This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Today I’d like to discuss the most controversial topic currently plaguing the zeitgeist: did JD Vance have a romantic rendezvous with a piece of furniture?
JD Vance is, as you probably all know by now, Donald Trump’s choice as his new Vice President, since the old Vice President probably didn’t want to come back due to President Donald Trump trying to have him murdered. On a side note, that is the sentence I would say if I had the chance to go back in time to tell myself as a child one thing. You know, just to fuck with her head.
Vance is also the author of the hit book “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir in which he pretends to come from Appalachia and wants us all to know that they’re poor because they’re lazy and drink sugary juices and stuff.
That book was a HUGE hit among conservatives (for seeming to support what they’ve been saying about poor people for a century) and also among liberals (for seeming to provide a tidy explanation for why poor white people like Trump). However, it turns out that it was one of those books everyone put on their shelf because it was trendy, but they didn’t actually bother to read it. Thanks to that, Xitter user @rickrudescalves went viral with this shitpost:
“can’t say for sure but [Vance] 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).”
This is a near-perfect example of a shitpost: the ridiculous accusation, bolstered by the formal citation with the page numbers noted, from an otherwise unknown account? Chef’s kiss.
Now, I know that earlier this week I posted a video in which I explicitly call out that Democrats should NOT spread misinformation and idiotic conspiracy theories in order to compete with Republicans. But shitposting falls into a bit of a grey area, for me. Depending on where you are on the internet, “shitpost” can have a few different meanings. In this case, I’m referring to shitposting as a seemingly low-effort post that posits something ridiculous or confusing with relatively little explanation or context that would help the average reader understand whether it is ironic or not.
Shitposting is an extremely effective way of derailing serious conversation, and far right 4channers and Redditors used it to good effect in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton in 2016. And that sucked, as a progressive who very much did not want Trump elected.
But still, I think of shitposting as distinct from the spreading of disinformation, though the two can often overlap. For instance, way back in 2003, long before “shitposting” was even a word, Dan Savage held a contest for people to come up with a new definition for “santorum,” which up until then was simply the last name of noted anti-gay piece of shit Rick Santorum, a senator from Pennsylvania. The winning definition was “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”
Savage created a few websites, like “spreadingsantorum.com,” and people gamed Google to push it to the top of the search results. News agencies spread “santorum” even further, and it became a national story. Santorum was very, very mad about all this, and not for nothing but he got demolished in his next election and has not held public office since.
This was all very silly, and was in no way a substantive critique on Rick Santorum’s many policy positions–not even a substantive critique on his opposition to same sex marriage. Not only was it very effective, though, but in my opinion it was ethical discourse. Opposition to same sex marriage was and is an inane policy position that does not deserve serious debate. It deserves mockery. Any person advocating against same sex marriage deserves mockery. And that’s something that shitposting is very, very good for.
As you may know, for pretty much every video I make, even those that veer hard into politics, I search the scientific literature for guidance on where to take the topic. And in this case, I was surprised to find a decent number of papers about shitposting. But the vast majority seemed mostly concerned with its use by the far right to derail discussion, attract younger men into extremist communities, and shift the overton window to make bigoted and hateful ideas more palatable. And that’s fair, because that has been the most important shitposting story of the past decade.
But as I’ve argued before in regards to doxxing, the use of a tactic to do immoral things doesn’t mean the tactic itself is at its heart immoral. A punch is not moral or immoral: a mother punching her child is immoral, while Buzz Aldrin punching the moon-landing-denier Bart Sibrel is fucking awesome.
So I was happy to find some research that looked at shitposting from a more neutral standpoint, like “Shitposting as public pedagogy” published last year in Curriculum Inquiry by Dr. Peter Woods, Assistant Professor in Learning Sciences at the University of Nottingham and, quote, “avid shitposter.” Woods explicitly calls out his colleagues for being too focused on shitposting as a fascist tool, when he has observed its efficacy for a range of political ends. For this paper, he specifically looks at two prominent shitposters on Xitter: dril and Sunny Delight. Yes, the God of Weird Twitter, and the brand that sells orange sugar water that I hear hillbillies love.
