and thus, their language trends toward the mathematical and technocratic,” he wrote before concluding, “But talk about it we must, because the evidence that culture matters should now overwhelm any suggestion to the contrary.”
Vance later added:
Recognizing the importance of culture is not the same as moral condemnation. We should not glance quickly at the poor and suggest that their problems derive entirely from their own bad decisions before moving on to other matters. Rather, we should consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us. It molds our attitudes, our habits, and our decisions. It sets boundaries for how we perceive possibilities in our own lives.
Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as “the least of these.” It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse that speaks often about the vulnerable even as it regularly fails to help them. [Emphasis mine.]
That last sentence struck me because it gets to the heart of what sets apart the Yale-educated Vance from his elite peers: A desire to actually help people, even if it means being courageous and saying something politically incorrect.
But for refusing to be hypocritical, to live one way and talk another way, Vance is getting crucified by the Left. That’s not surprising. But if we’re serious about helping Americans live better lives, we need fewer sneering New York Times pieces and more Vances.
The post The New York Times’ Weird Attack on JD Vance appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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