Government vs. Cat Ladies

Desperate to rally whatever constituencies they can to prevent a second Trump election, one late-in-the-game tactic the Democrats deployed was warning that Trump’s running mate Vance has used the term “cat ladies” as an insult, basically meaning women left with nothing but their politics and their cats at the end of their sad lives. In response, Taylor Swift and others proudly proclaimed themselves non-loser cat-owners. I like cats (and dogs) myself.

I thought it likely another sign of (truly rampant, no joke) sociopathy in media and politics when all the panelists on the Fox News show The Independents about a decade ago unanimously declared themselves cat-haters. This was a few years after I heard a Fox producer bragging about taunting a car-chasing dog but was still several years before Kristi Noem probably destroyed her chances to be Trump’s running mate by bragging about shooting a dog. Trump thus went from potentially running with a dog-killer to running with a mere insulter of cat-owners. By political standards, that is major progress.

The sad irony in it all, though, is that while liberals and leftists giggle at the mean right-wingers, you’re far more likely to have a government run by those liberals and leftists oppress your pets than to see Fido or Trixie attacked by fascist troops. The right, stupid though it can be, is usually interested in controlling a short checklist of moral or core-cultural issues and otherwise leaves you alone. By contrast, the left and mainstream, establishment liberals live to regulate, tax, and license things, all things, and pets make very inviting moving targets.

This year is the 100th anniversary of a ban on dogs in Iceland’s capital city of Reykjavik that began as a plague-avoidance measure in 1924 (just after the world had been through a frightening flu epidemic) but lasted until 1984—a year when the world was getting a little less totalitarian, Orwell’s darkly prophetic novel notwithstanding. (The ban was mainly due to fear of dog tapeworms spreading to humans, and the ban had the side effect of causing a proliferation of cats there that continues today, as explained by Jewells Chambers of All Things Iceland.)

The dog ban may sound silly now. The young in particular will be inclined to think, as they always do, that today we’d never fall prey to the kinds of authoritarian thinking with which people put up in past centuries. Except we obviously do.

Just two years ago, some Icelandic towns—people’s resistance to authoritarian measures perhaps once more softened up by a few years of anti-plague measures—imposed bans on cats or, when citizens balked at the bans, nighttime curfews. (The political pendulum seems to have swung from one species to another.)

And the reason for these restrictions—restrictions that should alarm liberal cat ladies in particular but also freedom-lovers everywhere—wasn’t that some politicians in Iceland are nominally conservative and thus share a Vance-like aversion to felinity or femininity. On the contrary, the reason was primarily green/environmentalist. Cats stalk and kill other animals, especially at night. A lot of animal welfare activists hate cats, in fact. Every once in a while, some extremist kills a cat in the name of animal liberation, counter-intuitive as that may sound.

Maybe the cold, fragile ecosystem of Iceland really will be better off with a few cat-free hours each day, but the whole regime should be a reminder that you are just as likely to get bossed around for green, liberal, or leftist reasons as for conservative or far-right ones. Don’t let Harris and Walz’s sudden non-sequitur talk of “joy” and “freedom” fool you.

Furthermore, given the increasingly cynical and petty nature of politics these days, don’t be shocked if the Democrats, currently in favor of childless cat ladies, turn on a dime and denounce cat ladies and their cats if the Democrats’ pollsters conclude someday that being anti-cat would help garner more votes from animal welfare activists and environmentalists.

Within months of that cynical, unprincipled pivot, SNL would be doing sketches making all cat-owning women look like nature-hating, right-wing shut-ins, and Taylor Swift would probably delete her old pro-cat tweets on cue, as happy to dance in lockstep with the political crowd as she is to move in formation onstage at her concerts. As in Orwell’s 1984, the left would pretend we have always been at war with cat ladies. No one in mainstream media would feel an obligation to remind people otherwise.

None of this would matter much if it were all just a matter of private taste or even widespread cultural tone, but this week may see the election of authoritarians, whether left-wing or right-wing, who hunger to turn every such debate into an edict issued from Washington. Potential vice president Walz, ostensibly part of a ticket that wants unity and moderation, said very recently he’d love to help New York City’s angry socialist media darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez become Speaker of the House, lest there were any remaining doubt Walz is a socialist (or a farmer or a worker or whatever folksy euphemism the disingenuous leftist authoritarians of Minnesota favor these days).

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised Walz likes angry socialist women, given reports he had a romance with but then jilted the daughter of a Chinese Communist Party official decades ago. And he may yet Make America Socialist for the First Time if his party wins this week. It would be a miracle if he or Harris or a more-powerful AOC wanted to regulate nothing more than cats.

But no matter how much the victorious Democrats regulated and spent, I’m sure that the rich, artsy, left-wing women of AOC’s (and my) New York City would celebrate as if they’d just been let out of their cages. The vicious, mean-spirited control freaks here often seem to think their fashionable thick-rimmed glasses and high aborted-fetus counts make them qualified to rule-or-exterminate the peasants from their hip loft-apartment HQs.

Socialist monsters as policy advocates and complete jerks on a personal, one-on-one level, these dimwitted yet haughty spawn of mostly-second-tier colleges and overfunded think tanks will rule us all if liberalism continues its “progress” unchecked. And when you plead for mercy as they put you in jail, tax away your income, or regulate your small business out of existence—indeed, even if they place new restrictions on pets—they’ll snarkily respond to your pleas by saying that you deserve what you get because JD Vance insulted their cats.

The liberal elite so often sound like a prison warden who imagines himself merciful but angrily orders you put in solitary because you once accidentally spilled soup on his shoes. You know, a little bit like joy-and-freedom-loving Harris keeping prisoners in the joint past their release date back when she was California attorney general because it was useful to maintain a forced labor supply.

Cackle cackle cackle! No. Better: fight fight fight. 

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey