Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '24: When A Disturbing Lie Takes Centerstage
Politics has long been called a dirty game, and lying and politicians are two terms that many consider synonymous. But sometimes there are lies that are so brazen and so low that they shock even the most jaded of beltway pundits.
Most recently, this has taken form in the lie that J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, once copulated with a sofa. This falsehood can be traced back to one tweet:
Since then, multiple Democrats have platformed the rumor. Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz joked that he would be thrilled to debate Vance if his Republican opponent could “get off the couch.” Harris’s social media accounts immediately broadcast the moment. Rep. Jared Moskowitz added fuel to the fire, writing on Twitter that "I've been on Air Force 2 JD, there is a great couch on it" after Vance approached reporters next to the vice presidential plane. But the worst offense might belong to J.B. Pritzker, who claimed that Vance “as you probably have heard, is, you know, getting known for his obsession with couches” in an interview with ABC’s This Week.
(The worst part? The Huffington Post headline on the incident is “J.B. Pritzker Burns JD Vance On Humiliating Couch Rumor.” I wish I were joking.)1
To be fair, Trump himself is also guilty of stoking nasty rumors — like referring to the bizarre conspiracy theory that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with the assassination of JFK. But, at least Trump is honest about the fact that he sometimes likes to fight dirty. Harris and Walz, in contrast, like to pretend they have some higher moral standard.
But this is not the first time that politicos have gleefully spread – or at least platformed – a disgusting (and sexually based) rumor.
According to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72, Lyndon B. Johnson was more than happy to employ this dark tactic:
“This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.
“The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the son-of-a-bitch deny it.”
This political anecdote immediately came to this author’s mind when news of Vance and the sofa first went viral – and this author was then disappointed when several other news outlets, like The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone also made the comparison when she was doing background research for the piece. It is a horrible feeling to be beaten to the punch.
But it was not just other outlets parroting the Johnson story – it was also the originator of the Vance rumor himself. In an interview with The New Republic “Rick,” the anonymous figure behind the X account that started the Vance rumor, not only admitted that the rumor was a complete fabrication, but that he had drawn his inspiration from the false Johnson story. According to The New Republic:
“Rick’s [the user who made up the Vance story] reasoning for this particular fabrication? He was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s anecdote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 about former President Lyndon Johnson starting a rumor that his opponent had sex with his livestock.”2
But this is where things get interesting, and will perhaps lead to a more “meta” article than the norm. The background research for the Johnson story took so long because there was no research to find. The only source for this tidbit was Thompson’s book, and that one passage was quoted ad nauseam across the internet. There were no details on which primary opponent was the target of the smear. More tellingly, there was no reference to anything involving pigs or scurrilous rumors in any newspaper in Texas or anywhere in the country during Johnson’s early career when searching through the archives. Johnson may have indeed spoken about his opponent’s supposed carnal desires, but there was no record of it whatsoever.
But there was a different theory put forth by screenwriter and author David Gerrold, on a blog so old that it is no longer online and only accessible by the Wayback Machine:3
“Lyndon Johnson never said anything about getting your political opponent to deny he's a pig-fucker. Here's how that one started: In 1967, Paul Krassner printed 'THE PARTS LEFT OUT OF THE KENNEDY BOOK' in his magazine The Realist. In those excerpts, LBJ was seen by Jackie Kennedy copulating with the neck wound in JFK's body. It was outrageous -- and offensive -- and a hoax. Krassner was publishing a satirical magazine and folks missed the satire. The parts that were left out of the Kennedy book (THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT, by William Manchester) were left out because they weren't true and Manchester didn't write them.
But Krassner was attacked on the floor of Congress for publishing such a vile piece. Perfect. That was what he wanted. Krassner said in the next issue that once you get a politician denying that he's a pig-fucker, you have everybody in the world asking why he felt the need to deny it . . . Time and memory have played Russian telephone with this incident, and as a result, the pig-fucker remark is now attributed to LBJ -- even though LBJ was the original target. Too bad. Krassner deserves the credit for an outrageous and tasteless (but brilliant) political prank.
I can confirm that this is an accurate account, because as an idealistic, iconoclastic, confused, young, proto-hippie-anarchist-activist-science-fiction-freak, I bought and read those issues of The Realist when they were originally published. And years later, I sat between Paul Krassner and Robin Williams at a roast for Harlan Ellison and we talked about that very incident. You can also look up this interview with Krassner.”
To be fair, this explanation also has only one source, and it was pure chance to have stumbled upon it while down the rabbit hole of research. But there is a lot of source material on Krassner’s disgusting claim that Johnson copulated with Kennedy’s corpse – including the original excerpt from the magazine – which suggests that this might be the truth (or, at least, closer to it).
But this revelation is perhaps even more fitting for a website that loves to look at how history repeats itself. This article opened with the saying that politics is a dirty business. But, the fact is that the media is an even dirtier one, and will champion the stupid and unpalatable under the guise of wit to take down a target. It was one smarmy, snarky writer, imagining himself an enlightened and irreverent artiste who made up a disgusting story about Johnson and JFK.
Similarly, one smarmy, snarky Twitter user, who thought himself so enlightened that he fancied himself a modern-day Lyndon B. Johnson, decided to publish a stupid and gross rumor about a man he had never met.
The media allows the falsehood to go mainstream before fact-checking. When the lie is called out, it is dismissed as satire. And then politicians try to use the muck to their advantage. History, rinse, and repeat.
It is unclear why the rumor morphed into one about pigs — if that is even true. Perhaps it changed because, in retrospect, those who saw the truth in Krassner’s message recognized that its necrophilia-based vehicle was repugnant and didn’t want to associate it.
We can only hope that, fifty years from now, the Vance sofa rumor will similarly be forgotten, and that the politicians licking their chops at the chance to score political points with a profane lie will be ashamed of their connection to it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/j-b-pritzker-burns-jd-204145106.html
https://newrepublic.com/post/184418/man-creator-jd-vance-couch-sex-explains
https://web.archive.org/web/20040629105640/www.gerrold.com/soup/2004_05_30_archive.htm
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