JD Vance and the Couch

ok, it's hilarious.

Sometimes, things on the internet aren’t true. Sometimes, the untrue things on the internet are hilarious and so believable that they become news cycles. Not major news cycles — they’re not going to dominate primetime cable — but, if you’re online, you’re following their trajectory.

And, again, we’re in one of those wonderful news cycles. The internet is saying, well, the internet is saying that JD Vance fucked a couch. It started with a Twitter post, of course.

Now, it’s not true that JD Vance ever fucked a couch. Or, maybe he did. But it’s not true that he ever wrote about the sectional encounter in Hillbilly Elegy. The Associated Press had to retract a story titled “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch” because how do you fact-check that? They can’t prove that JD Vance never fucked a couch.

The problem of course is that JD Vance is really weird. He seems like the kind of guy who might fuck a couch. And Hillbilly Elegy seems like the kind of book where he might admit it. The whole thing is fiction-stranger-than-truth. There are memes for days.

It reminds you of the Gorilla Channel news cycle. Do you remember that? When somebody posted a made-up excerpt from the Michael Wolff book and conned everybody into believing that Donald Trump had a special channel that just showed gorillas in combat.

It took a while for us to climb out of the Gorilla Channel narrative and, once again, we’re there again. We’re at this weird inflection point where everybody knows that JD Vance never admitted to fucking a couch. And yet, does that matter? It’s a personality assessment and what better way to describe a Silicon Valley TradCath than to say he seems like the kind of guy who might fuck his furniture.

The Republicans, obviously, have to ignore this and pretend it’s a nonissue, which it is. JD Vance can’t come out (presumably with a couch) and say that he doesn’t fornicate with his furniture. Everybody who knows about the couch incident is online. And everybody online has already made up their political minds. It’s like the first thing the internet does to you anymore — drives you into a political camp. Maybe it’ll grow into the real world, not widely, but a few isolated incidents of Fox News boomer grand-dads telling their grandkids how great JD Vance is and their grandsons reminding them that, sure grandad, but he fucked a couch.

I don’t know what the Democrats should do with this new cycle (probably nothing) and I know it’s not particularly ethical, but wouldn’t it be great for Democratic talking-heads to wink-and-nod at it. For them to mention, off-hand on live cable that all the couches in the Naval Observatory are already lined with plastic.