Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare

by Tobin Smith

  Here’s another thing I learned from my early and frequent appearances on Fox & Friends in the morning: the show (and most of FNC opinion programming) was just Roger’s unleashed ID being televised. Whatever pissed off Roger the most that morning and could most likely be manufactured to manipulate the five key emotional pillars of Fox News’s right-wing traumatic tribal emotion amplification spiral is what made it to air.

  Most people don’t know there was a secret daily memo from Roger and SVP John Moody (who was an even bigger Attila the Hun right-wing zealot than Ailes!) to the production staff. I learned about the “The Memo” early on in my career and developed sources through the years to forward me copies to a safe email address.

  This memo was the actual emotional targeting strategy for the day. Seeing and reading Fox News’s primary targeting and narrative daily playbook taught me how the Fox News tribal warfare playbook worked in real life. It’s how I became a reliable Fox News hit man—the guy who the producer and host could count on to plunge the rhetorical sword and make the final kill shot through the heart of our token liberal prop of the day. I became the guy who the producer needed in order to elicit the at-home audience member’s high-five for another libtard ass-kicking.

  Anyway, the reason Roger Ailes was so good at his previous job—creating right-wing attack ads and electing right-wing presidents—was that his ID was the mirror image of his audience’s ID. Until Fox News had its own audience emotional engagement surveillance machine (FoxNews.com), Fox News’s programming strategy was:

  Take the daily Roger’s ID memo.

  And manufacture or amplify whatever piece of the right-wing tribal identity activation and amplification spiral Roger thought had the most red meat on the bone that day.

  And then, evoke and stoke the most powerful mental chain reaction possible in the minds of our audience based on what currently pissed off Roger the most.

  Not many Fox News contributors got the time I did with Roger Ailes and senior management. I was stationed at the New York headquarters. And I was the first inside person to come clean on the Fox News tribal activation, distortion, and amplification. Many others know this playbook—but they still work at Fox (or now at MSNBC or CNN), other streaming tribal TV services, or they hope to get hired by right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting as they create their new version of tribalized Retro America TV.

  I performed in over two thousand thoroughly rigged Fox News opinion segments. My contract was renewed for fourteen years until it all ended in 2013 during a dispute over my newsletter business. I got very high Q ratings, and I was asked by producers to guest host more than fifty episodes of various Planet Fox live opinion shows. By the time I was guest hosting shows in 2009, I knew the Fox News tribal warfare playbook better than most of the hosts I sat in for.

  And understand this: since 1980, I have made my living understanding, monetizing, and profiting from mankind’s most innate emotions—but primarily fear. I started on Wall Street helping stockbrokers use fear to sell investment products. Later on, before and during my Fox News career, I worked for one of the largest investment newsletter publishers, Phillips Publishing, writing and distributing investment research and newsletters. There, I helped produce powerful printed direct-marketing brochures. Our grift was that they looked like magazines, so we called them magalogs, and people opened them up because they thought they were getting a free magazine. Today those magalogs are called “advertorials,” but that’s just putting lipstick on the “Gee it looks like I got a free four-color magazine—I should open this!” pig. In short, I know the power of fear and emotional grifting. Given my fourteen years exploiting right-wing tribal fear, and twenty-five years creating fear-based advertising content, I humbly surmise there are few people who know more about fomenting and monetizing tribal and existential fear than I do.

  But I do know this: Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and TV televangelists have monetized more fear than me in my career by a million times.

  Fear, fear, fear, fear!

  All consumers of political or cultural media should know that when you declare yourself a “proud conservative” or now a “proud Deplorable,” you have told me (and more importantly you just told Fox News producers) exactly how to grift you. Did you know that? When you press your remote control to Fox News, it’s like you just sent up a flare that reads “I’m yours.” Your arrival at my doorstep tells me all I need to know to use the FNC white tribal warfare playbook to suck hours and hours of your life into my programming.

  Let me get this straight. You do know about the “hidden” emotional manipulation and addiction elements embedded in social media—but you didn’t know that Fox News tribal identity and validation opinion shows are nothing more than a televised grift done at a previously unimaginable scale?

  Fox News has without question leapt into the pantheon of the Media Grifters Hall of Fame. We dislodged the former king of emotional grifting—WWE wrestling—as the most profitable professional grift. But the difference between Fox News and WWE pro wrestling fans is that WWE fans know they are being emotionally grifted.

  Fox News started the $10 billion a year tribal identity porn industry in America and others followed. Today’s America features a huge commercial digital media industry that monetizes cultural and political fear and hatred by staging gladiatorial cage matches featuring well-dressed proxies of Metro vs. Retro America as cathartic and ego-gratifying entertainment products.

  How has the mental and physical collateral damage from the mass consumption of billions of cumulative hours of Fox News’s emotional weapons of mass cultural/political destruction been so hidden in plain sight?

  Because the damage of culturally and/or politically tribalized and desocialized Foxhole dads, moms, sisters, and brothers is atomized—it happens one family at a time. It’s like that Nigerian Prince email scam where a person gets an email from a “Nigerian Prince” who desperately needs to get money out of Nigeria, and if you will just send him your bank account number, he will send you $2.5 million.

