Why liberals love Bill Mitchell, Twitter’s most absurd Trump supporter

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.