JD Vance Does NOT Have Six Nipples

...and other debunked rumors.

(Photo by: Lloyd Bishop/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

Earlier this summer, a mischievous X user wrote in a widely circulated post that JD Vance had admitted, in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, to having engaged in a sexual act with a couch. That claim has been thoroughly debunked—Vance admitted no such thing—yet it continues to circulate as a meme. 

At the Democratic national convention in Chicago last month, no less a figure than Elizabeth Warren got in on the “fun” with this little zinger: “Trust Donald Trump and JD Vance to look out for your family? Shoot, I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch!”

Classy.

Even Minnesota Governor Tim Walz alluded to it shortly after being named Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, telling a packed Philadelphia arena, “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Shame on Elizabeth Warren. Shame on Tim Walz. And shame on all of us.

Democrats are—or should be—better than this. We are not the party of slander and disinformation. We must wipe the adolescent smirks off our faces, stop picturing the Republican vice presidential nominee in flagrante with a Chesterfield, and focus on the critical business of winning this election.

To that end, please be mindful of some other baseless rumors about JD Vance that should not be amplified:

• JD Vance does not keep a handful of dog kibble in his suit pocket and sneak littles bites when no one is looking. No credible sources have confirmed that Vance has “unmistakable, 24/7 kibble breath,” or that he must regularly fend off packs of stray dogs when he finds himself outside late at night.

• JD Vance has never admitted during a podcast interview that he once started attending 12-step meetings for pornography addiction, until he found out that illustrated medical textbooks are not widely considered to be pornography.

• Fact-checkers at the Associated Press have determined that JD Vance’s wedding vows did not include the sentence, “I forgive you for not being white.”

• Under no circumstances should anyone repost the unfounded claim that JD Vance insists on air-drying after taking a shower because using a towel “awakens the feminine.”

• No matter how often it is repeated or how easy it might be to imagine, JD Vance does not wear headphones blasting marching-band music at dangerous volumes in order to achieve and sustain an erection.

• There is no evidence that JD Vance once shat his pants in the first hour of a long international flight, or that he apologized to the passengers seated around him by saying, “This happens sometimes, from all the dog kibble.”

• JD Vance was not fired and banned from a Dairy Queen for tracking a coworker’s menstrual cycle.

• No serious reporter has substantiated the rumor that while at Yale Law School, JD Vance bet some classmates that he could recreate the scene from Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman eats 50 hard-boiled eggs, and that Vance then attacked the challenge with such speed and apparent ease that his friends were disgusted and deeply unsettled, later recalling the silence that fell over the room as Vance housed his 20th—then 30th—hard-boiled egg, his jaw unhinged snake-like to swallow them whole, egg after egg after egg after egg, his round face as blank and untroubled as the surface of a swamp on a hot, windless day, and the blended look of triumph and confusion that rippled across it after the final egg had been dispatched and there were no cheers or back slaps forthcoming, only the hard, wary stares of men who minutes before had been friends, and how no one who bore witness to the Egg Incident, as it came to be known around New Haven, ever spoke to Vance again after that day.

• JD Vance does not have a sizable collection of human teeth in his basement, and certainly does not abruptly stand up from dinner parties that he and his wife are hosting to announce that he’s “heading on down to Tooth Town” when he wants to spend time with it.

• And finally, there is no official record of JD Vance ever visiting the emergency room to have his penis liberated from a tube of GO-GURT®.

Activating voters in an important election should not, and cannot, require abandoning our essential values. Please share this list widely to make sure that every American is aware of these rumors, and knows them to be unworthy of our national political discourse.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on, and until there is strong support for the viral allegation that JD Vance’s own shoes smell like expired crab meat soaked in Malort, we would be irresponsible to speed its journey along.