Author: Mike Rothschild

Writer and researcher specializing in conspiracy theories, politics, history, and fringe beliefs.

What Will the 2024 Big Lie Look Like?

Mike Rothschild

No matter the outcome of the 2024 election, Donald Trump won’t accept it. If he wins, he’ll claim he won more states and votes than he actually did. We know he’ll do this because he already did it in 2016. And if he loses, he’ll claim he won more states and votes than he actually did. We know he’ll do this because he did it in 2020, and hasn’t shut up about it since, even claiming in the recent debate with Kamala Harris that his admission that he “lost the election by a whisker” was “sarcasm.”

So no matter what happens, Trump will set himself up as the victim of a vast conspiracy to cheat and defraud him. But what will the 2024 stolen election industry look like if Trump loses to the vice president? Who will be its major players? How will it take root in the fever dream imagination of the MAGA movement, and how long will it take? And who will be the unfortunate victim of their unhinged and violent conspiracy theories?

Obviously, we won’t know most of the answers to this until it already happens. But there are many reasons to believe that whatever form the Big Lie of 2024 takes, it will look somewhat different and have at least some different players than that of 2020. Of course, the optimal outcome would be that Harris wins so convincingly that other than a few Trump bitter-enders, most of the influencers and election officials who pushed the 2020 Big Lie will decide it’s not worth it and move on. Ideally, there would be no Big Lie.

But that’s probably not going to happen. So here are some ways the stolen election discourse of 2024 might be different from 2020:

Donald Trump won’t be in power

This is the most obvious change from 2020 to 2024. Taking power is harder than keeping power, and Trump doesn’t actually have any legal power right now. Yes, he commands a cult of personality that has millions of members who will be angry and spoiling for a fight should he lose the election. But the Stop the Steal movement was hatched and plotted at the White House. It had the force of the office of the president behind it. Trump had the right as president to speak to the rallygoers on January 6th. And if he wanted to, he could have invoked the Insurrection Act and ordered armed soldiers into the streets.

Other than Secret Service protection, Trump is a private citizen right now. He can’t call up the National Guard, he can’t declare martial law, he can’t use federal officials as weapons, and he can’t just jump on the phone with anyone he wants and expect them to do his bidding. Trump can complain all he wants, he can rally armed MAGA lunatics to DC, he might even be able to benefit from sympathetic officials at some level – but ultimately, he has the same official power that most of the rest of us do, which is nothing.

Nobody will be surprised

America had never had a transfer of power from one party to another disrupted the way it was in 2020. When Trump disputed the results and his supporters started the legwork of trying to find which states had cheated, it was genuinely shocking for people who hadn’t been paying attention to conspiracist movements and media, because it was so novel. And Democrats were slow to react, feeling like much of the complaining was sour grapes or designed to make money for influencers. They were, of course. But they were also a concerted effort to throw out the votes of the people – which hadn’t happened in modern American history.

This time, nobody will be surprised. We will all be able to see it coming, know exactly what Trump’s inner circle will be doing, and try to put roadblocks in front of them. The Harris campaign has already added a slew of top-tier election lawyers to prepare for the bogus audits, phony lawsuits, attempts to get fraudulent slates of “alternate electors” sent to Congress, challenges to voter rolls, and intimidation from Trump loyalists. Dozens of lawsuits have already been filed either challenging eligibility or fighting back at those challenges, and Democrats are doing well in them. Nobody will be surprised this time when the peaceful transfer of power is threatened.

States where stolen election claims were loudest were flips in 2020

Looking back at 2020, the loudest outcries of fraud came in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. While there were also efforts to overturn the election in states like Colorado and Nevada, those five were the focus of more lawsuits, audits, conspiracy theories, and threats than any others. Why? because they all flipped from Republican to Democratic. Nobody should be shocked if those states go for Harris the same way they went for Biden. The only state with a real chance of flipping to Democrats this time is North Carolina – a state that’s already trending away from Republicans and where the GOP is running a Holocaust denying lunatic in a gubernatorial race they’re losing by as many as ten points, according to current polls. Certainly there will be audits and lawsuits and bellyaching if Harris wins North Carolina, but it’s not going to be shocking.

Polls are tightening in a few other Republican-dominated states, including Florida, but it’s unlikely they’ll go for Harris. If they do, expect a slew of false claims and conspiracy theories.

Many prominent stolen election advocates were ruined by lawsuits or indictments

Despite all of the noise and chaos of the Big Lie, the Stop the Steal movement really didn’t accomplish anything. It made some influencers a lot of money, but far more of them were ruined by it – and Trump still left office.

