Barely a fortnight after your correspondent celebrated the ascension to the Republican ticket of a “champion of families,” even some self-styled “conservatives” are pushing to push J.D. Vance off an electoral cliff.

His offense: asserting in a 2021 Tucker Carlson interview that America is “effectively 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.”

It seems that the Buckeye State’s junior senator was insulting heartbroken women suffering from infertility and that, per the wholly-Uniparty-owned Wall Street Journal editorial board, his remarks don’t “play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

The Journal’s suggestion: hide behind the skirts of his attorney spouse, Usha, who “might help persuade swing voters that Mr. Vance respects women more than his comments have made it seem.”

Puh-lease.

Let’s start with a little “necessary throat clearing,” as Vance put it in his epic “Civilizational Crisis” speech contemporaneous with the Tucker interview:

Look, a lot of people are unable to have kids for very complicated and important reasons. I know good friends of mine who struggled to find the right girl, find the right guy. There are people, of course, for biological reasons, medical reasons, that can’t have children. The target of these remarks is not them.

It’s one thing to recognize that there are people who don’t have children through no fault or choice of their own. But it’s something else to build a political movement, invested theoretically in the future of this country, when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.

(Note: Vance had mentioned Democrats Kamala Harris; Pete Buttigieg, an adoptive gay parent; Sen. Cory Booker; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.)

So not only does Vance intend no insult to childless women, their sadness underscores his core contentions: that “babies are good … the ultimate way that we find self-meaning in life,” and “the fact that we’re not having enough babies … is a crisis” because “a country that has children is a healthy country that’s worth living in.”

It’s why he defined the increasingly elusive American Dream as meaning that “if you work hard and play by the rules, you can support a middle-class family on a single wage” – presumably for a male head of an intact household.

Meanwhile, the astroturf “groundswell” to sweep this chronicler of a fallen culture from the 2024 race precisely proves his point from the Tucker exchange.

Now, feminists drunk with “girl power” – and again abetted by girlie men – have upped the ante: They’re not just trying to run the country, but leveraging Vance’s comments out-of-context to dictate who gets the top job. But also thereby stepping up their scorched-Earth efforts to reshape social norms through an all-out assault on marriage, child-raising, and especially male family headship.

The reticence of the male conservative cohort to defend Vance is reminiscent of the time, during the serial sexual assault character assassinations on conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh, Hawaiian harridan Mazie Hirono (another childless woman politician, allegedly a U.S. senator) memorably demanded that “the men in this country just shut up and step up.”

Never mind that the GOP pajama boy wing’s pathetic, Lilliputian pandering on Vance is, in the Journal’s telling, inspired by concerns about an electoral cohort not even remotely “gettable” for Republicans. Cue Pew Research: “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).”  

Moreover, that bowing and scraping commenced on the heels of the manliest political act since TR: a truly masculine candidate’s history-making rise to his feet after being grazed by an assassin’s bullet, followed by a fist-pump-punctuated summons to his supporters to “fight, fight, fight.”

Judging by the response of the tea-and-crumpets compromisers in his own party, 45 might as well have whimpered, “Duck, run, hide.” And PS – “shut up.”

At the time of Ms. Hirono’s outrageous ultimatum, this commentator asserted that “all politics are now sexual.” And it’s never been truer.

Because guys: DJT’s covertly coronated competitor is the quintessential California contentment-crushing cat lady. Want a supremely telling indicator? She wants to take away your freedom to enjoy red meat – the dietary staple of every self-respected, red-blooded American male. 

Meanwhile, her main hope of election (other than bamboozling the public) is to froth up female outrage about the potential loss of her notion of “freedom:” exterminating in the womb the babies J.D. Vance rightly identifies as civilization’s source of joy and hope for the future. A phenomenon virtually unknown among married women, just 4% of whose pregnancies end in abortion (versus more than 40% of single women’s).

Men, especially conservative men, it’s not a time to “shut up” – it’s time to rise up, like your true standard-bearer,  and “fight, fight, fight.”

Fight to reclaim rightful places in universities with enrollment now at 60-40 women (a prima facie discrimination case), from which females are seizing control of the commanding heights of the economy and culture and systematically relegating males to second-class citizenship.

Fight for jobs exported or being lost to immigrants – who have reportedly claimed a wildly disproportionate share of the slots supposedly created under the Biden administration, driving non-college-educated U.S.-born men in particular out of the labor force.

Fight for your roles as husbands and fathers, with not just fertility but also marriage rates plummeting. To the extent that some analysts project that one in three U.S. adults may never marry – which may, astonishingly, also account for up to a quarter of men’s departures from the labor force. Why? Richmond Fed economists surmise it might be that – wait for it – “married men seem to work more, in part, because they enjoy providing for their family.”

In other words, the American Dream as the hillbilly delineated it.

So most of all, fight for J.D. Vance, who is now battling the cat-lady contingent tooth and claw for you, red meat, and your and America’s future.

Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.