The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Worst People in the World

Posted on | January 27, 2026 | No Comments

Heather Schwedel

You think you hate the liberal media enough, but you don’t — and that’s probably a good thing. It would be psychologically unhealthy to hate anyone as much as the liberal media deserve to be hated.

Heather Schwedel is a writer for Slate, which was one of the pioneering political commentary sites back in the dial-up modem days of the 1990s. If you’re old enough to remember when AOL discs came in a box of cereal — seriously, that actually happened for a few months in 1996 — you may remember when Microsoft hired Michael Kinsley (former New Republic editor and then co-host of CNN’s Crossfire) to be editor of Slate.

That was 30 years ago. In 2004, the Washington Post purchased Slate, but when Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, he had no use for Slate, which is now property of a separate firm, Graham Holdings. This trek down memory lane doesn’t do much to explain why Heather Schwedel is on Slate’s payroll, but it does give you some sense of the downward trajectory of Slate’s prestige. The latest milestone on this descent into infamy is Schwedel’s article with this headline, “Well, That Is One Way for J.D. and Usha Vance to Respond to the Erika Kirk Divorce Rumors.”

Could anyone imagine a more perverse and sickening possible reaction to the announcement that the Vice President’s wife is pregnant? Perhaps someone might call attention to the various deranged mutterings of Candace Owens or the despicable smears of Nick Fuentes, but ladies and gentlemen, Heather Schwedel is employed by Slate, which was formerly considered one of the most reputable online journals. It’s not like this was published by some obscure fringe site. No, this vile article was written by a full-time staff writer and, presumably, given the green light by an editor who is paid an actual salary. Among the tasks of an editor is saying “no” to story ideas that will bring disrepute to the publication, and here the editors of Slate have self-evidently failed. Let’s dive in:

The rumors about J.D. Vance leaving his wife for Erika Kirk, which have persisted since the two shared a much-discussed hug in October, were always more darkly entertaining than plausible. But observers have surmised that they took off because they reflected a certain air of uneasiness that has surrounded Vance’s marriage for the whole time it’s been on the national stage. As the highly educated daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Vance not only doesn’t burnish Vance’s MAGA credentials; she undermines them. When reports of a possible divorce on the horizon began to swirl in November, it wasn’t altogether surprising. Reckoning with all those contradictions was inevitable, right? . . .

Dear God, ma’am! Wes Pruden would have kicked you down the stairs if you had pitched him a story like that. “Rumors” have “persisted” since “a much-discussed hug”? By whom was this discussed? Some podcasters?

Also notice Schwedel’s not-too-subtle recycling of the Nick Fuentes “married a jeet” smear: Usha is the “daughter of Indian immigrants” and therefore “doesn’t burnish Vance’s MAGA credentials” — but if he dumped the mother of his three children to marry the grieving widow of Charlie Kirk, that would burnish his credentials? Exactly what does Heather Schwedel know about “MAGA credentials” and how they are burnished? Where did she gain this expertise? But among the many laughable elements of Schwedel’s first paragraph, perhaps none is as absurd the part where she says “observers have surmised” blah blah blah.

Guess who she links for this? C’mon, take a guess.

If you guessed Amanda Marcotte, collect your prize. Of all the idiot feminists in the world, Schwedel links the most idiotic for her “observers have surmised” reference. To spare you from reading the entirety of Marcotte’s brain-damaged screed, I’ll quote this one sentence: “Vance’s marriage is an increasingly poor fit for his political brand, which has become increasingly based on praising the virtues of white supremacy and retrograde gender roles.” To use the adverb “increasingly” twice in the same sentence is the sort of stylistic error that bespeaks haste in composition, and one pictures Marcotte furiously typing away with a maniacal expression on her face as she wrote that. What joy she must have felt in that one-two punch of “white supremacy and retrograde gender roles” to characterize Vance’s “political brand.”

Anyway, back to Schwedel’s secondhand rumor-mongering:

If you’re wondering what’s so MAGA about having a kid, it’s not just that they’re having a kid, but that they’re having a fourth kid. The average number of children per American household has been declining for decades, so having four kids in the year 2026 is a bit of a statement. While it doesn’t have to be conservative-coded, it tends to skew that way. It’s also a statement in the sense that it follows more literal statements Vance has made about pro-natalism and how women need to have more babies, and/or the evils of women who choose not to. In fact, the Vance baby is part of a mini baby boom at the White House, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, also expecting. . . .

(Note that I am the father of six children myself, but all of mine were sired long before Trump rode down that escalator.)

[I]t’s important to remember that [Mrs. Vance] is a willing participant in all of this. While it’s tempting to wonder if anyone else in her law-school class has put their career on hold to have four kids, she chose to have all those kids, and to leave her career to support her husband, and to stay with that husband, no matter how increasingly awful he seems both as a force in society and as an individual partner to her. Usha is free to slap “I had this before J.D. went crazy” stickers on her other kids. But if she could ever claim any kind of ignorance, that time is over. She has now seen exactly who her husband has become as vice president. And knowing everything she knows, she concluded that yes, she wanted to have another one of J.D. Vance’s babies.

In conclusion, yuck. Nothing more need be said to condemn this, as it is self-evidently indefensible. It is astonishing how contemporary liberal journalism manages to attract all the worst people in the world, a sort of magnetic North Pole of wrongness. We might be tempted to say that Heather Schwedel should be ashamed of herself, but if she had any capacity for shame, she wouldn’t be writing for Slate, would she?



 

Category: J.D. Vance, Liberals, Media Bias

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