Close to 1,400 January 6th rioters have been charged in connection with the insurrection, with hundreds more likely to be charged. Many have gone to prison, and some still are there. Dozens of others, including Donald Trump himself, have been indicted for election fraud, tampering with voting machines, hacking, fake elector schemes, and other Stop the Steal related crimes. People have lost their jobs and their careers over their devotion to this dead-end movement. And many of the figureheads and funders of the movement have been financially ruined. Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones, and Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft have all declared bankruptcy. Mike Lindell is broke, while Fox News had to pay out three quarters of a billion dollars in damages to Dominion Voting System, and several other defamation lawsuits have settled as well. John Eastman and Lin Wood were disbarred for their roles in election fraud schemes, with many other attorneys who took on doomed election fraud cases sanctioned.

How many of them will take the risk this time? What news network will platform insane conspiracy theories about 2024 voting machine companies knowing years of litigation likely await them? What lawyer will file a bogus lawsuit in the service of Trump knowing they might lose their license because of it? Some will, of course. And there will likely be new Stop the Steal acolytes in 2024, looking for a chance at money and right wing fame by taking up Trump’s lost cause. But it seems reasonable that some of the figures who tried to undo Biden’s win in 2020 won’t want to take the professional and personal risk this time around – or if they want to, they won’t be able to.

Trump will be a two-time loser

Ultimately, the Stop the Steal movement was driven by the certainty that Donald Trump never loses, and when he does, it’s because someone else cheated. He’d spent a year preparing the ground to contest losing the election due to supposed fraud, cheating, dead voters, illegal immigrants voting, massive numbers of fake mail-in ballots, and a conspiracy by the Democratic Party. The QAnon movement had spent 2020 doing the same thing, and even using the same reasons. But if Trump loses again, he’ll have dropped (or been cheated out of) two elections in a row. At some point, you can only get fooled so many times. For a movement that extols winning, they will be a movement that can’t win anything.

Finally, Trump himself is diminished, a rambling and shambolic figure who can’t hold a crowd’s attention, can’t debate, can’t communicate clearly, and who is losing support even from fellow Republicans. His stories are boring and rote, his nicknames and attempts at humor are pathetic, and his entire affect is one of a man slowing down and losing the ability to command an audience. Stop the Steal was a concerted effort to put a losing president back into office using extralegal means and violence. The second time around, a lot of people just might not bother trying to prop up a guy who is so clearly on the downslope of life. Some will, of course. There are always those who prefer the park bench and the cyanide capsule to surrender and humiliation when the dictator falls. But it’s entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that much of the GOP will be glad to be rid of Trump – even if they can’t publicly admit it.

If that’s how it all plays out, we’ll all be better for it.

Busy Days at the Crap Factory

Mike Rothschild

To be on social media in the runup to the 2024 is to be engulfed in an ever-expanding extended universe of conspiracy theories, moral panics, culture war minutiae, disgusting accusations, and slow-rolling public breakdowns. And all of it is pushed by a rotating cast of grifters, influencers, pundits, politicians, and professional insane people. Many of them are being directly or indirectly paid by Russia, and they are designed to both terrify you and sell you various Trump-branded products.

Think of it as a giant factory that makes two things: things to be afraid of and things you can buy to deal with the things to be afraid of.

And the factory is busy. At this moment, right wing social media is in absolute lather about a couple of phony stories about Haitian immigrants in Ohio either killing and eating someone’s cat or grabbing random ducks and murdering them. There are memes all over nutjob twitter, and the insane story has moved all the way up the conservative grifter ladder to the point where vice presidential candidate JD Vance – no stranger to being the subject of false accusations – is sharing it. Obviously, they’re pinning the whole thing on Kamala Harris, because as vice president she’s made the horrific mistake of advocating for the humane treatment of Haitian refugees resettling in the US. What a monster.

The claim started off as two separate stories, one involving a random person at a city council meeting claiming he saw Haitians kidnapping (ducknapping?) local wild fowl and barbecuing them, the other a bizarre story about a Black woman being arrested for publicly killing and eating a neighborhood cat. From there, they got run through the crap machine to become two parts of a single story – one of Kamala-sponsored Haitians rampaging through Ohio killing and eating animals with impunity.

The story is absolute nonsense. The ducknapping hasn’t been proven to have taken place, and local police have said they have no evidence of it. And the cat-murder, while real, had nothing to do with a Haitian immigrant, and the woman involved is American – as proven by her voter registration records.

Nothing about this is true. It’s not even new to blame migrants for allegedly killing and/or eating pets. Almost exactly two years ago, not coincidentally right before the midterm election, Fox News breathlessly ran stories about migrants murdering pets in a Texas/Mexico border town – stories that local law enforcement confirmed were bogus. And every so often moral panics about Asian immigrants killing and eating American dogs “because they don’t know better” would make headlines, often turning isolated incidents into cultural-wide assaults on American values.

