I’ll never forget the first time I was on Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had taken an interest in one of my cases and brought me and my client on to his show. Truly, he was interested only in her perspective, but since litigation was looming, we were a package deal. So I drove to a studio in Nashville, sat in front of the fake city-skyline background, took a deep breath, and dove in.

I bombed miserably. O’Reilly didn’t like my answers, and I struggled to explain myself when he pressed me for more details. I didn’t look good and I didn’t sound good. I had all the charisma of a wet dishrag. The first phone call after the show was from my best friend from college. He was laughing at me. “Dude, you were terrible.”

And yet, in the long run, that first appearance may well have been the best career move I’d made since getting a law degree. From that moment forward, I could claim the most important résumé bullet point in the conservative movement: “David French has appeared on Fox News.”