Sunny D is held up as an example of how shitposting has been used by corporations in order to sell shitty products to us, something I have been annoyed at for forever so I really appreciated that. Like, I cannot tell you how annoyed I was with friends of mine talking about how they were going to buy Steak-umms because their social media manager decided to come out against election misinformation. It’s dystopian and I hate it and no, I will not be engaging with comments on this video that whine “well at least it’s better than other brands’ advertising” just no, not today, Satan.
While I enjoyed the section of this paper eviscerating Sunny D’s viral shitpost “as a form of public pedagogy (that) reinscribes extant power relations by further legitimizing the corporation and marginalizing those managing mental health issues,” for now I’d rather focus on the section about dril. Woods points to dril’s famous “corncob” post as an example of a shitpost that may have actually increased media literacy:
“The fact that dril’s post does not actually reference any specific debate (much less any specific debater), combined with the copious amount of typos and the over-the-top absurdity of the corncob imagery, focuses the audience’s attention on the rhetorical act of refusing to admit that one has lost an argument,” he writes.
“Since dril first posted the tweet in 2011, “corncobbing” has become a commonly used form of online shorthand for losing an argument with bravado that social media users often refer to when engaging with politicians through their social media accounts (Covucci, Citation2021; Kelly, Citation2021; Tait, Citation2017). Beyond merely being a descriptive term, users will often respond in droves to politicians engaging this debate tactic with references to the original tweets (both through written responses and images of corncobs). In doing so, social media users reverse the typical directionality of political messaging, thus engaging the turbulent and pedagogical nature of shitposting. Rather than solely receiving the messages of politicians, the greater population now has a tool that can challenge the posturing of public figures and produce a counternarrative through this public pedagogy. The original tweet and its subsequent aesthetic pedagogy then provides enough turbulence to produce a (admittedly small) shift in social media’s online political discourse that has lasted for over a decade.”
Woods goes on to point out that fascists and far-right conservatives have ALSO used “corncobbing,” as when Mitch McConnel deployed it against AOC when she was trying to have a substantive conversation about why the Republican-led Senate would force a vote on climate change without public debate, thus exemplifying how far-right groups construct an oppressive public pedagogy through the “use [of] transgressive, liberatory, postmodern language, to promote anti-modern, racist, conspiratorial ideas” in the form of shitposting (Tebaldi, Citation2021, p. 206).”
Woods concludes that shitposting must be studied not as simply far-right propaganda, but as a tool that can achieve a number of political ends as well as increasing media literacy in fun and unexpected ways.
And so with that in mind, let’s turn back to the shitpost that sent me down this rabbit hole: JD Vance once fucked a sofa. By now, I’m sure everyone knows that this was a shitpost, thanks to every mainstream news outlet reporting it with headlines like “JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” which, of course, only added to the shitpost’s appeal and kept the jokes going for longer. This is, in my opinion, a shitpost for good: as Rick Santorum will forever be connected to that frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex, JD Vance will be connected with couch fucking, either “is a couch fucker” or “is not a couch fucker.” Honestly if you have to pick one, I guess you go with the second but really neither is a title you want, as a serious political candidate.
Ultimately I know many of you come to my channel for the facts, and the corrections of misinformation, so I will conclude with my official take on this topic as a critical thinker: technically, those headlines are all wrong. Yes, the original Tweet was a shitpost made up for giggles. However, philosopher Karl Popper wrote in his seminal–sorry, his famous treatise “ The Logic of Scientific Discovery” in 1934 that a nonnegotiable standard of scientific analysis is falsifiability. Accordingly, one can prove that JD Vance once fucked a couch, by directly observing that instance. One can even gather sufficient evidence to suggest that it’s likely JD Vance fucked a couch, by gathering accounts from bystanders, or even by resulting evidence like finding a latex glove filled with Vance’s DNA.
However, the negative claim, that JD Vance has NEVER fucked a couch, is not falsifiable. To prove that, one would need to observe Vance for every minute of his life from birth to now, an act that is simply unreasonable without a time machine. Therefore, the headlines claiming JD Vance didn’t fuck a couch are incorrect.
The best that could be said for the matter would be that JD Vance SAYS he never fucked a couch, but as far as I can tell he hasn’t said that. Which is suspicious. I encourage our mainstream media to consider pursuing this story until they get word one way or another, and then to publish it as another headline article, something like “JD Vance insists he has never fucked a couch.” That would be fun.