Fortunately, these sorts of folk devil outbreaks tend to sputter out as quickly as they arise. It’s like that by next week, this entire ridiculous story will have been forgotten. What’s not so fortunate is that it will have been replaced by something else just as horrible and racist and stupid. Probably multiple things.

Here is just a tiny sampling of the moral panics and conspiracy theories coming from the Fox News Cinematic Universe over the last few years, involving any number of absolutely dreadful and not real things like:

“Democratic states are passing laws that allow doctors to execute newborn babies if the mother decides to have a ninth-month abortion”

“Schools are performing gender transition surgery on minors without parents knowing it.”

“The state is going to come into my house and rip out my gas stove.“

“Heavily armed Venezuelan gangs are taking over entire apartment complexes and the liberal woke governments are just letting them do it – and your block is next!”

“You will be forced to drive an electric vehicle after the government mandates the confiscation of all gas powered cars.”

And on and on. These are just a few, if I go back even further, I could find dozens of examples of culture war nightmares and imaginary feuds that the crap factory has churned out, popularized, then watched disappear. Over the past few years, the list of things the far right has hated, feared, boycotted, demanded be stopped, cancelled, or demonized has gotten longer than a CVS receipt. Bud Light, the NFL, the Dr. Suess estate, Taylor Swift, Barbie, Black hobbits, Kathy Griffin, the green M&M putting pants on, Netflix, rainbow endcaps at Target, Starbucks, the hate and fear and panic never stop.

Some of them are laughable, like when Sean Hannity fans all decided that they had to destroy their expensive Keurig machines because of something about Roy Moore. But others are deadly serious, and two months before what promises to be one of the most contentious and potentially violent elections in US history, we have to err on the side of serious.

Like most conspiracy theories in general, culture war moral panics aren’t exactly made up, but based on real things that are then distorted and twisted into something totally unrecognizable. If something is entirely fake, it’s easy to poke a hole in it. But if it’s 2% real and 98% fake, then the believer can always rely on the 2% that’s real and demand “oh, so you’re saying {fill in the blank} isn’t real!?! DEBATE ME, BRO!” So many of these things have some foundation in reality, but not in the way far right media is claiming.

No, Haitian immigrants are not eating pets. But they’re coming to the US in larger numbers than some people are comfortable with, and provide the same easy scapegoat for racists that immigrants have always provided, from the Irish and Germans of the Civil War to Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. And in doing so, they’re taking dangerous journeys to come to a nation where many people don’t want them, to do the jobs those people don’t want to do.

No, doctors who provide abortion are not murdering newborn babies because the mom decided she’d rather keep living the single life. But they are providing a necessary and sometimes life saving form of medical treatment at their own legal and physical peril, while also helping council parents who have to make the unimaginable decision to remove life support for a newborn who can’t survive on their own. And in the incredibly rare cases where a doctor has killed a newborn baby, they’ve been prosecuted for murder.

No, schools are not doing transition surgery on kids, but LGBTQ kids are finally getting the support they’ve needed from trusted adults as they navigate an incredibly difficult stage of their lives. At best, the of schools performing “gender reassignment surgery” was cooked up in Donald Trump’s brain based on a 2024 law passed in California that doesn’t require schools to notify parents if a child has changed their pronouns, not their gender.

No, the feds aren’t taking away your gas stove at gunpoint, some states are mandating new buildings be built with alternative forms of heating that are less damaging to the environment. A federal law to mandate more efficient gas stove construction was blocked by Republicans, because obviously.

No, you will not be “forced” to drive an electric vehicle, some states are mandating large percentages of new cars be built to powered by electricity, but gas cars will still be made, driven, and sold. The federal “phase-out” of gas-powered vehicles was limited to half of all new cars and trucks by 2030, while California’s mandate of 100% of all new cars being electric vehicles by 2035 is teetering. Also, I thought all these people loved Elon Musk and wanted their own Cybertrucks.

And no, “Migrant gangs” aren’t executing armed takeovers of apartment buildings, the tenants in those buildings are speaking out against the inhumane conditions their slumlord building owners are keeping them in. And as a result, the landlord has agreed to give up control of the building and pay substantial fines for the decrepit condition of the complex.

The right wing crap factory is going to be a very busy place over the next few months. And even after the election, no matter who wins, the crap will still be made. There will always be fearmongering, always be a population in need of it, and crap makers ready to sell it to them.

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The Golden Carrot

Mike Rothschild

I have spent way too much time thinking, writing, and talking about QAnon. And one of the reasons it took off in the way it did was that it offered an explanation – not for something that was happening, like most conspiracy theories, but for something that wasn’t happening.

