by Tobin Smith
continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative social and personal consequences (double check).
You know—“negative consequences” like estrangement from your kids and friends. Divorce. Self-induced higher levels of chronic loneliness. Higher risk of premature death.
RETRO AND METRO AMERICA AND THE GREAT DIVIDE
The Great Divide is a reframing of the blue state/red state concept born after the 2000 election. The Great Divide acknowledges that in America today, there exists such a deep and wide economic, cultural, racial, religious, and political gap that the “United States of America” is, for all intents and purpose, effectively two nations. According to The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America by John Sperling and Suzanne Wiggans Helburn, “Retro America, the one culturally, traditionally and economically rooted in the past, and Metro America, the one culturally heterogeneous, culturally modern and economically focused on the future.” These two Americas are divided along racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, political, and geographic lines as well as economics. The great battle, going on in America, they write, is not Left versus Right; rather, it’s Metro versus Retro America.
Within the two Americas—Metro and Retro America—as Peggy Noonan makes clear we have an epidemic fever of emotional toxicity, and most victims don’t even know it until it’s too late. No one seems to understand how and why they need to slow down and detoxify these Foxhole fever victims to a healthy level where they can reengage with their estranged family and friends.
Don’t believe me? Am I exaggerating the epidemic of emotional mayhem? The American Psychological Association’s recent Stress in America™ poll shows the US at its highest stress level ever. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) say the future of the nation is a very or somewhat significant source of stress, slightly more than perennial stressors like money (62 percent) and work (61 percent). More than half of Americans (59 percent) said they consider this the lowest point in US history that they can remember—including those who lived through World War II and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
When asked to think about the nation in 2019, nearly six in ten adults (59 percent) report that the current social and political divisiveness causes them stress. A majority of adults from both political parties say the future of the nation is a major source of stress, though the number is significantly higher for Democrats (73 percent) than for Republicans (56 percent) and Independents (59 percent).
“We’re seeing significant stress transcending party lines,” said Arthur C. Evans Jr., PhD, APA’s chief executive officer. “The uncertainty and unpredictability tied to the future of our nation is affecting the health and well-being of many Americans in a way that feels unique to this period in recent history.”
My message to you is this—I do care, and I do know how to detoxify many of these eighty million people. But clearly much of this stress comes from the emotional power of Fox News’s huge digital mind share in Retro and parts of Metro America in 2019.
To detoxify is a simple and necessary two-step process. First, people with this Foxhole fever need to be educated and aware of:
How they are stalked by emotional media predators.
How this emotional predation works and what are the mental and physical health risks that come from over-marinating in hours per day of emotionally toxic white identity fear/hate/blame/resentment porn.
This book and my site www.FoxNewsRehab.com will do the trick in most cases. We also plan on holding workshops where the most toxically addicted Fox News viewers live.
But this book and our detoxification workshops are not nearly enough.
If the toxic Foxhole fever epidemic was a diagnosed clinical mental condition, it would statistically only be exceeded by the clinical diagnosis of chronic loneliness and depression in America and the 60 percent higher risk of premature death that comes with it. And the biggest cause of chronic loneliness, as reported by UC San Francisco public health research on loneliness, comes from “pushing people away” from their lives.
What is the number one way old people “push people away” from their lives? When a person becomes that brainwashed ranting-and-raving hyperpartisan political culture warrior who no one can stand to be around any longer.
Look—the original audience engagement thesis when I was working inside Fox News between 2000 and 2013 was “what if we took the most emotionally powerful right-wing partisan issues of the day presented on right-wing talk radio and amplified their emotional impact by using Roger Ailes’s proven emotional manipulation format he pioneered for televised attack ads?”
No one had ever done that before. And because people watching TV got to see the facial cues of their beloved TV host/partisan blood brother protagonists and the faces and ethnicity of their hated libtard antagonists in fully scripted and rigged outcome “opinion debate” segments, the emotional impact was ten times more powerful than radio.
Of course we have had radio and TV partisan attack ads in America for decades—every two years. Fox News co-founder and tribal identity porn guru Roger Ailes’s former TV attack ad shop would create, test, and roll out TV attack ads to carpet bomb their right-wing client’s opponent. That opponent could be another conservative in a primary race, but most likely their target was a liberal in a congressional, Senate, or presidential race. They used weaponized TV and radio ads during the campaign—but saved the most emotionally powerful TV ads for a saturation bombing run in the last few weeks of any campaign.
The objective was always the same:
Find a fear- and hate-inducing negative theme that resonates with voters.
Make it ten times more emotionally powerful via Ailes’s television propaganda arts and techniques.
Then via TV ads, saturation bomb the opponent in the eyes of voters to make the voter hate the opponent more than they hate or dislike your client.
The brilliance was that Ailes’s shop knew they could not in most cases make anyone love their candidate (because of the opponent’s saturation bombing from the left). But all they had to do was make their voting audience hate or fear their candidate less.
