As for Seth Rich, a relatively anonymous campaign worker for the National Democratic Committee who was killed in a botched robbery in 2016, Couch and fellow deranged loon Ed Butowsky promoted, without a shred of evidence (or coherence), numerous elaborate (silly) conspiracy theories, including the idea that Rich (rather than Russia) was one of WikiLeaks’ sources in a large leak of Hillary Clinton-related emails and that he was murdered on the orders of the Clinton family – apparently, according to Couch, Rich’s brother was the brains behind the effort, a claim that landed Couch in some legal trouble; Couch ultimately had to officially disavow the whole thing. His audiences, however, do not exactly consist of people who give much weight to facts, reason and accountability, so demonstrating, with the help of facts and reason, that Couch is full of shit hardly made a dent in his appeal.
Persistently running the conspiracy theory tracks, Couch spent much of 2020-2022 amplifying and spreading misinformation, pseudoscience and bullshit about Covid and Covid vaccines (“Dr Vladimir Zelenko: Covid Is A BioWeapon, The Poison Death Shot Is Premeditated Mass Murder And We’re In World War III”) through his DC Patriot website and on Twitter, where Couch enjoyed a large number of followers (presumably including a not insubstantial number of bots) ready to swallow up his nonsense, including the claim that the flu vaccine increases the risk of coronavirus by 36% – it doesn’t, of course, and it doesn’t require very much knowledge of, well, anything to recognize that someone (one Benjamin Krause, in fact) must have badly misunderstood something fundamental in order to make such a claim; Couch, of course, reacts to reason as if it were poison. His Twitter account was ultimately suspended for promoting false Covid information.
As a curiosity: In an interview on “The Todd Coconato Show” in 2021, Couch argued that people should avoid the vaccines and rather expose themselves to weakened versions of the virus (“self-inoculation”) to achieve protection, like they did during the Revolutionary War – a.k.a. get vaccinated.
Couch was also an invited speaker at the 2020 AMPfest, a conference at Donald Trump’s Doral Hotel designed to bring together Trump supporters, anti-vaccine activists and QAnon conspiracy theorists. On January 6, 2021, he was also one of the March for Trump/Save America speakers.
Diagnosis: Yes, there is more, though at this point, Couch is just one of many dingbat conspiracy theorists mainstreaming misinformation on the rigthwing clown circuit – he has a substantial number of followers, but we expect that most of them would be just as silly and crazy if Couch hadn’t been around.
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