Dear JD Vance

I’ve listened to and read the transcript of the interview you gave to Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times. You denigrated Kamala Harris numerous times in that interview, criticizing her immigration policies and the way she’s led the country. She’s the current vice president, a job that is mostly ceremonial and holds no law-making authority. You seem to have forgotten that we have a sitting president, and it’s not Ms. Harris. The job of Congress is to make policy, and the president (whom you didn’t mention once) enacts it. You are blaming Ms. Harris for decisions made by the body of which you are a member.

Mr. Vance, your views on women are deeply distasteful to me. You tried to score some points in the interview by saying that you wish you had not used the term “childless cat ladies.” Some of my good friends are childless cat ladies, and they and I will not let you off the hook. You tried to clarify your point by saying that the US has become deeply anti-child, but you only dug yourself a deeper hole. In that interview you recounted a story about a poor Black mother who got on the train between New York and New Haven in 2013. You said the passengers were giving her a hard time because her kids were “extra” (my word, not yours). Kids will do that, especially in crowded public spaces, and adults will get exasperated with the shenanigans and noise kids make. Scowls from annoyed passengers does not equate to being anti-child. It’s not an example of “pathological frustration with children” and it does not speak of something “very dark” in our culture. If I’d been on the train that day, I might have been annoyed too. I’m a mother, and mothers and fathers get annoyed when kids — their own and others’ — act up. We might be tired, cranky, or hungry, but it doesn’t make us anti-child. So, your conclusion is not just strange, it’s a quantum leap into conspiracy.

You seem unable to engage with people as fellow humans whether you’re on a crowded train or in a bakery deciding what donuts to order. A more compassionate response would have been to wonder about that woman’s life. Does she have a partner to help raise the children or is she gutting it out alone? Does she have family to help? Does she have a job that gives her a hard time when her kids are sick? Has she lost jobs because she’s trying to be a good mother? Does she have good daycare? Can she afford it, or does she have to play a bill-paying shell game to keep the creditors off her back? And I would have wondered when our lawmakers are going to understand the stress families endure, trying to shoulder all of this. When will the US cease to be the only developed nation to abandon families to their own devices and make their children suffer as a result? It’s this country’s policies that are anti-child, not its people.

Another example you tried to make about the US being anti-child circles back to cat-lady territory and a “sociopathic” reason some people don’t want to bring children into a world that they believe is irretrievably damaged by climate change. Who are you to find their choice unacceptable? What concern is it of yours anyway? But that’s just it, you want to make it your concern. You do not want people to be free to make their own choices. When a “leader or the leader’s inner circle decides that its people ought to subordinat[e] individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race,” that’s a textbook definition of fascism.

There’s more in that interview I could take issue with, such as the five times you were asked if Trump won the 2020 election, and you refused to answer. Your intended boss looks and sounds worse every day, but the thought of you as president is even more frightening than a second round with him.

Joan Zwagerman is enjoying the fall colors and trying not to worry (too much) about the election.