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JD Vance accidentally dropped the college football championship trophy and people have jokes

We can still come together to make fun of politicians.

CBS News/Youtube & Michael Li/Flickr

JD Vance "fumbles" the coveted college football national championship trophy.

It's a tradition for sports teams that win major championships to receive the honor of visiting the White House and meeting the President. The Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles will be visiting soon. The World Series winning Los Angeles Dodgers visited earlier this year. And just this week, the national champions Ohio State Buckeyes took the stage with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, an Ohio State alum.

It was a simple photo opp. There would be no hard hitting questions from journalists about the economy or Russia. Everyone involved was there to simply celebrate the accomplishments of a talented and hard working group of young men in a controversy-free ceremony. What could possibly go wrong?

JD Vance had other plans. The moment he went to hoist the trophy, it appeared to quite literally fall apart in his hands.

Vance puzzled over the trophy for a moment as he tried to slide it toward himself. Then, as he began to lift it, the top half toppled over only to be caught by Ohio State running back TreVeyon Henderson before hitting the ground. You can actually hear the crowd gasping and holding their breath before Henderson saves it, all while the United States Marine Corps Band performs "We Are the Champions." You honestly couldn't script a more hilarious sequence if you hired Hollywood's funniest comedy writers.

To be fair, the college playoff national championship trophy is a little confusingly constructed. The bottom half is just a black stand for the trophy itself, which is the 26.5 inch tapered golden piece on top. So technically, Vance didn't break the trophy. He just didn't realize that it came apart in two pieces.

But it was too late. The blunder was caught by dozens and dozens of cameras, with the jokes about Vance "fumbling" the trophy nearly writing themselves.

Watch the wild video here:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Vance, the Internet's favorite punching bag as of late, suddenly found himself on the butt end of an avalanche of jokes.

Vance is no stranger to being made fun of on the Web. First, it was the theories that he wears eyeliner while simultaneously preaching about the death of masculinity. Then, it was enterprising social media users engaging in a war of one-upmanship to see who could create the most horrifying, bloated caricature of the VP.

And now, he can add this fumblerooski to his resume.

In a thread posted on the subreddit WatchPeopleDieInside, people came with their best jokes at Vance's expense:

"Ahh I see it's because the trophy didn't wear a suit and say thank you"

"That man has never held a trophy in his life."

"They are going to blame the Democrats for this."

On X, one user wrote, "JD Vance: Can't order donuts. Can't hold a normal conversation. Can't hold a trophy without breaking it."

Honestly, jokes were barely necessary. The photos are hilarious enough. The top half of the trophy tumbling limply into Vance's shoulder. Vance bending down, scrambling to pick up the base. It's all just *chefs kiss.*


People on the right had some fun at the VP's expense, too.

"Trophy must be made in China," one Reddit user joked.

"Dan Quail on steroids," added another.

Fox News couldn't help themselves, either. They made more than a few puns about Vance "fumbling" the trophy.

Even Vance himself had no choice but to try to take the mockery in stride.

The Trump administration is off to a controversial start, to put it extremely lightly. JD Vance's trophy snafu harkens back to a simpler time when we all came together to make fun of George W. Bush not knowing how to pronounce words or Gerald Ford tumbling down the stairs of Air Force One. There isn't much that's able to bring people from different sides of the aisle together anymore, and this one is just a minor blip in the grander scheme. But this little reprieve in the news cycle has definitely been a much needed source of comic relief.

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Education & Information

Film shown to high schoolers in 1948 exposes the tactics of propaganda still relevant today

"What are 'glittering generalities?'"

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Propaganda exposed in 1948 film shown to highs schoolers

Propaganda is a word we often hear thrown around when someone says something we don't agree with. It doesn't matter if what's being said is factually true or not. The word has been so overused that people may not recognize actual propaganda when they see it. Americans aren't well versed in recognizing propaganda outside of the brief disclaimer that other countries used propaganda during wartime.

There's not much of a deep dive on the topic in schools but at one point in history, it was completely normal for high schoolers to be taught how to spot propaganda. In the 40s, juniors and seniors in high school were required to learn about how propaganda mixes language and images to persuade people to believe one thing over another even if it wasn't true. The goal for propaganda was to get people emotionally invested in whatever was being pushed so they'd be more likely to trust what they were hearing.

America was so invested in teaching about the pitfalls of propaganda that they put together a video explaining different ways to recognize it. This was designed to come in handy for the deluge of information coming out about WWII at the time and eventually the Cold War. People needed to be able to critically pick apart what they were reading, seeing and hearing so they could best decipher the truth.

Oak Ridge High School Library | Free Photo - rawpixelwww.rawpixel.com

While America is not currently at war, learning to decipher propaganda is still relevant today, especially given how quickly information moves nowadays. In the 1948 film sold to high schools across the country, an older man shares with a high school boy ways to identify propaganda by first listing some of the techniques.

The techniques of propaganda listed are glittering generalities, transfer, name-calling, card-stacking, testimonial, plain folks, and bandwagon. They then go through each technique to breakdown what they look like in practice. Many of the techniques listed may be easily identifiable in modern American politics and advertisements.

grayscale photography of children sitting inside room Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

Examples given for glittering generalities are "good government" and "real American" used in different campaigns. But the faux politician asks the boy what is "good government" and is it the same as what the mayor considers to be "good government." This gets the young man's wheels turning. In his example for card-stacking he plays a recording where the mayoral candidate blames a water issue on the current mayor.

"That's what we call card-stacking. Cooper was mayor when the pumping station broke down but it was the man in office before him who allowed it to get into such a rundown condition and it finally gave way before he could get anything done," the man explains.

