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No, We’re Not Required to Say “Kids are Great”

A response to Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper

Kristen Tsetsi
6 min readAug 15, 2024
Photo by OurWhisky Foundation on Unsplash

The Atlantic contributor Tyler Austin Harper, in a recent thread on X, attempts to craft a diplomatic reaction to an interview CNN’s Dana Bash conducted with J.D. Vance — and fails.

In the CNN interview, Bash asks about Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” and Vance clarifies to Bash that he isn’t against childfree cat ladies, but rather a “set of ideas” that are anti-child.

Harper generously tweets within his reaction thread that he doesn’t believe Democratic policies are anti-family, but adds, however, “it’s worth exploring why this line that dems are ‘anti-family’ seems believable for so many people.”

Based on what he seems to think are persuasive reasons, my guess is that when he says the anti-child line is believable for “so many people” he actually means it’s believable for Tyler Austin Harper.

Those reasons follow, and I’d like to respond to them one by one:

…a lot — not a majority, but a lot — of college educated dems are anti-child and view having a family as a threat to their all-important “freedom” to do what they want.

Using sarcasm (“all-important”) and quotation marks around “freedom” reveals that Harper has…

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Kristen Tsetsi
Kristen Tsetsi

Written by Kristen Tsetsi

Author of the post-Roe v. Wade novel THE AGE OF THE CHILD. “A voice & perspective we rarely see in literature. Total page-turner." - Amazon Review

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