#sanewashing

Thinking about it logically, using a cancer diagnosis as his excuse to step down suddenly would have been a much better play if they knew at the time.

Play on sympathies for Biden, humanize him, use that as an excuse for why he did poorly in the first debate. And it wouldn't look like he caved to pressure. It wouldn't look like he just dropped out because everyone told him to. And you could show him getting out there and still campaigning for Kamala, with news focusing on how he's doing this even while battling cancer.

That is a strong, powerful narrative to sell to voters! Biden is dying, but he's using his last days to fight for Democracy and stand up for this country!

And it would have baited the MAGAts into cheering for his death which would be covered by all the media outlets and made them look worse.

It would have been perfect!

If it was known at the time that Biden had cancer, that would have been the best time to reveal it!

If they knew back then and didn't reveal it when he dropped out, that's a HUGE misstep.

Normally, I would think the terrible strategy would be enough to dismiss this conspiracy theory altogether, but unfortunately it seems like Democrat politicians, when given the chance to shoot themselves in the foot, never miss the opportunity. Which is why I still can't completely dismiss the theory out of hand.

It would be incredibly on point for Democrats to know about Biden's cancer, miss this perfect opportunity to play on sympathies to help him boost Kamala, and then hide it... Covering up something that was bad strategy to hide in the first place.

It's exactly the type of brainless "strategy" they would think would be in their best interest for some reason.

And by the way, can I just say... Biden with his declining mental health... still more coherent than Trump. 🤷‍♀️

Yeah, Biden talks slow and stutters a bit. He might even lose track of what he's saying occasionally. But he's not going to casually call Mattel a country and talk about putting 100% tariffs on them. Something which I don't think would even be legal to do to a US company. If people think Trump's mental health is better than Biden's, it's only because Trump is more high energy. He spits out nonsense so fast that you can't even process how little sense what he's saying actually makes.

sanewashing

Sanewashing refers to the practice of making irrational, extreme, or otherwise problematic people or ideas appear more reasonable or normal than they really are. It is especially used as a liberal criticism of coverage of conservative politics in mainstream media.

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice:

A near-majority of American voters willingly reelected Donald Trump. This harsh reality is a collective moral failure, but it’s also not a choice made in sound mind. Consider that voters believed Trump’s first presidency was a roaring success and Joe Biden’s only term a Carter-level catastrophe. It’s an upside-down Bizarro World view that ultimately played a key role in dooming Kamala Harris.

Trump’s 2024 platform was rooted in an obvious lie — that the nation under Biden’s leadership is a flaming dumpster fire and everyone was much better off when Trump was president. Democrats challenged this false reality with facts, but they ultimately lost the messaging war. Their best efforts were no match for the most powerful weapons in Trump’s propaganda arsenal — a timid press and a right-coded social social media environment. Greg Sargent reports in the New Republic that the Harris campaign’s own internal polling revealed an alarming trend: “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency — even if they saw these things negatively — were his fault.” According to exit polls, Trump decisively won the questions “who do you trust more to handle the economy?” and “who do you trust most to handle a crisis?” Of course, in reality Trump utterly botched the 2020 pandemic response, which researchers concluded resulted in 40 percent more deaths than necessary. And yet swing voters are willing to risk it all again in hopes of cheaper eggs and cruelty against outgroups.

Disinformation on demand

Legacy media shoulders significant blame for their “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherency and deteriorating mental state. Voters believed Trump could fix a steadily improving economy despite his promotion of inflationary tariffs. The media even presented Trump’s rants as cogent discussions of economic theory.

It’s worth noting, however, that an NBC poll from April revealed that voters who received news primarily from legacy media (newspapers, cable news, etc.) still overwhelmingly supported Biden. Trump owes his victory in great part to low-propensity voters of all races, including young men, and those voters don’t necessarily form their views based on mainstream media reporting. Rather, far too many are stuck in an online social media bubble where they are delivered a steady diet of rightwing propaganda. The median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, and liberals have joked about the network “brainwashing” their conservative parents. But rightwing social media content has effectively targeted and radicalized younger people, who — unlike the typical Hannity-obsessed grandpa — can vote for the next several decades. TikTok, which Trump joined in June, has 170 million users in the United States, and according a Pew Research survey, more than half of them said they regularly get their news from the platform. That’s up from just 22 percent in 2020. This is a serious concern because the far right uses TikTok to advance unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies.

[...]

Lower income Americans, particularly young people, do spend more of their income on groceries, rent, and gas. That’s why Republicans were so laser focused on the price of eggs. Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of liberal content countering the negative vibes. Of course, explaining the post-pandemic economic recovery is complex and requires more than a punchy one-minute video can convey. Although people might idly scroll TikTok all day, consuming 60-second quick hit videos like potato chips, they will balk at reading an extensive, well-reported news article. That’s too filling a meal.

