After Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate during the Republican National Convention, the Media Research Center immediately started complaining about criticism of the candidate:
- Van Jones: Vance Is A ‘More Dangerous Virus’ Than Trump
- Wallace Praises Kamala Claims She’ll ‘Wipe the Floor With J.D. Vance
- Blame Opie! Variety Slams Director Ron Howard for Movie Creating ‘Monster’ J.D. Vance
- NBC Reporter Claims Vance ‘Afraid’ to Debate Harris, Gets Slapped Down
- MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Peers Into Vance Speech, Finds a White Supremacy
- CNN Analyst ‘Worried’ About VP Pick J.D. Vance ‘Eliminating DEI’
- Maddow Sees ‘Alt-Right’ In Vance’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ Fandom
A post by Catherine Salgado featured Vance parroting her employer’s dubious narrative that it’s “censorship” to correct lies and misinformation; a second post by Salgado headlined “JD Vance, Don Jr. Champion Free Speech at RNC” was mysteriously deleted shortly after it was posted (though it lives on in the Internet Archive).
The the MRC had to do more actual defense of Vance. Alex Christy whined in a July 26 post that Stephen Colbert was hyping an admittedly fake story about Vance doing untoward things with a couch:
Even by his standards, CBS’s Stephen Colbert displayed a shocking display of hypocrisy during his Thursday monologue on The Late Show as he gushed over President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address and hailed Biden’s “humility and self-sacrifice” in order to save democracy. Yet, later, he urged his viewers to spread fake news on the internet about GOP VP candidate JD Vance having sex with a couch because he found the debunked story funny.
[…]Later in his monologue, Colbert approached the issue of the AP fact-checking the internet rumor that Vance admitted in his book to having sex with a couch and the AP pulling the article. Citing a Mediaite article, Colbert acknowledged the story is bunk, “Reportedly, a PDF search of Vance’s book yielded ten references to ‘couch’ or ‘couches,’ but ‘at no time is the furniture engaged in coitus.’”
However, Colbert’s desire for truth in politics only goes one way. If the truth gets in the way of a good troll, the truth should take a back seat:
A few days later, the MRC flip-flopped on the whole troll thing in an Aug. 1 post in which Tim Graham touted “Trump’s trolling claims that Kamala Harris used to identify by an Indian heritage, and then decided she was black.”
The MRC was also stuck defending Vance’s “childless cat ladies” slur. In a July 18 rant against MSNBC host Alex Wagner, Jorge Bonilla huffed that her “unhinged rant leaves one thinking that Vance missed an opportunity to renew his epic blast at miserable cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable.” But as the insensitive remark gained more traction, it tried to be more serious about it. Curtis Houck devoted a July 26 post to reframing the remarks as something positive that didn’t apply to all childless cat ladies:
In perfectly coordinated fashion this week, the liberal media have gone postal on GOP vice presidential nominee and Senator JD Vance (OH) for 2021 comments about the left being dominated by unhappy progressives who don’t have children.
Everyone in the liberal media have piled on, ranging from ABC, CBS, and NBC on their flagship morning and evening newscasts to major newspapers to the insufferable blogosphere.
[…]But here’s the important passage the left has left out from Vance’s speech; the left has ignored where Vance showed compassion for both those not able to and struggled to conceive (and how, as evidenced in a brief X thread by the great Kaylee McGhee White, Vance was right in terms of voting behavior):
Houck also tried to reframe another Vance comment:
Come Friday morning, Wang was on ABC’s Good Morning America again to bludgeon Vance with nearly identical meltdowns. This time, she added a new claim, noting Vance “call[ed] for people without children to be taxed more” in an interview with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
What did Vance actually say? He simply argued, “[i]f you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve three kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids.”
Thanks to child tax credits and even a Biden administration promise to end child poverty, we can safely rate Wang’s meltdown as pants on fire.
Which does boil down to, yes, childless people being taxed more.
Brad Wilmouth spent a July 27 post trying to justify Vance’s comment:
On Thursday, as CNN shows hyped actress Jennifer Aniston complaining about J.D. Vance quipping that liberals are mostly “childless cat ladies,” afternoon host Jake Tapper went so far as to have on CNN entertainment reporter Elizabeth Wagmeister to gloat over the story and tie in Taylor Swift.
Setting up the segment, Tapper recalled: “What do Jennifer Aniston, Pete Buttigieg, and Whoopi Goldberg have in common? They are all less than pleased with Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance after a clip from 2021 recently resurfaced. Take a listen to what Vance told Tucker Carlson on Fox back in 2021.”
[…]It was not clarified that the then-Senate candidate was observing that both men and women who choose not to have children disproportionately tend to be Democrats more than Republicans.
Notably, according to the Wikipedia entries for current U.S. Senators, five out of 16 Democrat women, but only one out of nine Republican women do not have children.
Christy didn’t explain the relevance of that or why it proved Vance somehow right.