Why liberals love Bill Mitchell, Twitter’s most absurd Trump supporter
In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes among people who hate them.
If you don’t know who Bill Mitchell is, he’s the too-good-to-be-true Trump sycophant who tweets things like:
Bill Mitchell is a joke. But who’s the joke on?
In a lovely profile at BuzzFeed, Charlie Warzel describes Mitchell as a “a kind of post-truth, post-math Nate Silver.”
It’s a great line — but it misses, I think, an important part of Mitchell’s role in the election. Mitchell isn’t the Trump movement’s Nate Silver; he’s the Clinton movement’s anti-Nate Silver. He’s a Trump supporter so dismissive of evidence that if he didn’t exist, liberals would have to invent him.
I read Mitchell because he is retweeted into my feed 10 times a day by people who find him hilarious. It’s a lot of this kind of thing:
This is the secret behind Mitchell’s reach, and it distorts analysis of what it means.
“Mitchell’s influence is considerable — earlier this year, the MIT Media Lab listed him as the 26th-most influential Twitter account of this election cycle (the highest-ranked non-politician or journalist), between Lindsey Graham and Megyn Kelly,” Warzel writes.
The algorithm powering the MIT Media Lab’s study was very interested in retweets, and Mitchell gets a lot of retweets. But retweets don’t equal endorsements. A lot of Mitchell’s biggest retweets come from accounts mocking him. Indeed, for all the big-name liberals, established journalists, and agog #NeverTrumpers I see retweeting Mitchell, I never see well-known conservatives seriously promoting his stuff.
Which is all to say that what’s powering Mitchell, as far as I can tell, isn’t influence. It’s what Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos calls “reverse outrage”:
"Reverse outrage" is the righteous internet backlash against an initial statement or display of outrage … The irony is that in the rush to prove one's moral superiority by speaking out against some racist, sexist, or otherwise hurtful sentiment (whether it's a hashtag or a viral video about a coffee cup), the sentiment is frequently amplified on a scale that wouldn't have been possible had people not taken the bait.
So it is with Mitchell, who has been amplified on a scale far outsize to his influence. And it’s not because the perspective he’s representing is important, or valid, or even obviously popular. It’s because it’s identity-confirming.
Part of Nate Silver’s popularity is he flatters liberals’ perceptions of themselves as empirical, data-driven, and evidence-minded. (This isn’t a knock on Silver — you could say the same about my work.) The methodology is the message, or part of it. That’s true for Mitchell, but in reverse: Mockingly retweeting Mitchell carries much the same message as seriously retweeting Silver. If echoing Silver is saying, I think about politics like that guy! then sarcastically echoing Mitchell is saying, I don’t think about politics like that guy!
Mitchell makes liberals look good, and he confirms their worst stereotypes about anti-science conservatives. Mitchell makes the press look good, and he confirms their worst stereotypes about blind partisans believing whatever they want to believe. Mitchell makes #NeverTrumpers look good, and he confirms their worst stereotypes about the gullibility of the movement Trump has created.
All that said, the joke here isn’t on Mitchell — not exactly. As Warzel notes, he’s gone from being an unknown executive recruiter to a guy with more than 100,000 Twitter followers and a plausible future on the fringe of the conservative media. Mitchell enjoys a symbiotic relationship with his anti-fans: They boost his name recognition and follower count, he gives them a laugh and a foil. It’s win-win, but in a kind of depressing way.
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