Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare

by Tobin Smith

  The cable, online, and social media reach of Fox News’s nightly unabashed right-wing cultural and political televangelists.

  Outrage and clickbait mongering right-wing digital streaming media now competing with Fox News.

  Conservative radio’s forty million daily listeners.

  The Evangelical megachurch evangelists and televangelist culture warriors who reach the one-in-four Americans who self-identify as “Evangelical Christians.”

  The reach and scope of American Foxocracy is now jaw dropping. We now have for all intents and purposes a completely separate country-within-a-country that is digitally interconnected with God, guns, megachurches, and political, cultural, and religious evangelists and Fox News televangelists spreading the good word of white nationalism.

  The actual size and audience reach of the American Foxocracy is hard to imagine. And now with Fox News 3.0 making it impossible to determine where Fox News ends and Trumpism starts—that self-reinforcing Foxhole spiral feedback loop now includes Bible study, Sunday services, and the White House briefing room too.

  One person in the mainstream media who understands the very real dangers of the Foxocracy’s tribal fear and hatred-as-entertainment-mongering reality in America is Margaret Sullivan, a media critic for the Washington Post who wrote recently that, “Democracy, if it’s going to function, needs to be based on a shared set of facts, and the news media’s role is to seek out and deliver those facts.” To that, I’d add that news media is a vitally important Fourth Branch providing checks and balances against the three branches of government. The news media should be the nervous system of democracy, to inform the citizens of the democracy with unambiguous facts and analysis in a nonpartisan manner.

  Sullivan continues, “Most news organizations take that responsibility seriously,” even correcting themselves when in error with, “editor’s notes, lengthy corrections, on-air acknowledgment, suspensions, and even firings of errant news people.”

  Is Fox News among the responsible? Nope.

  “The rule at Fox,” Sullivan writes, “is to stonewall outside inquiries and to double down on its mission, described aptly by my colleague Greg Sargent: ‘Fox News is fundamentally in the business of spreading disinformation, as opposed to conservative reportage.’”

  And it’s not just any kind of disinformation. It’s propaganda. Damn near “Trump TV,” as she calls it.

  Finally, she adds, “Despite the skills of a few journalists who should have long ago left the network in protest, Fox News has become an American plague.”

  Is Ms. Sullivan exaggerating? Am I?

  Fox News’s GOP tribal white identity propaganda is almost perfectly manufactured and published according to the formula and rules of creating great propaganda that the late Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in his perfectly named book, How to Make Great Propaganda.

  BTW—my favorite parts of Joseph Goebbels’s self-published twenty-point propaganda playbook, as reported on psywarrior.com but with my comments here in parentheses, are:

  Material from enemy propaganda may be utilized in operations when it helps diminish that enemy’s prestige or lends support to the propagandist’s own objective (e.g., hacked or stolen emails).

  Black rather than white propaganda may be employed when the latter is less credible or produces undesirable effects (e.g., WikiLeaks and birtherism).

  Propaganda must be carefully timed.

  The communication must reach the audience ahead of competing propaganda.

  A propaganda theme must be repeated, but not beyond some point of diminishing effectiveness (would someone advise the Donald Trump of this rule—the “lock her up” chant has gone stale).

  Propaganda must label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans (e.g., “libtards, snowflakes, liberalism is a mental disease, Pocahontas”).

  They must evoke desired responses which the audience previously possesses.

  They must be capable of being easily learned.

  They must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations.

  They must be boomerang-proof.

  Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level.

  Propaganda must reinforce anxiety concerning the consequences of defeat (cultural, racial, or political defeat).

  Propaganda must diminish anxiety (other than concerning the consequences of defeat) which is too high and which cannot be reduced by people themselves.

  Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred (oh boy—that could be a book by itself).

  Propaganda cannot immediately affect strong counter-tendencies; instead it must offer some form of action or diversion, or both.

  Fortunately Joseph Goebbels never had Facebook or YouTube, or Germany might have won World War II. And Ms. Sullivan has missed the important difference between political propaganda and tribal identity activation and validation porn.

  The key point is this: When combined with social media, existential tribal fear and PC-based scorched earth shame and outrage porn spreads like a viral plague. In 2009, with the election of Barack Hussein Obama and the Great Recession, tribal identity porn went digitally viral. That is when Fox News morphed to Fox News 2.0 or what many of our contributors referred to as the “OBN—the Obama Bashing Network.”

  THE NATURAL SPEED OF TRIBAL CONVERSION AND RADICALIZATION WAS DISRUPTED TOO

  What most in America have also failed to connect is that when you add tribalized cultural and political video content and powerfully engaging memes to social media, the entire feedback loop is like my pressure cooking Hot Pot analogy—what used to take tribal hatreds decades or more to fester now takes a few years—or less. We now are just realizing again as a culture founded to wipe out European tribalism that the existential tribal virus never left us—it just became dormant in the Baby Boomers after World War II (with a few short periods of exception) until we made fomenting American tribalism a $100 billion industry.