File:Oliver twist.gif - Wikimedia Commonscommons.wikimedia.org

The boy then clarifies the information he is hearing, "and card-stacking is choosing some facts and leaving out others and arranging them to suit your purpose."

Once the teen understands some of the basic propaganda techniques, he and the man take another look at a campaign film they've previously watched, allowing the boy a chance to identify the types of propaganda techniques used.

"You'll find that the purpose of most propaganda is to persuade people to believe something, to do something or to buy something," the man says before later adding, "whenever you're tracking down propaganda, get as many different points of view as you can."

Gathering as much factual information as you can from multiple different points of view and different sources is important for any sort of research, but it's especially important when the goal is to sell you something or win your vote. Showing a film like this one in high school may be helpful in ensuring people continue to be able to recognize the persuasive techniques used in political and marketing ads to encourage critical thinking and informed decision-making.

"I think I understand," the boy says. "To know whether propaganda is good or not, whether it's true or not, I should know the purpose, recognize the technique, get the facts and judge the purpose and technique by the facts."

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Democracy

Fox News viewers changed their minds after getting paid to watch CNN for a month

Some hope we can bridge the political divide.

Greg Gutfeld and Anderson Cooper images via Wikicommons

Fox viewers changed their minds after watching CNN

The prevailing logic in today’s political world is that polarization is worsening because people live in media echo chambers where they are only exposed to outlets that mirror their views.

People who live in echo chambers come to distrust any opinions that exist outside of their bubbles and when they're not exposed to any conflicting information. This creates a scenario where the person becomes increasingly entrenched in their worldview.

One would assume that after a person becomes fully entrenched in an echo chamber they have little chance of changing their views. However, a new working paper by researchers at Stanford and Yale universities has found that when people are removed from their bubbles there’s a chance they’ll change their minds.

David Broockman of Stanford and Joshua Kalla of Yale conducted a study in 2022 where they paid regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to watch CNN for around seven hours a week for a month. The researchers then surveyed them about their political beliefs and knowledge of current events.

The study is titled “The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers.” The research was done in fall 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and lead-up to the presidential election.

When the participants were polled, researchers found that they were 5 percentage points more likely to believe that people suffer from long COVID, 6 points more likely to believe that other countries did a better job of controlling the virus and 7 points more likely to support voting by mail.

“CNN provided extensive coverage of COVID-19, which included information about the severity of the COVID-19 crisis and poor aspects of Trump’s performance handling COVID-19. Fox News covered COVID-19 much less,” said the study.

​After the Fox viewers switched to CNN, it changed their opinions on the social justice protests happening at the time as well. The switchers were 10 points less likely to think that Biden supporters were happy when police got shot and 13 points less likely to believe that if Biden gets elected “we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”

Many of the participants also realized that when it came to Trump, they weren’t getting the whole story. After switching to a steady diet of CNN they were less likely to agree that “if Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it.”

“Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views,” the authors of the study said.

The study shows that Fox News isn’t just a media outlet that affirms its viewers' worldviews, it also feeds them a distorted version of reality that pushes them toward more extreme opinions. The good news is that some of these people can be changed when exposed to better information.

It should also be noted that Fox News viewers aren’t the only ones living in information bubbles and that there are plenty of ideological traps that ensnare people on the left as well.

The study should give everyone hope that all is not lost and that America’s political divide may not be impossible to bridge.

This article originally appeared two years ago.

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Education

One word that explains why the world feels 'deeply off' for so many people

There's a term for this collective feeling so many of us are experience.

Photo credit: Canva

If your'e feeling a disconnect, you're not alone.

Many of us, for many reasons, are feeling a deep sense of disconnection between what is happening in the world around us, and how society acknowledges those events…or doesn’t. Whether it’s about climate change or our current political regime or whether or not we’re using technology ethically, there’s this viscerally felt notion that old systems are no longer working. All the while, life seems to be going on as normal. Which can be as crazy-making as any other type of gaslighting.

For those that are feeling this way, that something is deeply off with the world,” author and digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush says “you’re not alone.” and inf act, there’s actually a name for this collective feeling. It’s called hypernormalization.

As Harfoush explained in an Instagram video, hypernormalization was a term first coined by historian Alexei Yurchak in his 2005 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In it, Yurchak described the paradox of living in the Soviet Union before its dissolution in 1991, when everyone knew the system was failing, but since no one could imagine a possible alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Sound familiar?

Years later, filmmaker Adam Curtis took this concept and ran with it for his 2016 BBC documentary, aptly titled HyperNormalisation, which essentially argued that this time period—and events like the rise of Trumpism, Brexit, the War in Syria, and more—was a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts, causing world leaders to give up on trying to reshape the world, and opt instead to establish a similar, albeit “fake” world for the benefit of corporations.

The documentary also posited that the West’s fixation on individualism played its own part in this. By and large people are too concerned with themselves to worry of the greater reality unfolding behind the scenes. The combination results in inexplicable, chaotic events that keep happening, which are either denied, are accepted as normal. Again, this might hit close to home.

Hypernormalisation, Hypernormalisation documentary, documentaryStill from HypernormalisationThe Guardian

As Harfoush explains, hypernormalization today looks a lot like “the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working, that structures are crumbling, that society is going through these massive shifts, and yet the institutions and the people that are in power just are like ignoring it and are pretending like everything is going to go on the way that it has.”

“We all know that that’s not true, so you are feeling the discomfort between what you know to be true and how you’re seeing people react to it,” she concluded, reassuring that, “your vibes are not off. Your instincts are not off. There’s a term for it. You’re welcome.”

This insight doesn’t necessarily solve the issue, but it can certainly help us begin seeing things a little more objectively. After all, change doesn’t happen without first exposing the absurdity for what it is.

By the way, you can watch the full version of Curtis’ HyperNormalisation documentary on Youtube.

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