Month: August 2024

Disunity Ticket

Mike Rothschild

If you believe a small, mostly-Trump worshipping part of social media, dead bear-planting antivaxxer and brain worm guardian Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump represents a massive blow to the Democrat [sic] Party establishment that will propel Trump to victory as part of a historical unity ticket when all of Kennedy’s voters embrace Trump and vote for him.

If you believe pretty much everyone else who knows anything about polling, elections, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump, or brain worms; then Kennedy dropping out will have almost no effect on the race. It might even hurt Trump in the long term by saddling him with Kennedy’s considerable baggage.

I’m certainly not an expert on presidential polling, but I am something of an expert on brain worms and antivaxxers. So I can safely say that the real effect of RFK Jr. dropping out is almost certainly going to be closer to zero than the 50 STATE LANDSLIDE being predicted on MAGA social media. Numerous polling firms have already given pretty good reasons why Kennedy’s departure won’t boost Trump much, if it all.

Trying to apply trends in niche social media groups to the population as a whole is always tricky. Most people, Democrats and Republicans alike, think Kennedy is an irrelevant weirdo, to the point where the Harris campaign wanted nothing to do with him. There might be some crossover between the two in the health freedom/Tucker Carlson community, full of people who think vaccines are poison, seed oils are worse than Hitler, an all meat diet will keep you alive forever, skin cancer isn’t real, and the medical establishment’s job is to keep you fat and sick. Some might even believe Trump is going to declassify all the files about the assassinations of both JFK and RFK – though, of course, Trump could have blown the doors off the “deep state” conspiracy any time while he was already president, and never did.

The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd is loud, but small – and while they might like both Trump and RFK, they were already overwhelmingly going for Trump. And again, most other people think these folks are creepy weirdos who are obsessed with meat, genitals, seed oils, and assassinations.

So I wanted to focus specifically on the conspiracist community’s reaction to Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump, and why a Trump/Kennedy marriage is much more likely to end in disaster than in triumph. Putting the two together might seem like a thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party establishment, but in reality, Trump and Kennedy are a poor fit, with fan bases that want different things and don’t especially like or trust each other. And Trump and Kennedy themselves were sniping at one another on social media as recently as a few weeks ago. So here’s why a Trump/Kennedy match is more likely to be a disunity ticket than a magical rocket ride for Team Humanity:

Kennedy’s campaign was already toast: Joe Biden dropping out and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris had already taken almost all the wind out of Kennedy’s sailboat, picking up scores of disaffected Democrats who mistakenly believed Robert F. Kennedy’s son was the next great Democratic standard bearer. Kennedy’s polling cratered, and Harris’s rose almost exactly as much. Beyond that, Kennedy’s campaign was broke, and had struggled to attract anything but negative attention for his bizarre antics. There’s just simply not many people in his camp to actually flip from him to Trump, and as we’re about to see, most aren’t going to do it anyway.

Most RFK Jr. voters supported him because he WASN’T Trump: the biggest reason so many people got behind Kennedy in the first place is that he was supposedly fighting back against the idea of the “uniparty” – a Democratic and Republican establishment that had total control over elections, politics, and governing. While he was nominally a Democrat and was trying to get into Democratic primaries, he was much more anti-establishment (or as least as anti-establishment as a Kennedy can be) in general, not conforming to the rigid doctrine of either party and making no secret of his displeasure with what used to be the part of his father and uncle.

And his supporters have acted accordingly – RFK Facebook groups and Reddit threads have been full of Kennedy voters declaring how they feel betrayed, lied to, used, and incredibly confused. Many are already saying they’ll still vote for him (which he had asked voters to do in states where the winner is all but assured), while others are declaring they’ll vote for other third-party candidates, or just not vote. And every single influencer who has proclaimed Trump/Kennedy to be a “unity ticket” was already a Trump supporter, and is basically wishcasting. A few are saying they’ll go over to Trump, but it’s hard to tell if they weren’t already going to vote for Trump anyway, they just liked what RFK had to say about vaccines. Speaking of which…

Operation Warp Speed should be a red line: This, at least to me as someone who follows the “health freedom” community, should be the ultimate deal breaker. Donald Trump has claimed he is the “father of the COVID vaccine,” and has taken credit for the speedy development and availability of COVID vaccines just a year into the pandemic. Truth be told, it’s the only thing he got right about COVID, and it’s probably just because it had a cool name.

