Usha Vance appeared on Fox News yesterday in a prerecorded interview with Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt. Poised and prepared, Vance answered a few softball questions until about seven minutes in, when Earhardt brought up by her husband's weird 2021 claim that "We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oilgarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It's just a basic fact."
"What was your reaction?" Earhardt asked her.
Vance didn't appear to be flustered. She knew the question coming and he had a canned answer.
"I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often," she told Earhardt.
The funny thing is, JD actually 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 wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too." And if you watch the video where JD told a giggling Tucker Carlson that, you'll see that the "context" is more of the same about how "miserable" these childless adults are.
I guess in the Vance household, they have a special language where words don't mean what normal people think they mean. For instance, telling your 7-year-old boy to "shut the hell up" when he wants to talk about his Pokémon cards, means, "Hold on, Billy, I have to make a phone call then we can talk."
This interview with Usha has other interesting examples of Vance-speak.
Usha said JD "made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive, and it had actual meaning."
For the Vance family, a demeaning insult is called a "quip."
Usha said JD complained about "childless cat ladies" because he wanted to initiate a substantive conversation about the difficulties of parenting in America.
For the Vance family, meaningful conversations always being with an insult that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed.
She concluded by saying, "Let's try to look at the real conversation that he's trying to have and engage with it."
The Vances enjoy trading offensive barbs with one another as a way to foster better communication. Why don't more people think of this?
So there you have it, a crash course in Vance speak. It's easy to learn — the grammar and spelling are nearly identical to American English. Just practice up on deflection, contradiction, minimization, lack of accountability, false equivalence, and selective empathy, and you'll be speaking like a Vance in no time!