The brilliance of the technique on TV was made more powerful by the fact that with Fox, this propaganda was being brought to you under the identity mantle of a “news channel.” Under the pretense of being a news channel, Roger Ailes, his producers, and I created a new form of televised psychological warfare that Americans had never seen: The Fox News seven to eight minute white tribal emotion activation and amplification attack ad disguised as a “political or cultural debate” segment where we duped the viewer into thinking they were watching “the news.” We made Republican Party propaganda infomercials disguised as talk show segments.
The masquerade worked. The older, 94 percent white audience thought they were watching “the news” (and still do). The reason was the decades of conditioning they had from watching the previous form of televised news programming from the three political news networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC. The brain is an amazing piece of equipment, but it has limitations and shortcuts. One shortcut is called “plasticity.” This is where the brain sets up contextual shortcuts or “frame circuits” to understand what it is seeing or doing. Fox News channel was a “news channel,” and therefore to your sixty-plus-year-old brain it was news.
The other reason was CER—conditioned emotional response. Think of those white rat experiments in a cage with two water bottles—one pure and one laced with cocaine. After a while the rats exclusively drink the cocaine water—who knew?
Or Pavlov’s dog. Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian conditioning) is learning through association and was discovered by Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. In simple terms, two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response in a person or animal. Classical conditioning is why most non-news opinion programming opens with a red banner and the host saying “Fox News Alert” blah blah blah. The faux alert banner and “This is a Fox News
Alert” claptrap are pure Pavlovian conditional response tactics.
When I say Fox News’s experiment in clandestine emotional predation and manipulation “jumped the rails” and morphed into an emotional plague, it’s because two things happened to this powerful white tribal identity content that they never thought would happen or ever dreamed would happen:
One is emotionally vulnerable senior aged cable viewers (the current median age of Fox News viewers is sixty-eight) who already on average watched 7.2 hours of television per day started binge-watching Fox News seven to eight minute white tribal attack ads disguised as a “political or cultural debate” for 3-5 hours every day.
Neither the producers nor I ever considered what would happen to a person’s state-of-mind and general behavior if an older person marinated their brain in thousands of hours per year of the most emotionally powerful televised attack ads and GOP propaganda instead of just a few random minutes of attack ads during election seasons.
And then the biggest unexpected and emotionally powerful event of all:
What would happen if a new technology called “social media” took their already emotionally powerful hyperpartisan attack ads and diced the most emotionally engaging ones (which they knew to target from their emotional surveillance data) into three-minute digital grenades that would saturate bomb one hundred million people every month via social media streaming?
We all understand that tribal behavior and instinct is in our DNA—it’s an indelible part of human nature. But evolution especially sensitized humans to danger most of all. Yet in our modern lives, our tribal nature has remained basically dormant since (1) most of us no longer live in actual tribes and (2) our sense of personal safety—the most powerful and important part of being human—is not dependent on joining and staying in a literal tribe.
What happened with millions of conservative viewers is FNC’s white tribal identity porn, when combined with 24/7 emotional engagement based social media retargeting, exploded the hyper-partisan activation rate for millions of previously “agree-to-disagree” Americans who cooked their minds for thousands of hours inside the world’s first digital white tribal identity radicalization factory—and like Peggy Noonan described so well, the explosion in tribalized right-wing Americans changed America.
THE WORLD CHANGED FOR FOX NEWS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
When Fox News started in 1995, there was not much emotionally activating or animating stuff going on. Yes, Bill Clinton was POTUS, but the economy was humming, the Internet Age had started, and FNC never got more than 100,000 viewers. There was no TV streaming. There was no social media like today.
But Fox News version 1.0 caught a break—the Monica Lewinsky affair was exposed. OMG that was right-wing partisan gold. Fox mined that vein of pearl-clutching moral panic like the professional emotional grifter they are. But still viewership per day was only 50,000ish—that was until the 2000 POTUS election and the “hanging chad.” FNC viewership and online users leaped to 250,000 and pulled back to a steady 150,000.
Fast-forward to 2008 and Fox 2.0. Fox News transformed into a lethal white tribal identity amplification spiral machine in 2008 because of:
The election of Barack Hussein Obama, which caused an explosion of white over-fifty-five-aged Retro American viewership of Fox News’s white tribal identity activation and amplification content.
The invention and exponential growth of a new industry we should have called “surveillance capitalism”—the hyper-targeted social media digital surveillance architectures which first exploded out of stealth mode in 2008 with Facebook and YouTube.
The 2007–2009 Great Recession, which brutally destroyed the finances and primary wealth repository for many of FNC’s 95 percent white Retro American viewers (their home equity). Viewers accurately perceived Metro Americans and elites and Wall Street got bailed out by the federal government while they were left to the wolves to fend for themselves. Embers of socioeconomic and class resentment were, by Fox News, fanned into raging fires (remember the Tea Party? Who put dozens of angry white Tea Party leaders on the air for thousands of hours? Fox News).