  The massively important difference today in America is this—in the old days of generational tribalism, before digitized tribal identity activation porn went viral, it could take much of a lifetime or more for a real and not imagined existential tribal enemy narrative to take hold. The tribal enemy narrative had to be passed down from clergy to grandparent to parents to children and then a cultural spark was required to ignite ethnic or cultural or political tribalism before it became activated (e.g., the Catholic/Protestant “Troubles” in my native Northern Ireland).

  Today, FNC’s tribal identity activation and validation porn, consumed via hundreds of millions of 4K digital devices and 4K high definition TV screens streaming massive amounts of tribal identity social media, is both the accelerant and the spark—and Fox News is lighting that fuse as a for-profit enterprise every day.

  And of course, this digital tribal identity activation spiral is not only happening in America. From the “Spring Awakening” in the Middle East, the UK’s Brexit, the rise of white tribal supremacy groups in Europe, and even to the digital recruitment of tens of thousands of ISIS jihadists, evidence of the tribal identity activation power of digital fear and hate tribalism propaganda is in nearly every country in the world.

  Cultural or political tribalism is still a dormant virus in many—but for many more in America it is now an activated virus. Video that delivers the perception or actual reality of tribal oppression and disrespect involuntarily activates innate tribal hostility, bad feelings, and animal spirits. That is what right-wing tribal TV does—it shows you a new way how you are being disrespected and made fun of by the left every day. How you are victimized by malevolent elites who grow stronger every minute while you grow weaker and more vulnerable.

  Ms. Sullivan has it right—it is high time to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously. Maybe we should call the Foxocracy an emotional weapon of mass destruction and a plague on agree-to-disagree democracy.

  When good old politic
al propaganda evolved into tribal activation pornography, we missed that jump to emotional hyperspace. We also missed the unintended social and health consequences.

  Key Point: Our human psychology has a backdoor, and it is very hackable—by fear. Fear suggests loss. Fear involuntarily causes stress. Fear paints a picture of necessary response; thus, stress also involuntarily induces a strong desire to do something. But much of Fox News induced stress is nonactionable—you can’t throw a brick through the TV, as much as you would like to. You can’t drive down to the Mexican border with a shotgun and protect America from invasion. You can’t even stop those “wetbacks” from hanging around the back of Home Depot and stealing good American jobs or fly to China and get your steel foundry job or auto assembly job back (mostly because with twenty-first-century technologies, those jobs don’t exist anymore in China or Japan or Mexico or anywhere else).

  So what? So this: when you add up those thousands of hours of unresolved stress and fear for tens of millions of Americans, the psychologists I consulted with on this book say this amount of constant and unresolved fear and stress can create a condition that’s a cousin to a PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder.

  And for tens of millions of self-identified “proud conservatives/ Deplorables/Republicans”—especially ones over age fifty-five living in the 2,626 counties in Retro America that voted Trump—the unintended consequence of them living constantly inside the digital Foxocracy are almost all mentally and physically negative.

  So yes—for Fox News and its incarnate offspring Donald Trump and Trumpism, “fear is a business strategy—it does keep people watching.”

  But why does fear keep self-identified conservative people watching? And what are the negative mental and physical health outcomes that are compounded for a person over sixty experiencing three or more hours of abject fear every day?

  Well, the latest data from ten separate neurological research projects on fear-induced trauma since 2005 has proven that fear works especially well with self-identified conservatives because they are neurologically hardwired with up to 25 percent more intense reaction to fearful images.

  Did you know that? There are right and left wings in all countries and democracies—and the data is the same. People who self-identify as “conservative” have brains actually wired to be up to 25 percent more sensitive to fearful or disgusting images (more on this important finding in its own chapter).

  Now you understand partly why the saturation coverage of a manufactured “immigrant caravan” on Fox News Channel or an Evangelical televangelist going on for two hours about how you are going to hell if you don’t vote for Donald Trump in 2020 happened—it’s physiology—and it friggin’ works. It captures iris-widened eyeballs and fast-beating hearts—it keeps those eyeballs jacked up so they can be sold to adult diaper companies or collect credit card donations to buy televangelists bigger and newer Gulfstream private jets.

  FNC WHITE TRIBAL IDENTITY ACTIVATION CONTENT WAS ALWAYS THE PLAN

  The outstanding New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer also captures well my understanding of the genesis of the Fox News fear and rage based tribalized “opinion content” model. She reports that while “[Rupert] Murdoch could not have foreseen that Trump would become President, he was a visionary about the audience that became Trump’s base.” She reports in the same article that “in 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. . . . [H]e planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers (the broadcast news model), his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow (the contrived emotional manipulation spiral model) of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast NFL games.”

