Bill O’Reilly Accuses Tim Walz of ‘Defamation’ for JD Vance ‘Couch’ Dig: ‘Lost of a Respect for the Governor’

Screenshot via Bill O’Reilly YouTube

Bill O’Reilly accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) of “defamation” with a “cheap” and “tawdry” comment about Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance involving a debunked “couch” story.

At a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Walz took some digs at Vance, saying at one point, “I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

The dig was a reference to a quickly debunked story spread on social media that Vance had written about having sex with a couch. AP and other s fact-checked the baseless rumor .

O’Reilly argued that “progressives” ran with the fake news on social media and that’s exactly the crowd that Walz was trying to appeal to.

“The get off the couch thing was defamation, and I’ve lost a lot of respect for Gov. Walz. I didn’t disrespect or respect him because I don’t know him, but a demented social media person made up a story about Sen. Vance that involved the couch. I’m not going to tell you the story because it’s obscene,” O’Reilly said.

The moment, he added, is a clear cut case of defamation because it’s more than likely Walz knew the story was debunked.

“He knows the story was debunked. It was debunked right away,” O’Reilly said. “And he did it anyway.”

The debunked story is one of a number of examples being used by critics to label Vance “weird,” something he’s pushed back on as a false narrative built by “social media interns.”

“My attitude on this is — my best guess — this is just a total guess — is that [Kamala Harris’s] campaign is run by a lot of 24-year-old social media interns who maybe were bullied in school and so now they’ve decided they’re going to do the same thing. They’re going to take that attitude of the middle school social scene and try to run a campaign on it,” he said .