  When someone falls for that grift and becomes a walking, talking Foxhole—no one talks about it! That is the beauty of that grift—it was kept quiet for decades by the people that were grifted because they were embarrassed to admit they got taken!

  What many now identify as “Fox News brain” or a walking, ranting Foxhole happened under the cloak of that darkness, too, because no one took the time (until pollster Frank Luntz) to actually measure how deep the disease of tribalized partisan identity had become in America (spoiler alert: the answer is eighty-plus million).

  Today the Fox News talk show segments really just work one overall macro narrative grift: “Retro American culture and religion (and guns—always guns) are under a massive existential siege by hordes of Metro American liberals and immigrants. If we don’t go to tribal war against those viperous left-wing socialists and immigrants of color who constantly disrespect you/your culture/our God, you are going to lose what is left of your crumbling grip on economic and white cultural power. That, and it’s all the elites’ fault—the elites think you are their servants.”

  The conservative talk radio wing of the American Foxocracy has been forced to go even darker. The transcripts I get from the tribal warfare mongers on talk radio today are talking all day and night about how real tribal civil warfare is coming—not just digital battles—real tribal civil warfare that is coming soon.

  Rolling Stone’s award-winning cultural journalist Matt Taibbi writes in his analysis of American political news media in his book Hate, Inc: “The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: (Retro) America vs. (Metro) America, on every channel. The trick here is getting audiences to think they’re punching up, when they’re actually punching sideways, at other media consumers just like themselves, who just happen to be in a different silo. Hate (and fear) is a great blinding mechanism. Once you’ve been in the business long enough, you become immersed in its nuances. If you can get people to accept a sequence of simple,
powerful ideas, they’re yours forever.”

  Yes, you most certainly can, Matt. What’s so wrong with tens of millions of sixty-five-plus-year-old white Americans binge-watching thousands and thousands of hours of this much emotional toxic waste sold as a “news channel?” What’s wrong with verbally demonizing or “punching” your tribal enemy in the nose? Is that a sign of a healthy society? No, it is not, according to the many mental and physical health experts I consulted for this book. Do populist grifter demagogic rabble rousers like Donald Trump and his Make America 1980 Again grift rise in healthy countries?

  No, they don’t.

  More importantly—who set the table for Donald Trump to grift sixty-five million Americans into thinking he could magically turn 2016 into 1982?

  The conditioning started with conservative radio of course—but the emotional impact of seeing your political and/or cultural enemies’ faces and eyes is an order of magnitude more powerful than merely listening to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck rant and rave while you are driving home or cooking in the kitchen.

  This book will show you how the Fox News playbook helped make them so powerful. It looks at how FNC figured out how to use viewers’ own brain chemistry to addict them to the scams—and to always keep them watching. And it will show you how you can use that knowledge to start fighting back and learn the antidote to Fox News addiction.

  You don’t have to become or stay a Foxhole—and I can prove it.

  CHAPTER 1

  How Did the Fox News Tribal Identity Porn Playbook Become So Powerful?

  The Fox Hate Channel’s white tribal partisan identity playbook for the Foxhole spiral is not new. But its power to manipulate American right-wingers got supercharged by very powerful regulatory and information technology disruption combined with a hundred years of practice and the presidential election of 2008.

  Understand this—the white tribal identity media panic and fear spiral grift has been around for 125 years—it just took a set of massively transformational and disruptive inventions and regulatory shifts to turn it into emotional plutonium.

  But before I tell that story, let’s keep score here on all the benefits that have come to millions of Foxhole addicts watching nuclear powered Fox News white tribal identity porn every day of their rapidly ending lives:

  An uncountable number of divorces.

  Tens of millions of important and emotionally nurturing friendships and family relationships poisoned.

  An epidemic of tribalized white political and cultural intensity disorder.

  A growing number of senior-aged Americans suffering from chronic and deadly isolation following the loss of nurturing family relationships and friendships poisoned by their constant hyper-partisan zealotry.

  Public health data states that the top reason for elder estrangement is “pushing away family and friends.” For many, isolation leads to a chronic loneliness that (according to the latest research) brings them up to a 60 percent higher risk of premature death.

  America is in the middle of a “silver tsunami.” FNC’s target audience in America (white people over sixty-five) adds sixteen thousand new targets every day until 2030. Fox News and Planet Fox anticipate more than sixty million new emotionally vulnerable and isolated targets in America for their predatory and seductive brand of white tribal identity porn—what I call the “Foxhole spiral.” If you add in the UK and Australia, Planet Fox is perfectly positioned to ride the silver tsunami of aging Baby Boomers around the English-speaking world.

  Planet Fox must be so proud that their little right-wing propaganda channel turned into the most emotionally destructive white tribal identity media factory since—well, you know—1930s Germany.

  To communicate a big complex story well, it really helps to find the right analogies. I used the Nigerian Prince scam to illustrate how the damage from digital and viral scams stays hidden because of the shame and embarrassment of falling for that ridiculous scam.

