How a meme made Hillary Clinton's health a campaign issue

"There are a million things wrong with Hillary," Cernovich told me. "She's a documented liar. She's massively corrupt. She wants to let in more so-called refugees, which makes her an existential threat to the West." (He calls the Syrian refugee crisis a "media lie.") "But I was looking at the conversation online — what was getting through to people and what wasn't — and none of that was sticking. It's too complex. I thought that the health stuff would be more visceral, more resonant from a persuasion standpoint, and so I pushed that."On September 11th, Clinton fainted after attending a memorial service at Ground Zero. Cernovich wrote a post called "Complete Timeline of Hillary's Health #HillarysHealth," which included such data points as "peculiar travel habits" and "lengthy naps." It got two hundred and forty thousand page views — less than a marquee Huffington Post story, but impressive for a blog with no advertising budget. More important, #HillarysHealth became a national trending topic on Twitter. That day, Chris Cillizza, a centrist pundit at the Washington Post, wrote an article titled "Hillary Clinton's Health Just Became a Real Issue in This Campaign." Scott Greer, a deputy editor of the Daily Caller, tweeted, "Cernovich memed #SickHillary into reality. Never doubt the power of memes." [The New Yorker]