Most conspiracy theories work because they attract people out of power looking for who actually has it. But QAnon was the opposite, it gave the extant most powerful person on earth – President Trump – even more power in the form of a secret military intelligence operation that would, on his command, go into action and rid America of all the evil doers. But it had to be done in a certain way: in secret, following certain rules, and only once certain conditions were set. Of course, those conditions were never actually set. The pieces were never in place. So Trump and Q never actually did rid America of all the evil doers. That seems like it should matter, but it never does.

When Trump lost the election, the appeal of QAnon as a “secret plot carried out at the highest level” disappeared immediately and Q stopped posting. But mostly, Q believers were so distracted by the stolen election discourse that it didn’t matter. How could Trump lose if Q was real? Why did the pedophiles and wreckers not get swept up if Trump was in power? Nobody asked. The two things just didn’t fit together.

In conspiracy world, things don’t ever actually need to fit. There’s always another great hope, a golden carrot to be dangled in front of the desperate digital soldiers that will reward all their patience and sacrifice. All those hours spent researching, those holidays spent alone eating baloney sandwiches while your family gets together and enjoys the seasons have to mean something – right??

So it’s no surprise that Trump has spent a great deal of campaign time promising various podcasters that he would finally reveal all of the nation’s secrets and the truth about the vast conspiracies at the heart of American life – but only if he gets another term.

Trump has recently promised to release a “client list” belonging to Jeffrey Epstein, something he describes as “UFO footage” along with proof of alien life, all the “remaining files” about the JFK assassination, and all the secrets of the US intelligence agencies as far as other assassinations goes – including the one he nearly fell victim to. These are the big secrets, the ones that will destroy the deep state and usher in the new era of peace and freedom.

Naturally, conspiracyland was ecstatic about Trump’s pledge.

These sorts of promises are incredibly alluring to people who base their lives around uncovering “secret knowledge” that “they don’t want us to know about.” And it’s not hard to see why. What could be more important that whether aliens exist and have been to our planet? What secret would be more powerful than at long last revealing who really killed JFK? It’s the final payoff for everything they’ve been working toward for years or decades.

In fact, these secrets are so compelling that one has to wonder why Trump didn’t do any of this in his first term. Why do you need to tell people all the hidden truths you’ll reveal in your second term when you didn’t reveal any hidden truths when you had the chance? What changed from then to now – other than needing to scrape together enough votes to win a few swing states?

This is the essence of how QAnon works, and why it doesn’t stand up to critical scrutiny in any way. If the Q team was going to sweep up the deep state and save the millions of children being trafficked through their secret tunnels, why didn’t they, you know, do it? Why wait so long that you lose the power to enact these changes? Isn’t the blood of every child who is sacrificed on you, not the deep state?

If the “Trump reveals all the secrets of the Kennedy assassination” rap feels familiar, it’s because he already released a bunch of JFK files in 2017. Many offered intriguing depth to the swirl of insanity around the assassination, but didn’t change the “official story” in any way. Trump, of course, claimed when asked about the partial declassification that he wanted to release even more files, but was blocked by those evil dunderheads in the CIA. But he’ll definitely do it this time.

“It’s going to be done early on,” he told the Silicon Valley-themed podcast All-In. “A lot of people want to see that and whatever it may say – I won’t say it, I have an idea – but whatever it is it will be very interesting for people to see and we’re going to have to learn from it.”

It’s always something, right?

But why is it always something? Trump was the president. He could just declassify whatever he wanted. He’s already claimed he can declassify documents telepathically, just by thinking about it. Why not JFK? Why not Epstein? Why not UFOs? What’s the problem? And why do none of his followers hold him to any sort of standard. If he’d been sitting on these explosive secrets for years and didn’t reveal them, isn’t he just as bad as those who decided to keep them secret in the first place?

The problem with prophetic conspiracy theories is that eventually, something either has to happen or you need to come up with a convincing reason why it didn’t. Otherwise, people start to lose faith in the prophecy. Really talented gurus are good at coming up with such excuses – the UFO didn’t land because the aliens questioned our commitment, the Great Flood was delayed because I read one of the numbers wrong, etc. Q didn’t bother – whoever was making the posts just stopped posting. There was no need for any other cryptic riddles. Likewise, Trump hasn’t needed to come up with a reason he didn’t do any of this the first time, because nothing matters to him and his fans. He’ll do it now, they reason. This time it’s different.

So he can claim he’ll reveal all the secrets that he could have revealed at any time during his four years in office. This time, he’ll really do it. The pieces will all be in place. The timing will be right.

Unless it’s not. Maybe he’ll need a third term to really get all the files out.

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.