J.D. Vance couch rumors aren’t true, but he’s still extremely weird.

The 2024 election is already historic for quite a lot of causes, from an assassination try to a last-minute dropout, with the nation’s first Black lady candidate slated to safe the Democratic nomination. It is usually maybe the primary time in American historical past {that a} vice presidential nominee has been rumored to have had intercourse with a sofa.

Let’s get this out of the best way: J.D. Vance didn’t say he had intercourse with a sofa. The rumor started as a joke on X, when person @rickrudescalves tweeted on July 15: “can’t say for certain however he is perhaps the primary vp choose to have admitted in a ny instances bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two sofa cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).” That the tweet gave the impression to be instantly sourced from Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, satisfied many individuals that it was actually true, but when they have been to learn pages 179 to 181, all they’d discover is Vance speaking about his time at Ohio State College.

So many individuals embraced the shitpost, nonetheless, that it took on a lifetime of its personal, with numerous memes popping up on TikTok and X. “[W]e can not let JD Vance close to the oval workplace,” one individual tweeted with an image of the various sofas contained in the room. One other juxtaposes Vance staring longingly with zoom-ins of leather-based couches whereas Barry White’s “By no means, By no means Gonna Give Ya Up” performs. When the rumor had unfold broadly sufficient for the Related Press to publish a prolonged explainer headlined “No, JD Vance didn’t have intercourse with a sofa,” another person quoted it and referenced the notorious Invoice Clinton denial, writing, “I didn’t have sectional relations.”

It’s widespread for rumors about well-known individuals which can be objectively unfaithful however are humorous or entertaining to go viral (a well-known instance suggests Glee actress Lea Michele secretly can’t learn), whether or not began by intentional trolls, as was the case with Vance and the sofa, or by way of video games of digital phone, the place all context and factuality get left untranslated. More often than not, the rationale the rumors unfold is as a result of individuals genuinely wish to consider them. In Vance’s case, the truth that he’d written a coming-of-age e-book meant {that a} widespread trope (teen boy tries to have intercourse with inanimate object) made some extent of sense, coupled with the truth that he’s espoused some extraordinarily weird views on intercourse and gender.

Curiously, the AP article debunking the rumor has been faraway from its web site — an uncommon determination usually reserved for critical factual or editorial errors. As a spokesperson for the AP instructed Vox by way of e mail, “The story, which didn’t exit on the wire to our prospects, didn’t undergo our customary modifying course of. We’re wanting into how that occurred.” Some nonetheless speculated that maybe the AP’s dedication to fact-checking is such that, even though Vance didn’t write about it in Hillbilly Elegy, there’s no definitive proof he didn’t attempt to have intercourse with a sofa.

What’s more unusual is that the sofa joke was solely one of many three most off-putting issues Vance has been identified for throughout his first 10 days as a VP nominee, and the one one which wasn’t verified as true. After Trump introduced his choose on July 15, a clip from his 2021 look on Tucker Carlson went viral through which he complained that the US was “successfully run” by “a bunch of childless cat girls who’re depressing at their very own lives,” naming Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The whole way forward for the Democrats is managed by individuals with out youngsters, and the way does it make any sense that we’ve turned our nation over to individuals who don’t actually have a direct stake in it,” he mentioned, discounting Harris’s two step-children whom she co-parents with husband Doug Emhoff. Then, Vance tried and didn’t get laughs at a Trump rally by making a clumsy joke about consuming eating regimen Mountain Dew and the way “[Democrats] are going to name that racist.”

Vance already held excessive views on intercourse and gender; he opposes abortion even in instances of rape and incest and has in contrast it to slavery. He has voted towards a invoice guaranteeing entry to IVF and instructed a ban on porn. He known as common baby care “a category struggle towards regular individuals.” He opposes legislating codifying the suitable to homosexual marriage and instructed that individuals in “violent” marriages shouldn’t get divorced.

He’s additionally among the many nebulous group of younger mental conservatives backed by Silicon Valley enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel loosely known as the “New Proper,” whose essential undertaking appears to be making techno-fascist and incel-adjacent concepts appear cool and edgy. On X, the place Vance has spent an excessive amount of time, he at one level adopted a number of white nationalist accounts, lots of whom glorify bodybuilding and fascism whereas selling the Nice Substitute principle. He’s, in different phrases, precisely the kind of man you would think about claiming that sofa intercourse robots have been the start of a wonderful future with out girls.

Stating Vance and Trump’s apparent weirdness now appears to be amongst Democrats’ essential methods in combating the Republican ticket. And it’s working: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was praised for his appearances on MSNBC through which he careworn how “bizarre” the Trump-Vance platform is, whereas the Harris marketing campaign went viral for its assertion on Trump’s Fox Information look, which learn, “is Donald Trump okay?” and listed main takeaways like “Trump is previous and fairly bizarre?” That sort of blunt, call-it-like-you-see-it candor was as soon as a boon to the Trump camp, which delighted in offending “blue-haired” “soy milk” liberals whom they noticed as myopic and out of contact. However after we’ve received somebody like Vance spouting deeply delinquent and weird concepts which can be manner outdoors the realm of regular political discourse, the best response is commonly a easy, “What the hell?”

I don’t actually need to elucidate why everybody believing a joke a few vice presidential candidate having intercourse with a sofa is humorous, it simply is. Very like the memes implying Kamala Harris is a pop icon queening out to “Brat” summer season, “JD Vance fucked a sofa” is simply one other absurdity of the wildest election summer season in current historical past, one the place the reality is a lot crazier than fiction that the fiction begins turning into plausible. No, J.D. Vance didn’t fuck a sofa. However he’ll at all times be remembered because the vice presidential nominee that was as soon as rumored to have fucked a sofa. And that’s fairly bizarre.