Kennedy, on the other hand, has made a career out of selling false and dangerous claims about inoculations, and called the COVID shot “the deadliest vaccine ever created,” among other insane conspiracy theories about the virus being “engineered” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy-funded activist groups were taking vaccine challenges to the Supreme Court as recently as June. The vaccine was becoming a sticking point for Trump supporters who ALSO believe it’s a poison death shot, as evidenced by the many times people like Alex Jones twisted themselves into knots defending Trump while “being concerned” about the shot.

Kennedy is already touting Trump as the candidate who can “make America healthy again.” Given that Trump is one of the most physically unhealthy presidents in American history, that seems unlikely. But ultimately, this should strangle any sort of Trump/Kennedy union. If you back Operation Warp Speed, you can’t support Kennedy, and if you support Kennedy, you can’t back Operation Warp Speed. We all know conspiracy theorists excel at finding space in these sorts of logical nightmares, but if Trump is behind a genocide jab, and Kennedy endorses Trump, what does that say about Kennedy? Nothing good, I’d imagine.

Kennedy has nothing to offer Trump except baggage: given that Kennedy has no real base of supporters other than people who mostly already hate both parties and won’t vote, what value add does he represent? It gets him a little bit of media coverage, and maybe a fraction of his voters, but the cost is going to be high: Trump is now saddled with a ton of baggage he’s not going to want, related to Kennedy’s past drug use, erratic behavior, insane statement, and conspiracy theories. Any major right-wing influencer who had expressed support for Kennedy, most notably Joe Rogan, has already been batted down by angry MAGA believers and browbeaten into submission.

And Trump endorsing Kennedy on social media is raising some really uncomfortable questions about the Vice Presidential candidate he already picked, who has a massive train of weird baggage himself. There’s pretty much no chance Trump admits the Vance pick is a disaster and drops him, and Kennedy would be a massive drag as a VP for Trump anyway, putting an unstable weirdo front and center in a race where there already too many unstable weirdos. So what are we even doing here?

Ultimately, listen to what Kennedy supporters are telling us – they almost entirely hate both parties, hate Big Pharma, hate the vaccine, and hate how a few groups control the media and politics. There’s nothing antiestablishment about Trump at all, other than the fact that Trump supporters think everyone hates them. Maybe Kennedy brings a few people over with his new message of “Make America Healthy Again,” though even that’s as cynical and see-through as it gets. And any Kennedy supporter who believes that Trump would “pay back” Kennedy for his support with a cabinet post is kidding themselves.

So no, there won’t be a “unity ticket” running on making seed oils illegal and nut-sunning mandatory. Trump will trot Kennedy out as a prop a few times, then the uncomfortable questions will start coming, and Trump will pretend he’s never met Kennedy. And the final act of a long, strange, and increasingly tragic story will have been written.

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There is No Couch

Mike Rothschild

JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and Republican nominee for vice president in 2024 did not have sex with a couch and write about it in his book.

Moving past the idea that this is a sentence one has to write in the year 2024, we can start to talk about why anyone thinks he did, why some conservatives and journalists are getting upset about it, and what it all means for the strangest election of all time, or at least the strangest since the election or 2020.

In mid-July (or maybe it was sometime in 1887, it feels like it’s been that long), a Twitter user who goes by @RickRudesCalves tweeted the following:

“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).”

Other than being named after the leg muscles of the late WWE Intercontinental Champion Rick Rude, there’s not much to go on about who this user is. They’ve chosen to stay anonymous, and there’s no reason to violate that. As for the tweet itself, Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy contains no such passage. People went through the book, quickly found that the reference to the latex glove wasn’t in it, and that should have been that.

But here we are nearly two weeks later, and the Vance/Couch story is pretty much everywhere. It’s been referenced on late night TV, It’s the fodder for more memes and jokes on social media than anyone could possibly count. It’s even jumped the firebreak of normie political speeches, something usually reserved for Trumpian insanity like QAnon, with Democratic vice presidential candidate, MN Governor Tim Walz dropping a “get off the couch” reference in his introductory speech at his first rally for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. When the crowd laughed, he exclaimed “see what I did there!”

We did.

Vance hasn’t responded to the couch allegation, except when he sort of did by making a remark about his wife making him sleep on the sofa if he asked her to come up and speak at a rally, which did nothing to defuse the joke because it was neither a denial nor him leaning into it and defanging it. Also, he used the word “sofa” not “couch,” thereby muddying up the wording of the joke, and proving again that MAGA people don’t know anything about comedy.

The Vance/couch meme has gone on for so long and gotten so far that even journalists and more respectable pundits have said it’s time to retire it, that it’s not funny, that passing it around is akin to spreading misinformation, and that it’s generally beneath the dignity of a presidential election to be discussing a candidate having sex with a couch.

