I awoke today to the digital chime of yet another social media announcement, that modern confessional where the powerful pretend to be human for the benefit of the scrolling masses. Usha Vance, the current occupant of the title 'Second Lady'—a designation that sounds more like a backup dancer in a fading cabaret than a position of consequence—has informed us that she is pregnant. A fourth child. A boy. Due in late July. I can barely contain my indifference, yet here I am, forced to stare into the abyss of this curated domesticity because it is the only currency left in a bankrupt culture.

Let us deconstruct the sheer, exhausting theater of it all. We are living through an era of profound institutional collapse, where the very air is thick with the stench of political decay, and yet our national discourse must pause to acknowledge the expansion of the Vance genetic portfolio. It is the ultimate distraction: the biological reality of birth used as a shield against the intellectual void of our governance. I see the 'trad-wife' acolytes on the Right already salivating over this, viewing a womb as a battlefield in their pathetic culture war. To them, a fourth child isn't a human being; it’s a demographic victory, a statistical middle finger to the 'childless cat ladies' her husband so famously disparaged. They see a boy arriving in July as a reinforcements for their crusade against modernity, blissfully ignoring the fact that the child will likely be raised by a phalanx of nannies while the parents are busy being interviewed by people like me, who hate them.

Then there is the Left, whose reaction is as predictable as a metronome. They will pivot from 'bodily autonomy' to a strange, performative concern about the carbon footprint of a fourth child or the 'optics' of a traditional family unit. They will sharpen their digital knives, ready to slice into the privilege of it all, while simultaneously wishing they had a PR machine half as effective at humanizing their own brand of sterile, academic elitism. I find both sides equally revolting. One side treats the womb as a manufacturing plant for voters, while the other treats it as a site of socio-political transgression. Neither side seems to care about the actual, impending human who will be born into a world that is objectively on fire, both literally and figuratively.

The timing, of course, is a masterstroke of cynical planning. Late July. Just as the summer heat begins to melt the collective brain of the American public, and just as the political cycle reaches its most frantic, screeching crescendo. A baby boy will be the perfect prop for a campaign trail that thrives on the illusion of stability. Nothing says 'everything is fine' quite like a newborn in a stroller, even as the wheels are falling off the carriage of state. I can see the photos now: the soft focus, the carefully chosen linens, the strategic deployment of the 'everyday family' aesthetic by people whose lives are anything but everyday. It is a performance of normalcy in a country that has forgotten what the word even means.

I find myself pondering the existential weight of being the fourth Vance child. To be born into the 'Second Family' is to be born into a goldfish bowl where the water is toxic and the spectators are all holding nets. The boy will be a talking point before he is a person. He will be a data point in a stump speech before he can crawl. This is the cruelty of our age: we have turned the most basic biological functions into content. Usha Vance’s post is not a celebration of life; it is a press release for a brand. It is a way to anchor the Vance name in the soil of 'family values' while the husband navigates the treacherous, shifting sands of his own political identity.

I am tired. I am tired of the way we are expected to find meaning in these staged revelations. The fact that a woman is having a child should be a private matter of zero national importance, yet in our desperate, celebrity-obsessed necro-state, it is treated as a sign from the heavens. We are a society that has substituted policy for personality, and personality for procreation. Whether the child is a boy, a girl, or a sentient pile of venture capital is irrelevant. What matters is the machinery of the announcement—the way it forces us to engage with the Vances as a concept rather than a set of potentially disastrous ideas. July will come, the boy will arrive, and the world will remain as broken as it was when the post was first uploaded. The only difference is that there will be one more Vance to deal with, and I, for one, think we have more than enough already.