None of the people I'm talking about misunderstand what the real point is. What they took issue with was the snickering about the content of the video and the fact that someone's sexual fetishes would be used as blackmail in the first place. Everyone understands the gravity of the President being blackmailed.
Well that's better- it at least shows the problem isn't misunderstanding the significance so much as it's letting a peripheral issue occupy attention at the expense of the more important issue.
But that's a problem because it's exactly this kind of conversational shift that makes derailment a good tactic for mitigating the impact of political scandals.
