The Weekly Sift

Trump’s VP pick has had an inauspicious debut.

Let me say this right up front: In no part of Hillbilly Elegy did J. D. Vance confess to having sex with a couch. In fact, we have no reliable reports of Vance sexually abusing any piece of furniture. Ever. He has not been banned from Ikea. The clip of him singing a love song to a couch is fake; the lip movements don’t even match the audio. If you search on the #CouchHumper hashtag, all you’ll get is misinformation. Are we clear on that?

But somehow this week the mythical Vance/couch tryst became one of the funniest examples in the history of framing. It started on social media, with a tweet providing exact page numbers for the confessional excerpt. If you didn’t happen to have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy handy, how could you check? Surely nobody would just make something like that up, would they? [1]

Largely because of that specific referencing, the rumor began to take off — I even believed it myself at first — to the point that it needed to be debunked. So AP published a fact-check (since removed) which it headlined: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”

As any fan of George Lakoff knows, the first law of debunking misinformation is: Don’t put the lie in the headline. The reasoning is simple: Directly negating a frame invokes the frame. In Lakoff’s famous example, “Don’t think of an elephant” invariably makes you think of an elephant. Until this week, the most famous real-life violation of Lakoff’s rule was Richard Nixon’s immortal denial “I’m not a crook.” If you had never before considered whether Nixon might be a crook, you did then.

Well, lots of people who don’t delve deeply into social media, and so hadn’t heard the rumor at all, do read AP headlines. And they immediately thought: J. D. Vance? A couch? What’s up with that? And then, even though they didn’t have time to read the article, they wondered what exactly was wrong about the rumor. Did Vance just flirt with the couch? Did the couch misinterpret his intentions? Maybe he was napping on the couch and had a wet dream. That’s embarrassing, but it’s innocent; it could happen to any young man.

A few people who made the early couch memes may have believed the claim was true, but before long everybody knew it was invented. And yet the jokes just kept rolling in a tone of OK-it’s-false-but-I’m-having-too-much-fun. [2]

I am still looking for a social psychologist who can explain why this has been so enjoyable. But in the meantime I’ll take a stab at it. I think the message here is: “See? We can lie too.”

Democrats are sick to death of Trump and his minions pushing lies that they know are lies, like that the 2020 election was stolen, or Kamala isn’t a citizen, or Democrats support murdering babies after they’re born, or other countries have sent their prison population to the US, and hundreds of others. Mike Johnson is a lawyer, so he has to know that his Harris-will-have-trouble-getting-on-the-ballot claims are bogus, but he makes them anyway.

We’re sick to death of answering stuff like that with facts, only to watch the lie propagate in spite of the facts. So you want to lie? Fine. Our lie is funnier and more viral than yours.

I’ll be interested to see whether people start consciously using it that way, responding to right-wing BS with Vance-and-the-couch claims, and, when challenged, saying, “Oh, I thought you had started a lying contest.”

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Another reason we’re all being so merciless with the couch jokes is that other stuff emerged this week: stuff Vance really did say that personally insulted millions of us, and left us feeling like “I dare you to say that to my face, you couch-humper.”

In one, he disparaged women who decide not to have children (like my wife) as

childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too

In another, he proposed that people without children (like me) should have less voting power than parents, because we “don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country”.

How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

Wow. What a judgmental, clueless thing to say. J. D. Vance has never met me, but he’s sure that I don’t care about the future, that I couldn’t possibly care like he does, because my only connection to the future is through my sister’s kids and grandkids, the children of my close friends, the kids in my church community, the students I’ve taught, the coworkers I’ve mentored, and my membership in the human race. Kamala Harris is even a stepmother to her husband’s children, but she’s one of the childless cat ladies Vance called out by name. Apparently, step-parenting doesn’t count either.

Another childless person he called out by name was Pete Buttigieg, whose adopted twins are nearly three now. But at the time

Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children. [3]

In an interview Sunday with Jen Psaki, Pete offered a more abstract perspective on Vance’s attitude.

