Ben Shapiro: The Right Has Learned to Love Trolling

Source: National Review | January 4, 2017 | Ben Shapiro

But provoking a response shouldn’t matter more than speaking the truth.

On New Year’s Eve, our president-elect unleashed a tweet in honor of the coming year: “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

His most ardent followers thrill to this display of full-on juvenile testosterone. They thrill at what they approvingly call “trolling” by the “madman.” They tweet pictures of Pepe the Frog jubilantly, figuratively slapping each other on the back over the audacity of their Big Man on Campus.

This is the “new conservatism”: Elicit a reaction.

There’s no follow-up. There’s no design. And truth is unimportant. The new “conservatism” promoted by Trump and his most ardent imitators is a teenage slapfight with no general purpose other than to deliberately offend, thereby making yourself appear more powerful. Remember when Trump said that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in JFK’s murder? That was trolling. And when Cruz responded, Trump’s followers laughed, called Trump a “madman,” and suggested that Cruz was a weakling for letting such things get under his skin.

Trolling is a win-win: If the target responds, you simply point and laugh and suggest that you’ve “triggered” him. If the target doesn’t, you taunt him incessantly as a “coward.”

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But trolling has nothing to do with truth. In fact, it often traffics in lies in order to trigger — and then it suggests that anything that triggers the Left must be virtuous.

That’s actually dangerous. When Trump tweeted last week that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was “very smart” for not retaliating against President Obama’s expulsion of Russian agents from the United States, his followers didn’t respond to the policy — they laughed at the trolling. He’d triggered Obama and the media! He’d gotten them mad!

Was this good policy? Is it smart to cater to a brutal authoritarian who intends to enlarge his sphere of influence by any means necessary, including violence or support of other genocidal dictators?

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No wonder Trump now says he’ll engage in policy announcements via Twitter: It’s a no-lose move for him. If he announces an unpopular policy and his opponents respond, he’ll just stick on the clown nose: He’s trolling! Look at how easily triggered they were! Why are they taking his Twitter account so seriously?

This is all pretty convenient political cover. It’s just the Jon Stewart strategy writ large: Play the comedian when you say something unsupportable; play the statesman when you chance on something popular. But it undermines the notion that the president ought to be answerable for both his policies and his words. And it turns conservatism into reactionary silliness designed for pranks rather than for preservation of liberty.

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So we now have two sides screaming at each other, laughing when the other side responds, and ignoring truth and policy in the process. After all, have you seen how nuts those crazy opponents are?

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