Virginia Republican Proves He's No Childless Cat Lady With Spare Family He Borrowed For Photo Op
The GOP weirdness continues.
So, in the year of our Kathryn Hahn 2024, The New York Times published this article: “G.O.P. Candidates, Looking to Soften Their Image, Turn to Their Wives.” It’s the first presidential election since Donald Trump’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and reproductive rights are literally on the ballot in many states. The Republican men running for office want voters to forget their party’s blatant misogyny, and this usually involves campaign ads where the (white) women in their lives give them the Stepford seal of approval.
Annie Karni and Catie Edmonson at the Times write:
Their ads often feature women in softly lit living rooms and pristine kitchens vouching for their husbands’ characters. Sometimes the women are driving S.U.V.s with young children in the back seat as they stop for gas and groceries, talking about how their husbands are champions for their families, and can be champions for yours, too.
Their reporting doesn’t address how this shameless, sexist and pathetic ploy isn’t actually new. It’s a common dodge from politicians who harm women politically and perhaps personally, as well. Of course, Republican Derrick Anderson has revived this transparent tactic in a new farcical production. He’s running for Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s current seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, and he wants voters to know that there’s nothing he values more than someone else’s family.
Anderson, a former Army Green Beret, doesn’t have kids and lives alone with his dog. It’s a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, but Anderson seems to think it would serve his campaign better to borrow a friend’s wife and kids and give the misleading impression that they’re his actual heterosexually generated nuclear family. That is not weird at all.
Actually, it is pretty weird
Derrick Anderson has posted footage of himself with his friend’s wife and three daughters. They’re gathered around the dining room table with Anderson at the head, and they’re smiling and gabbing. It’s a lovely family moment, except this isn’t his family and probably isn’t even his dining room table.
Anderson also posed for what looks like a Christmas card photo with the woman and three kids. They’re standing somewhere in the land of ticky-tacky, and Anderson has assumed the prime “Dad’ position.
Families come in all forms, but Anderson obviously isn’t presenting himself as Uncle Derrick, an integral part of his friend’s family whose catch phrase is “cut it out!” His friend doesn’t appear in the ads or photo at all. Maybe his buddy was the one filming the footage and taking the photo, but if so, he should worry that Anderson might try to Single White Male him.
The National Republican Congressional Committee provided the Times with Anderson’s weird rent-a-family photo, which was run without anyone at the paper asking, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Anderson’s campaign spokesperson argued that “Derrick’s opponent and every other candidate in America are in similar pictures and video with supporters of all kinds,” and the family cosplay video just showed Anderson “with female supporters and their kids.” Anderson has apparently confused families in a campaign with designer fashions at an award show red carpet. “Derrick! Whose family are you wearing?” “Christopher John Rogers!”
Anderson is newly engaged, and his campaign ads could’ve focused more on the family he’s creating with his fiancée. However, there’s a reason that Anderson might want to present himself as a father. The Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance — who’s not mentioned once in the Times article — has repeatedly insulted childless Americans and anyone whose family doesn’t meet his restrictive classification.
Vance told an audience at the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute in July 2021: “Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have children? Why is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”
A month later, as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s old Fox News show, Vance said, “We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact: If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
Speaking at a Center for Christian Virtue leadership forum in October 2021, Vance said, “You know, so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children.”
Vance dismissed American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten as a “mother by marriage” and said “if she wants to brainwash and destroy the mind of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”
When these past remarks resurfaced this year, Vance refused to apologize. Demonstrating why his approval ratings rival those of herpes, Vance told Megyn Kelly, “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats. I know the media wants to attack me and wants me to back down, Megyn, but the simple point that I made is that having children — becoming a father, becoming a mother — I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way.”
His gross remarks don’t exist in a vacuum. Marjorie Taylor Greene told Weingarten at a congressional hearing last year, “The problem is, people like you need to admit that you’re just a political activist, not a teacher, not a mother and not a medical doctor.”
Weingarten is a mother, without qualification, and even if she weren’t, it wouldn’t mean she doesn’t care about kids and their education. Vance has kids and he blew off the impact of school shootings as an unfortunate “fact of life” that we can fix only by turning schools into prisons, and not even the low security country club deals where white inmates can play tennis.
Vice President Kamala Harris is the mother of two children from her marriage to Doug Emhoff. She’s such a good mother that their biological mother raves about Harris and considers her a key part of their blended family. That’s not good enough for Republicans who still describe Harris as childless.
At a rally a couple weeks ago, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” Genuinely humble people don’t claim other people lack humility, especially when this involves smearing someone else’s family relationship. The word that best describes Sanders is “cruel.”
The Republican Party’s sole platform is their Dalek-like contempt for anything the slightest bit different. The result is that their own candidates must pretend they’re something they’re not. Anderson currently has no children, biological or otherwise, and according to Vance and Huckabee, that makes him an arrogant sociopath with “no physical commitment to the future of this country.”
When there’s no room in the GOP for an otherwise bland white guy, it becomes clear that the GOP tent is actually the size of a cocktail umbrella.
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Gotta admit I found the whole "borrow a friend's family for my campaign pictures" hilarious and even endearing. If this was a Democrat I'd even see it as lampooning the whole "look at my family, I'm a human guy, not like every says" ads. A great followup would be an ad with an entirely different family, maybe even some poses but instead of rifles and handguns the family could be holding rakes for some reason.
Of course, Vance is just a weird bitter troll whose smug dismissal of childless or single people reflects his own fucked up resentment issues. And Huckabee is the worst hypocrite out there, professing all her "Christian" bullshit which is just a package for cruelty. May all their children grow up to break away from such toxic influences.
That really IS weird. The two unreconstructed party senators from South Carolina have no kids; does the pubic hair golem want to pressure them to pose with some?
I guess this is yet more runoff from the really weird, creepy obsession with “gotta make sure there are more precious babbys.” Yet the unreconstructed Republican party goes out of its way to make life miserable for people in general. They strive for life to be nasty, short and brutish.
Because all Republicans offer you are dead bodies and hatred.
That said I hope Spanberger (on edit: ooops I mean Vindman) beats this weirdass creep because I would hate to see someone with a creepily weird decision like this be in position to make laws.