JD Vance Memes About His Weird, Far-Right Policies Are Actually Fine
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We’ve now wrapped our heads around our new Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump Election 2024 reality, and with the coconut dust finally starting to settle, the internet has made a new meme star: GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance. Unfortunately for Vance, he’s not getting the Brat fancam treatment. Instead, he’s being painted as a couch-banging, cat lady-hating misogynist weirdo — both by the Twitterati (X-erati?) and the official Harris campaign and its surrogates. The pundits seem mixed on whether this is a good election strategy. But I’m here to tell you that calling out Vance and his fellow weird cronies is good and we should keep doing it.
Let’s recap the very conditions that have led to Vance and Co.’s crowning as America’s Top Weirdos. First, an old clip went viral showing Vance telling erstwhile Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that America is run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and he went after Harris and secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg for not having biological children. The clip immediately elicited the ire of pretty much everyone, including Republican women who either remain childless by choice or struggled to conceive. It also got the meme game started, amplified by Vance’s well-documented obsession with fertility rates, his waffling stance on IVF, and his fluctuating stances on abortion, which include previously expressing support for a national abortion ban as well as travel restrictions for pregnant people.
Then there was the couch thing. When Vance was announced as Trump’s VP pick, X user @rickrudescalves posted that the Ohio senator had admitted to having intimate relations involving a couch in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. This was a joke, but for some reason, the Associated Press decided to run a fact-check column with the headline, “No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With a Couch.” As if that didn’t do enough to Streisand Effect a random X user’s bit, the AP then retracted their couch-sex fact-check, allegedly because the post failed to go through the AP’s “standard editing process.” That story went super viral, the memes went wild and eventually broke internet containment, and now even your grandmother is texting you about it. We don’t have time to get into the dolphin sex thing (but you can read about it here).
While the internet has its meme daggers out for Vance, the Harris surrogates have been lobbing humiliations of their own at the right. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who’s been touted as a progressive favorite in Harris’s ongoing Veepstakes, spent last week on the news talk show circuit saying that Vance, Trump, and the rest of their far-right cronies are, I quote, “weird.” The Harris campaign has also picked up on this messaging, saying in email missives and on social media that JD Vance is a “creep,” and that Trump is “quite weird,” and sounds “like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant, let alone be president of the United States.” (We also got a couch joke.) Harris herself said at a campaign event that some of the things Trump and Vance have said about her are “just plain weird.” Prominent Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Buttigieg have similarly dug into the look-at-these-dweebs messaging.
There’s some concern that calling Trump, Vance, and co. “weird” will backfire. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman said the Harris campaign needed “a message that is dignity-affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity-destroying,” and quoted a professor who suggested that Trump might use the name-calling to show supporters that Harris looked down on them (much like Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment from 2016). This is a valid concern. But the “Trump and Vance are weird” messaging is not about their supporters at all. It’s about a far-right movement determined to trick people into believing their policy positions are reasonable and good when they are not.
There are plenty of good kinds of weird. “Weird” powers a lot of our culture and we’re better off for it. But your weirdness should not involve infringing on other people’s rights to make their brand of weird match yours. The Trumps, Vances, and co. of the world are the bad kind of weird. They are creepy bullies who want to force people to have children or strip them of their citizenship, who can’t stop complaining about the drag queens at the Paris Olympics, who call Beyoncé’s music “Satanic,” and who think this is how a woman’s reproductive system works. These guys (and yes, they’re mostly guys) believe that only their narrow view of society is the right one and that they deserve to control everyone who doesn’t fit it. They’re obsessed with policing everyone, from trans people, to pregnant people, to people who want or do not want to be pregnant, to teachers, to regular individuals and families just trying to do their best. We have spent a lot of time being afraid of these people, and for good reason — for the last eight years or so, their quest for tyranny has transformed our government, shaping our laws and courts, determining how we live, and threatening to take even more control if the right gains more power.
The Democrats have channeled this particular hold the far-right has over our politics into eight years worth of deeply sober “democracy is at stake” messaging, permeating every election since 2016 with unending fear, doom, and the sense that this house of cards could come down at any minute. But this messaging has had diminishing returns. American democracy has long been tenuous, and while it’s certainly possible that Trump’s reelection would lead to a complete fall to fascism, it’s hard to scare people into caring when it already feels so hard for the average voter to have their voice heard and core concerns addressed (especially for young people). And while fear can be a powerful voting motivator, it can also cause people to tune out and stay home.
Mocking the Vances of the world online and calling them “weird” angers and defangs them. It lessens their grip on us and reveals the truth — that the far-right’s policies are laughably unpopular. The majority of the country supports abortion, divorce, IVF, and civil liberties for transgender people. Most Americans don’t seem particularly fazed by drag queens, single people, or cat owners, and they certainly don’t all post weird tweets like this one. Also, making silly memes is fun and a lot of us haven’t been able to have any mirth in politics or on Elon Musk’s internet in a long time. And so I say, in the name of Kamala Brat Summer: Screw maturity. Send couch jokes.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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