By 2010, Fox News and social media had become symbiotically conjoined. Social media engagement depended on getting free, emotionally engaging content from emotion-engaging media. Social media platforms used Fox News’s emotionally radioactive white tribal fear and hate porn content as bait to surveil and then hyper-target consumers for digital advertisers (and Russian trolls later on—another unintended consequence).
Remember, Facebook and YouTube algorithms never send you less emotionally engaging content—they are programmed to send you (and auto-play) incrementally more emotionally escalating content. That emotional content spiral keeps your eyeballs and brain engaged to maximize their emotionally targeted ad monetization platform.
The power of the Great Recession produced the destruction of household wealth and jobs at a mass scale. It also delivered the final economic death blow to most of the regions within America’s twenty-six mostly twentieth-century industrial and resource extraction base states we economists describe as “Retro America.” At the same time, it supercharged the twenty-first-century economic base and balance sheets of many middle class and up living in the twenty-four states of Metro America as their digital and knowledge-based economies thrived.
The economic torpedoing of both Retro and parts of Metro America created a new, vast, and uniquely American socioeconomic class—America’s working poverty class. In June 2018 we got the actual household economic data of this new massive American working poverty class economists call ALICE Households: “Asset Light, Income Constrained, and Working.”
I’ve unfortunately come to label this new working poverty class as America’s grievance and resentment class. What distinguishes America’s new working poverty class? What makes them the grievance and resentment class? According to the latest Federal Reserve household economic data:
Forty-two percent of Americans don’t make $15 an hour.
Forty-five percent of America’s 155 million households can’t scrape up more than $400 in cash liquidity in a pinch.
Seventy-two percent of all American households live paycheck to paycheck.
About 90 percent of Americans have experienced stagnant or declining wages since 1980.
Working poverty households—ALICE Households—are defined as having a household income above the poverty line but below the median household income of $62,000. They are juggling (and sometimes missing) one or two payments a month of basic minimum middle-class life.
This means they are one lost job, one injury, or one auto accident away from moving in with a relative or going on State/Federal assistance.
This means about 115 million Americans now experience chronic economic trauma.
If you add the additional 14 million households in actual poverty, twenty-first-century capitalism is not working for nearly two-thirds of American households.
Where does all that grievance and resentment anger in Foxholes come from? Where does Fox News driven populist Trumpism come from? It comes because in 2019 nearly two thirds of Americans are bringing a twentieth-century skillset to a twenty-first-century knife fight.
Not surprisingly, many of the folks whose inflation-adjusted wages have not risen since 1980 or earlier are scared, angry, blameful, or all three. Their life expectancy (depending on age and where they live) is about fifteen years less than a person the same age living behind my gated neighborhood in Metro America. They don’t have a stock portfolio or financial cushion to get past what the top 20 percent of American households simply cover with savings or a margin loan on their investment portfolio.
What does this massively spread out economic carnage and trauma have to do with Fox News? One hell of a lot—it’s played a major role in the real story behind the Fox News ascension. The descending income and wealth of the American working poverty class fueled the ascension of Fox News’s powerful tribal blame, resentment, and victimization narratives�
�which in turn fueled the ascension of the Donald Trump’s Presidential Apprentice TV reality show.
The Fox News tribal identity grift was from its beginning intended to build the most psychologically sophisticated and emotionally powerful 24/7 right-wing tribal activation and propaganda infomercial ever created. The original grift was that we disguised this content under the cover of a cable “news” network geared to people who were used to trusting the news. As Rolling Stone journalist Tim Dickinson reported in 2012, Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes was able to “pioneer a new form of political campaign—one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault of public opinion.”
Dickinson even got the metaphor right. “The network—at its core—is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.” And thousands of free seven-minute political ads watched by tens of millions of Americans changed a whole lot of votes at the margin.
It should not come as a surprise that in my time at Fox News, the real Fox News agenda was known around the New York City headquarters offices as “the Liberal Death Star.” Since I left Fox News 2.0 in 2013, the Liberal Death Star morphed into Fox News 3.0. It has created an entire American Foxocracy ecosystem enabled by a set of extremely powerful unintended transformations in technology, in political content regulations, and in the new economics of twenty-first-century America.
IT’S THE FOX NEWS GRIFT, BABY
If you are great at the art of the grift—and with the possible exception of Donald Trump there was no better emotional grifter ever born than Roger Ailes—the grift feels so good that the griftee (in this case, a cable viewer or online streamer) doesn’t even mind being grifted.
In fact, they don’t mind being grifted: For the average Fox News viewer, who feels they are in a constant mental state of siege, traumatic victimhood, and cultural persecution, their visit to Fox News’s tribalized right-wing righteousness confirmation bias mental health spa is the best part of their day. And that tribal confirmation spa effect happens by careful design.
