It's fine to laugh at JD Vance and his couch
Having fun with a viral joke is not the same as lying relentlessly.
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JD Vance did not have sexual relations with that couch, Miss Sitinsky … JD Vance’s relationships with furniture are strictly platonic, thankyouverymuch, not least because JD Vance believes in procreative sex only, and you can’t impregnate a sectional.
After a joke about Trump’s vice presidential pick copulating with a couch went viral, the left is now indulging in our favorite hobby: scolding each other for failing to live up to our own ideals. “Aren’t we better than this?” we moan, tut-tutting that we should refrain from such juvenile behavior and attack our opponents based on their extensive record of being the creepiest dudes on earth.
Happily, we are largely refraining from puritanical tone policing this cycle. Democrats are able to differentiate between satire and actual misinformation. And in case there was any doubt, if Thomas Friedman is sniping about “playground” taunts and pressing Harris to pivot to “a message that is dignity affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity destroying,” then we’re absolutely on the right track.
“When they go low, we go high?”
The couch meme was born when a guy with the twitter handle @rickrudescalves posted “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”
In fact, the corresponding pages of Vance’s memoir describe his time at Ohio State University, and, if his undergrad life included extracurricular encounters with furniture, they do not appear in the book.
But the meme was immediately everywhere because it “feels” true. Vance is an insufferable, dead-eyed climber who repackaged his sad childhood into a bestseller with the help of the Yale Law professor who spun her own terrible parenting into a cultural phenomenon. His moral malleability made him a darling of nihilistic billionaires who bought him a senate seat. Along the way he marinated himself in a toxic stew of very online libertarianism and alt-right xenophobia.
Since Trump named him as his running mate, the media has unearthed an endless stream of videos of Vance saying deeply weird things. He inveighs against “childless cat ladies” like Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He suggests that parents should be entitled to cast votes for their minor children because if you’re childless “you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country” and “maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.” He says that childcare subsidies are “class war against normal people.” He responds to racist attacks on his wife, who is Indian, by protesting that he loves her and she’s a good mother.
Vance suggests that women should stay in violent marriages and writes actual elegies about his grandparents’ marriage, which was mired in abuse and alcohol and began when his grandmother was a pregnant 13-year-old child.
Even as he holds the exact same job that Harris had four years ago, he demands to know what Harris, a former senator, prosecutor, and state attorney general, has done with her life “other than collect a check.” He also supports ending birthright citizenship, which would delegitimize Harris (and also his own wife Usha Chilukuri Vance).
As the below video indicates, the man can’t even act normal about snacks.
All of which is to say that “he had sex with a couch” is about the least offensive thing you could say about JD Vance.
Birth of a meme
Business Insider tracked down “Rick,” the man behind the original tweet, who insists that he never intended the post to be taken seriously. But he says the moniker “couch fucker” captures Vance’s essential quality, so in some sense it doesn’t matter if it’s literally accurate:
Perhaps, Rick said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial. Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the “ecstatic truth” — in Herzog’s words, “a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual,” encompassing falsehoods that “make some essence of the man visible.”
The story’s virality caused Fox News’s Jesse Watters to develop a sudden allergy to misinformation. (Don’t worry, he got better.)
But legitimate political commentators have also voiced skepticism, with Tom Nichols of The Atlantic lecturing Tim Miller at the Bulwark not to bring up the couch “because it’s a faked thing.”
“There’s so much real stuff to go after with him that you don’t need to go there,” he insisted, as Miller chortled.
Casey Newton, a highly respected tech reporter, likens the couch meme to a deepfake video of Kamala Harris shared by Elon Musk, who apparently is exempt from his site’s own rules on manipulated content and parody.
“[S]haring weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke,” Newton writes at his website Platformer. “Welcome to the shitpost election.”
With absolute respect for Newton, that is not what’s defining this year’s presidential contest. The parties are not engaged in a tit-for-tat exchange of “obviously untrue” — or even “ecstatically true” — jokes, and it’s vital for journalists to reject bothsides framing that pretends there’s no difference between a pie in the face and a bullet.
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On the one side, you have a rando account lampooning a candidate to play up his inherent ickiness. It’s funny because, if it were true, we’d all say, “Yeah, sounds about right for that creep.” It’s the functional equivalent of calling Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer, something which he himself has joked about.
On the other side you have a deepfake video simulating the candidate admitting to being a “deep state plant,” who says that she learned to “pretend to sound Black.” The video was pushed out by the richest man on earth, who has pledged to spend upwards of $100 million to get Trump elected and whose PAC is running a fake voter registration platform.
These two things are not the same.
Newton writes: “When you have resigned yourself to the ubiquity of misinformation — and when platforms have aggressively downsized the content moderation teams that might otherwise prevent you from doing so — you shitpost.”
But that neatly sidesteps the issue of who killed the idea of objective information and threatened to file antitrust lawsuits against the social media companies if they engaged in content moderation and factchecking. For decades conservatives built a parallel ecosystem where truth didn’t matter, and they literally sued the tech platforms for saying that it did. Steve Bannon promised to flood the zone with shit, and then inveighed against the platforms for having the temerity to erect dams.
Trump isn’t a shitposter. He’s not a meme king, or an edgelord. He’s a liar.
From the Central Park Five to Obama’s birth certificate, Trump has never cared about the truth. He spent 2016 calling Hillary Clinton a criminal. He claimed that she had mishandled classified documents and spirited her infamous email server to Ukraine to stymie prosecutors. He said she’d greenlit the sale of a America’s entire uranium supply to the Russians as a favor to a donor. He said that she used her family’s philanthropy as her personal piggybank. And he gleefully reposted stolen emails, knowing that they were being used to flog lies about Democrats molesting and murdering children in a the basement of a DC pizza parlor.
That’s not shitposting. And it wasn’t shitposting when Attorney General Bill Barr investigated Hillary Clinton’s email server through October of 2019, hoping to deliver on Trump’s promise to “Lock her up.” Nor was it shitposting when Trump accused Biden of taking bribes from China and Ukraine, tried to extort the President of Ukraine to announce an investigation of his political rival, and set Barr to find dirt on Hunter Biden.
Those are lies. They’re not jokes. They’re not memes. And they’re not ecstatically true.
It’s ridiculous to say that Democrats lose their right to protest the attack on truth itself because they seize on a harmless meme for a couple of news cycles.
Keep throwing the pies
Democrats have just emerged from what seemed to be a grim march to certain defeat. We finally have the wind at our backs and are fully embracing the strategy of calling out Republicans for being gross and weird. There is no reason on earth to scruple about throwing a harmless rhetorical pie while your opponents are insisting that you kill babies and give porn to toddlers. And there’s certainly no reason to indulge in the pointless purity testing that torpedoed Democrats in 2016.
Embrace the ecstasy of ecstatic truth. Throw the pie. And fuck that couch straight through to November.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
It is an exercise in mental health. At long last.
MAGA: You kill babies and give porn to toddlers!
D VOTERS: yeah? Well your guy humps furniture at IKEA.
MAGA: OK now that's over the top.