  The FCC had done a “deal with the devil,” and with the cancellation of America’s Fairness Doctrine we, as we now are finding out, sold our soul to the devil.

  Anyway, Mayer also reports that Blair Levin, at that time the chief of staff at the FCC and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, says, “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”

  Levin argues, “Roger Ailes confirmed (and activated) all your worst instincts—Fox News’s fundamental business model is driving fear.” The formula worked spectacularly well. By 2002, Fox had displaced CNN as the highest-rated cable news network, and it has remained on top ever since.

  As Hundt sees it, “Murdoch didn’t invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, ‘I’ll be the ringmaster in your circus!’”

  Alyson Camerota was a colleague of mine at Fox News for many years and co-host on Fox & Friends. She notes that for years the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot websites” for content, and adds, “Never did I hear anyone worry about getting a second source. The single phrase I heard over and over was ‘This is going to outrage the audience!’ You inflame the viewers so that no one will turn away. Those were the Fox News standards.”

  Yes, those were the standards I worked under for fourteen years, and yes, they still are today. All those journalists and more have done great work digging into what Fox News was actually doing under the protection of the First Amendment and the false flag label from the FCC as a “cable news channel.”

  What I am reporting for the first time is different. What I am reporting and sharing is what those deeply troubling and amazingly powerful psychological and behavioral manipulation tactics and techniques actually are—and why they are so incredibly powerful.

  Fear is just the opening act. What I learned, decoded, and practiced during my fourteen-year tour at Fox News will (I hope) leave you appalled and shocked no matter what your political or cultural perspectives.

  America’s big problem today (okay, one of our big cultural and political problems—my bad) is that for my entire fourteen years at Fox (and to this day), 99 percent of thousands of people over the years who would constantly approach me in public have zero media sophistication or Psychology 101 basics.

  My journey to discover why this mass behavioral event had taken place in front of my eyes for years led me to discover the psychological answers to my basic question. Then, when I added my economic and technology background and experiences, I discovered a much darker and much more disturbing truth.

  That truth shook me to my core. We now have an entire generation of Foxholes who have consumed thousands of hours over more than twenty years of FNC white tribal identity porn. For context, Goebbels got the angry disenfranchised everyday Germans to hate Jews and go to war with Europe with his propaganda in just eight years with nothing more than a book, radio, and movies.

  No one until this book has identified and reported in any depth on these much bigger societal issues, save the brilliant documentary film by Jen Senko, The Brainwashing of My Dad, about how her father lost his mind after innocently falling into what I now call “The Foxocracy” ecosystem.

  The fact is in 2019, the downward gravitational pull of this traumatic negative feedback loop for the most emotionally vulnerable Fox News viewers/streamers has never been seen before at such a mass scale. It has never been seen before because a 24/7 fully digital tribal identity activation and amplification feedback loop located in your car, your PC, and your handheld digital device never existed before.

  In short, many important teachable moments have been missed. But for me, the most important lesson on the emotionally and psychologically toxic Fox News’s form
at of tribalized right-wing political and cultural fear-and-hate based high def video is as follows:

  When Fox News tribal fear-and-outrage based cable TV content became magnified by thirty times the reach and intensity by emotionally targeted social media, the reality for tens of millions of almost exclusively white, over-sixty-aged working and middle class Americans was this: They began to exhibit all the classic behavioral and neurological signs of chronic emotional trauma, behavioral addiction, or—in far too many cases—both.

  But worse, what we failed miserably at is identifying the mental health risk to millions of Fox News addicts (Foxholes) defined as a person who has watched three or more hours a day of FNC’s purposely rigged outcome fear and hate based opinion “debate” performances for ten years or more.

  As many behavioral psychologists I consulted for this book will attest, there is a very real negative behavioral cost that results from their chronic binge-watching and inundation of weaponized tribal fear, hatred, and rage based TV. For many it leads to desocialized behaviors and cultural and political zealotry—that is, becoming a Foxhole. Worst, Foxholes result in many cases the estrangement from family and longtime friends for tens of millions of Americans who are not similarly possessed with such zealous feelings of rage and revenge.

  Truly—the American Foxocracy is so powerful today because nobody addicted to anything wants to consume a less-powerful drug. The new competitors to the Foxocracy have to, by definition, attract eyeballs by providing even more powerful and fearful/disgusting/shocking tribal activation content.

  We all know the drill—you start with one OxyContin pill, then two. If you don’t quit them, you need a higher dosage for the same pain relief. And so on—you build a tolerance level that requires higher dosage to dull the pain.

  The FCC would properly label Fox News as an adult entertainment channel if the FCC actually had a clue about what Fox News is actually doing with its tribal partisan warfare-as-entertainment product. I mean, really—the FCC finally figured out the WWE fixed outcome wrestling “match” scam in 1994 and made them change their name to “entertainment” and disclose their “wrestling match” charade.