According to a University of Oregon study, 40 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans surveyed said they’d become more conservative from their TikTok usage. Half of the Democrats surveyed said they’d grown more liberal, but a lot of far-left content on TikTok is downright alienating and can sound like MAGA’s idea of a strawman leftist. For instance, one user boasted that she “didn’t care” if liberal economic and social policies “hurt the economy,” thus conceding that those policies are in fact harmful to economic progress. TikTok’s artificial “vibecession” dominated the discourse, while abortion-related content was actively suppressed even while pregnant women were bleeding out in parking lots. Users of the platform resorted to disguising the word “abortion” as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n” in order to reach an audience. TikTok has a longstanding policy against promoting abortion services, which it classifies as “unsuitable businesses, products or services.” However, TikTok, YouTube, and Meta have allowed users to spread and monetize anti-abortion misinformation. Studies have shown an interesting gender gap in where young people receive their news on social media: For most women, it’s TikTok, while most men learn about the world from YouTube, X, and Reddit, all of which have become havens of crude masculinity.

On YouTube, 56 percent of users are between the ages of 18 and 44. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that researches extremism, conducted a four-part research project this year that determined YouTube’s algorithm consistently steers users to rightwing and Christian content. The algorithm does this even with seemingly apolitical search terms, like “male lifestyle guru,” which YouTube reflexively associates with conservative ideology. Rightwing news content was also more frequently recommended, including anti-vaxxer videos. As far back as 2019, both YouTube and Facebook’s autofill search boxes would return content that promoted anti-vaccine misinformation.

[...]

Why rightwing content has the edge

When Kamala Harris appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, host Alexandra Cooper told her listeners, “I do not usually discuss politics or have politicians on the show because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place that everyone feels comfortable tuning in.” Left-leaning podcasters/social media content creators often avoid politics for fear of turning off their right-leaning fans. Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy at Barstool Sports don’t bother with such apologies when they have rightwing guests because it doesn’t compromise their brand. They are rightwing cultural influencers. Liberal podcaster Hasan Piker recently commented on the impact rightwing influencers have on young men of all races.

“There is a massive amount of rightwing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces. Everything is completely dominated by rightwing politics,” he said. “If you’re a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it’s playing video games, whether it’s working out, whether it’s listening to a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is completely dominated by center right to [the] Trumpian right. Everything they see is rightwing sentiment.”

Rogan and Portnoy might not present as overtly political as Walsh and Shapiro, but their edgy, hyper masculine personas are pure MAGA. Even billionaire CEO Elon Musk likes to present himself as a “disrupter,” an agent of change who boldly confronts the status quo. Anyone who’s seen the more popular indie films of the 1970s would realize how compelling this narrative is to young men. The subtle way that Rogan and Portnoy infuse politics into their personas presents a contrast with left-leaning social media content. The liberal TikToker or YouTuber who releases videos about home makeovers might endorse Democratic politicians during election season while wearing their “just voted” sticker, but rightwing influencers prime their audience on a daily basis. Young men marinate in a stew of rightwing sentiment and end up resenting the libs.

Stephen Robinson wrote in Public Notice a very valid case that a right-coded media environment gave Donald Trump the decisive boost to get elected, such as praising the disastrous Trump reign as a “success.”

Mainstream news organizations suddenly became more blunt about Trump’s decline – and derangement. “Trump’s age finally catches up with him,” the Washington Post wrote Saturday. “Trump kicks off Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia,” AP headlined its coverage of the Latrobe debacle. “Donald Trump’s vulgar rally ramble fuels questions about his state of mind,” the Financial Times wrote.

As always, the New York Times immediately “sane-washed” the story. On its breaking news politics page, a short report said Trump told “golf stories” about Palmer without mentioning his lewd remark. But shockingly, after wide social media outcry, reporter Michael Gold told a critic to direct his questions to [email protected], because “I filed something that included the thing you mention as omitted, but I’m not given the power to publish what I say.”

Maybe the pressure worked. Later in the day, the Times ran a longer piece by Gold, headlined “At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity,” which included the Palmer story verbatim, and warned that Trump’s crude talk could alienate “swing voters.”

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A short clip of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) at the DNC's summer meeting. The governor lambasts Trump. He famously called Trump "weird" last year and takes it to the next level here.

To see the entire speech, visit C-SPAN. But keep the subtitles turned off; at least for this speech, the C-SPAN subtitles are both sluggish and sometimes less than accurate.

Gov. Tim Walz Urges Democrats to Unite to Fight Trump Administration's "Fascist" Policies