San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Hillary Clinton, Kavanaugh and the art of willful trolling
Why did Clinton do it?
I realize that a question like that needs to be a lot more specific, so let’s try again.
Why did Hillary Clinton tweet this on Wednesday?: awful to get the other side to attack you, and your own side will rush to your support on the grounds that if you’re making the right people angry, you’re a hero.
“We need more Americans to understand exactly this phenomenon,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse told me on my podcast, “The Remnant.” Cable news producers and magazine editors have told Sasse that there’s “no chance in hell that you’re getting a 70 percent audience from anything anymore. What you want is a deep and sticky 1 percent audience. And one of the most effective ways to do that ... is by getting attacked, because you draw visibility to yourself.”
Sasse pointed to the New Yorker’s almost conspiratorial “expose” of Chick-fil-A’s “creepy infiltration” — in the magazine’s words — of New York City. The magazine has done “some really important work, not just in its history, but this year,” Sasse said, yet “they put out these nonsensical, scurrilous pieces.
“I think that the motive is to get attacked from the other side, so you can now wear the victim badge of honor, and then other people who are in your base then rally to you as a second-order effect.”
This dynamic is everywhere today, particularly in the president’s Twitter feed — and in the Twitter feeds of various Democrats who’d like to replace him.
Again, I don’t know if this explains Clinton’s tweets about Kavanaugh — conventional laziness, incompetence and dishonesty are reasonable guesses, too — but Sasse is surely correct that more Americans need to appreciate this phenomenon.
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Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “Suicide of the West” (Crown Forum, 2018). Email: goldbergcolumn@ gmail.com Twitter:@JonahNRO