He seems to view everything in terms of the negative. … I think a lot of us who have had kids would certainly say that that experience opens you to a new way of thinking about the world. But he doesn’t talk about it in those terms. He talks about how anybody who doesn’t have kids is less than, that their perspectives have less value, which is a really strange take.

Precisely. If Vance wants to wax poetic about how parenthood has changed him for the better, I’m happy for him. But if he wants to project onto me the benighted mindset he had before becoming a father, or (based on that projection) assign me a correspondingly lesser role in the nation we share, I’ve got a problem with that.

And let’s be clear: Projection is the key concept here. Vance’s attack is actually a confession. He doesn’t care about the future beyond how it affects his own biological descendants. Caring about other people’s kids, or about your community more broadly, is so foreign to him that he can’t even imagine how people like me can do it.

Such a me-and-mine worldview perfectly explains his position on climate change. If he can leave his own children well fixed by selling out to fossil fuel companies, that sounds pretty good to him, even if it condemns everyone else’s kids to an apocalyptic hellscape.

His attempts to clean this up only doubled down.

I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true.

But he wasn’t being “sarcastic”. He was being an asshole. He has ignorantly insulted me and millions of people like me, and when it was pointed out to him, he wouldn’t apologize. So the insult stands.

Do you want an asshole to be vice president of United States?

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But OK, let’s put aside the insults and assholery and look at what Vance was proposing, which is — let’s face it — just a dumb unworkable idea: Children get votes, which their parents get to cast. So if Mom and Dad disagree — it is OK for a woman to disagree with her husband, isn’t it? — which one gets to cast the kids’ votes? If Mom and Dad separate with joint custody, where do the votes go? And think about those stereotypic welfare moms that Republicans love to scapegoat, the ones who keep having kids just to get more welfare. Do they get extra votes? If I’m an undocumented immigrant, but my “anchor baby” is an American citizen, can I cast her vote?

The whole idea is stupid. Clearly Vance just says stuff without thinking it through.

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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz burnished his Harris-VP credentials by applying a term that has stuck: weird. If you want to say that Vance’s ideas are scary or stupid, I can’t argue with you. But the main thing they are is weird. Here’s an example of the far-out scenarios that hatch in Vance’s mind, and the kinds of things he justifies with these bizarre fantasies. [4]

Let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion … let’s say in 2024. And then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. … And if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? … I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.

Federal response like what exactly? Banning pregnant women from crossing state lines? Making women take pregnancy tests before getting on interstate flights? What? Suppose a pregnant Ohio State student flies home to California for Thanksgiving and miscarries while she’s there. How can she prove she didn’t get an abortion? What happens to her?

I’m sure Vance’s musings would sound perfectly normal in the Republic of Gilead. But not here. In America, they’re weird.

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[1] Apparently, people have been making stuff like this up for a long time. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson told this story about Lyndon Johnson.

The race was close and Johnson was getting worried.  Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.  “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied.  “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

[2] Rep. Jack Kimble is often amusing, but he’s not a real congressman. California’s 54th district does not exist.

[3] Pete is being generous. Yes, Vance couldn’t have known at the time that Buttigieg and his husband were having trouble adopting. But he knows now, and hasn’t offered any kind of apology.

I haven’t found any direct statement of Vance’s views on same-sex marriage, or adoptions by same-sex couples, but he opposed the Respect for Marriage Act that would have codified marital rights for same-sex couples, and many of his “pro-family” statements use phrases that are also used by anti-gay hate groups. So it’s possible, even likely, that Vance not only thinks Pete should have second-class citizenship, but that he opposes any attempt by gays and lesbians to qualify for first-class citizenship by getting married and adopting children.

[4] Lots of Republican proposals are justified by similarly bizarre fantasies. We have to ban late-term abortions, for example, because of the possibility that some woman might carry a healthy fetus for nearly nine months, and then choose an abortion at the last minute on a whim. Who does that?

Or we need to ban trans athletes from high school and college sports, because women’s programs could be overrun by men pretending to be women. How many trans athletes do they think are out there? Are they dominating any sport? Is any women’s program in America being overrun by them? Can Republicans name even one trans athlete whose motivation is anything like what they’ve described?