  So now to introduce how and why the Fox News tribal identity activation and amplification playbook works so powerfully well, why it is so insanely profitable, and why I came to refer to it as a weapon of mass emotional destruction, I present . . . the nuclear powered Hot Pot pressure cooker.

  Don’t laugh—stay with me. The Foxhole panic spiral phenomenon I am detailing has been around for ages—but when it got digitized on the front end and combined with social media’s emotional targeting on the back end, it became an emotionally and psychologically radioactive cloud like Chernobyl that never ends. First off, if you don’t know what a Hot Pot is, it’s a cool digitally controlled pressure cooker. My favorite stew that takes me hours to cook in the oven takes about twenty-five minutes in my Hot Pot. It’s magic—I have two of them.

  In the performance art that is Fox News opinion programming, we performed our emotionally destructive alchemy like any grifter would:

  We first hook your attention with visual images we knew would automatically trigger the emotionally corrosive but powerful feelings of political or cultural fear, hatred, outrage, personal resentment, and deep-seated feelings of social or economic grievance.

  And then, we choreograph the grand finale of the segment so your political/cultural team wins yet another righteous victory and sweet tribal revenge so that you get that cathartic rush of positive emotions and ego stimulation (plus a big dose of feel-good neurochemicals) when your tribal fears are relieved and replaced with the self-esteem/ego building that comes from your team being proven righteously superior again.

  IDENTITY PORN

  Fox News tribal identity addiction falls into the category that addiction professionals call a “process addiction.” Neuroscience has proven that when anyone with a process addiction partakes in his/her binge behavior of choice—whether that behavior is eating, using the internet, gambling, consuming sexual pornography, or watching Fox News’s partisan opinion programming—the reaction in the brain is the same.

  Research psychologists such as Dr. Peggy Drexler tell us that resentment is “really the feeling of indignation in reaction to a real or perceived slight, a sense of insult or inadequacy caused by the actions, comments, or simple existence of someone or something else.” Said more simply, you experience resentment when you feel that you’re not getting your fair share while someone else is getting more than their fair share. And boy oh boy, does cultural and political tribal resentment trigger feelings of hate, anger, and outrage—the addictive trifecta of tribal partisan pornography.

  Dr. Drexler also points out that resentments actually have a benefit for tribal-outrage addicts. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, with more than 2,300 subjects from around the world, found that short-term resentment actually helps to boost self-esteem by allowing us to blame others for our problems.

  Does that sound familiar?

  But in the aggregate, resentment is highly toxic. A 2011 clinical review of the emotional and physiological effects of anger and resentment on the body showed that chronic bitterness can slow metabolism, immune-system function, and organ function.

  Some psychologists even believe that if left unchecked, resentment can turn into a condition known as posttraumatic embitterment disorder, which manifests as anxiety, depression, and fits of rage.

  Key Point: Watching a lot of TV to pass your free time may become addicting, but watching hard news is just habit; there is no “addicting process” to become addicted to. Breaking news may be thrilling, but it’s way too intermittent and unscheduled to be addictive.

  The Fox News addictive-programming process uses addictive anger and resentment to:

  Understand the elderly white conservative viewer’s pre-tribal mindset, which is a compilation of their resentments, indignations, cultural values, religious values, political values, racial perspectives, regional outlooks, and worldviews.

  Scare or outrage the crap out of viewers by boring down on a recently exposed tribal nerve like a psychic dentist with a drill, presenting a heresy or an innate
ly scary image of non-white/non-Christian foreigners, immigrants, or terrorists doing horrible things.

  Produce each seven-minute rigged outcome opinion-debate segment around the carefully selected partisan heresy such that the “fair and balanced” debate is massively rigged for the conservative pundit(s) on the program to . . .

  Deliver the climactic and righteous rhetorical victory for the partisan right-wing viewer to trigger the jolt of dopamine and serotonin that the addict anticipated and knew was coming.

  It costs Fox News about $2 billion a year to create their digital crop of toxic white tribal identity porn. It is planted, fertilized, and then amplified in the old white audience’s brains. To monetize this emotional toxic stew, all the partisan media company has to do is:

  activate one or more primal emotions, and more importantly,

  amplify one or more soul crushing negative visceral narratives for a few minutes and then end the segment with a soul feeding and neurochemical rush that comes from yet another tribal victory or glimmer of hope in order to sell ads to advertisers and content usage licenses to pay TV distributors.

  Repeat, repeat, repeat. It’s a great business—especially if you create the emotional plutonium (the white tribal identity activation and amplification content) and you own part of the nuclear-powered tribal radicalization machine (in FNC’s case the Fox News cable and online digital distribution platform).

  But understand: white tribal identity mongering became an unbelievable business when the world’s digital surveillance platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube began in 2008 to redistribute and retarget Fox News’s white tribal identity content—for free. The power and intensity of the white tribal identity intensity spiral on these emotional manipulation social media platforms is now astonishing.