A lot has happened recently, but it wasn't all that long ago that the liberal media attempted to gaslight Americans into thinking that viral videos of Joe Biden's senior moments were so-called "cheap fakes."
"Such deceptively edited videos, known as 'cheap fakes,' have become staples of Republican attacks against the president," the Washington Post claimed.
"In edited videos, Republican officials and allies of former president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to turn Biden’s Normandy visit into a highlight reel of senior moments and missteps, aimed at showing the president as infirm, addled or out of his depth. Trump, who turns 78 on Friday, has also repeatedly attacked Biden over his age and fitness, and regularly shares videos of the president looking frail," the paper claimed. "But an examination of video feeds from the events in Normandy, France, makes clear that the selected clips had been edited to present a particularly damaging — and often misleading — picture."
Just over two weeks later, Biden bombed his debate with Donald Trump, which set off a firestorm of calls from both the liberal media and the Democratic Party for Biden to drop out of the presidential race—which he finally did on Sunday.
One might think that the media would have learned its lesson and started being more honest in their reporting. Instead, they're gaslighting us more by trying to spin Kamala's notorious word salads into something positive. According to the New York Times, Kamala Harris is "highly memeable."
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"The same unflattering supercuts and Photoshop jobs once used to denigrate Harris have now been flipped into celebratory artifacts of her candidacy," reporter Amanda Hess insists, before launching full-throttle into accusations of clips being taken out of context, and insisting that what has long been fodder for mocking Harris has become an asset to her campaign.
"Kamala Harris is a highly memeable presidential candidate. She dances in a loose and enthusiastic manner," Hess asserts. "She has an idiosyncratic speaking style. She laughs easily, including at herself. This has not always worked in her favor."
Idio…syncratic? That's not the word I would have used.
When Harris said, in a May 2023 speech, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?,” a Republican YouTube channel snipped the clip from its context and tossed it to commentators, who used it to compare Harris to a daffy talk show host or to joke that she sounded high. Videos of Harris dancing at campaign events were labeled “cringe.” The stickiest anti-Kamala meme of the 2020 election — that the former prosecutor Harris “is a cop” — united leftists, Black Twitter and Republican trolls in an internet-wide project of framing Harris as either a reactionary or a hypocrite.
Now these images have been reversed. Since President Biden bowed out of the race and threw his support to Harris, the familiar old Kamala memes have risen again. It’s their interpretation that has changed.
In the hands of her online fans, Harris’s word salad has been replated as hypnotic internet speak. Her confounding coconut tree quote — “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she went on to say — now circulates as a symbol of the giddy high produced by her dizzy rise in a destabilized campaign.
According to Hess, "All of it feels like a fun house mirror to the online energy that vibrates around the other party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump."
The Trump fandom stands ready and willing to spin any potential weakness, up to and including a felony conviction, into a triumphant meme. The MAGA stan proves his loyalty and ingenuity by processing even the gravest concerns into pro-Trump grist, thus maximizing his satisfaction at triggering the left. It once seemed as if the Democratic Party could never produce a candidate who could inspire an internet response quite that powerful and strange. Now, improbably, it has.
This article is a masterclass in wishful thinking. The Times wants us to believe that a few TikTok memes and catchy phrases can redefine Harris’s political career and sway the presidential race. Trump was able to turn his criminal conviction into a political positive because he was clearly the victim of partisan prosecution. I can't even imagine how clips of Harris having the incoherence of Joe Biden but without the dementia can possibly be spun as a good thing for her.
But boy, the media is really trying.
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