The problem with approaching the Vance/couch story as an actual story is that the Vance/couch story isn’t a story. It’s a joke, intended by its creator to be a joke, and passed around as a joke. Imbuing it with serious solemnity as a piece of a disinformation to be batted down actually makes it funnier. Not only is there a viral joke about the potential vice president fucking a couch, people are actually taking it seriously as something that has to specifically be refuted. Other than maybe the first day when the joke was going viral and it wasn’t clear if the passage was in Hillbilly Elegy, nobody making jokes or sharing memes about it actually thinks he did it. It doesn’t even matter at this point, because the joke is out there, it’s still funny, and getting upset about it only makes in funnier.

But why did it go viral if the people spreading it knew it wasn’t true?

Again, I’ll go back it’s funny. The joke works, and the jokes about the joke work.

But more than that, it works because it fits in with what people believe about JD Vance. Because JD Vance is a weird, creepy, vaguely bizarre human being. He’s endorsed tracking women’s periods to determine if they’d have abortions. He completely flipped on his feelings toward Trump, going from calling him “America’s Hitler” in 2016 to serving as his #2 man on the campaign trail. He’s deeply linked to techno-libertarian weirdo Peter Thiel, who is hellbent on making the world less free and democratic. He’s said multiple times that women who don’t have children should have the power of their vote diluted. He wrote a memoir that was self-serving and full of omissions, about a life he doesn’t seem to have lived. He made a bizarre remark about his wife, who is Indian-American as being a good mother even though she “obviously isn’t a white person.” He’s good friends with a strange collection of racist weirdos and white nationalists, and has endorsed the explicitly racist and antisemitic Great Replacement theory.

And his newest thing seems to be following Vice President Harris around on the campaign trail, giving speeches in cities where she’s holding rallies, to the point of approaching Air Force Two and maybe trying to get on it in Wisconsin. The word you’re looking for there is “stalking.”

This is all very weird, creepy stuff that most normal people find repellent. It’s also the affect of a person who maybe, just maybe, would have sex with a couch and write about it proudly in his memoir.

Again, it’s not believable because it’s true. It’s believable because it seems like it could be true about this particular person, based on what you already believe about them. And the people getting upset about the joke, calling it dehumanizing or disinformation, or just grumping about “decorum” are not only missing the point, they are actively making the joke more alive and vital.

What’s worse than being the subject of a joke about fucking a couch? Being upset that someone else is the subject of a joke about fucking a couch.

Right wing social media has been full of such rumors and myths and conspiracy theories for years. They range from disgusting conspiracy theories like the Sandy Hook shooting being a hoax to transphobic nonsense like Michelle Obama secretly being a man. Many of the same people who extol Trump have spread these rumors as fact, maybe because they believe them, or maybe because enough other people believe them that it’s advantageous to spread them. They’ve been dining off this memetic warfare for years, and now that it’s being volleyed back to them, they can’t handle it.

With the shoe on the other foot, and the Trump campaign unable to shake the label “weird,” these same guys are melting down, flailing in every direction looking for their own version of the couch joke, and failing every time because none of them are funny.

They’re calling Walz “Tampon Tim” because as governor of Minnesota, he signed a law mandating free menstrual supplies in public school. That’s a knee-slapper, for sure. They’re spreading insane conspiracy theories about Harris’s rally crowds being CGI, or echoing Trump’s unhinged claims that President Biden wants to “take back” his candidacy. They’re making up nonsensical nicknames for Kamala Harris that literally nobody other than Donald Trump thinks are funny. And Donald Trump doesn’t think anything is funny.

The couch cope has gotten so bad that it’s led to a pathetic attempt by right wing influencers to create a “Vance/Couch” meme for Walz, with the former president’s equally weird son spreading a limp rumor that the governor was caught drinking horse semen. It didn’t catch on, and the entire attempt smacks of “I know you are but what am I.”

You can’t make something like the Vance/couch joke happen. It has to happen on its own, with a unique combination of humor, virality, and believability. The couch joke was funny, it was written with a fake citation that gave it depth, and most importantly, it was about a guy who you could totally see doing it. And Vance’s lame attempts to run with the joke or the label of “weird” are only making it worse.

Because there is no couch. There is only a very creepy vice presidential candidate who you can totally see bragging about going to pound town with a couch.

The jokes and memes should not let up. Democrats should do more of them, bigger, and bolder. People upset about the joke should stop whining about it, because it makes the joke funnier. And JD Vance, stay the hell away from my sectional.