by Tobin Smith
I even gave the whole rigged outcome programming production process a code name in my iPhone notes section—I jokingly called my tribal identity TV notes “The Fox News Playbook of Tribal Warfare.”
I also reaffirmed that many of the other contributors I hung out with or performed with were as clueless as the audience about the Fox News/Roger Ailes grift and production dirty tricks.
None of them got the daily memo. Fox News personnel had grown increasingly paranoid of being turned in and fired for sharing the playbook or sharing the “opposition research” that came from the fourteenth floor of 1211 Sixth Avenue. Nobody was willing to send it outside the building, really. Note: The Fox News basement is where the cramped “news” pods were—the secret “Research” department looking for the next made-up or contrived moral or cultural panic bomb we could drop on Obama plied their trade from luxurious offices on the fourteenth floor. I am sure this psy ops team is still there today.
Most contributors that I worked with were only at Fox via satellite, rather than on set in the New York City studios where the production teams worked their magic. Those contributors were mostly just happy to “build their brand” and pundit bona fides performing on Fox News.
But then everything changed for me and America in July 2015.
On my office TV I watched in astonishment as a real life WWE Hall of Fame grifter and longtime, hard core binge-watching Foxhole (the same certifiable crazy blowhard ignoramus I, as a guest anchor, had interviewed multiple times for Fox Business) glided down a gold-tinged escalator in Trump Tower NYC just like the old Gorgeous George pro wrestling character I had watched as a kid.
I watched, mortified, as this real estate mogul who had inherited every advantage and now had become a low-rent reality TV grifter—the one and thankfully only Donald J. Trump—morphed into a professional Foxhole. Trump performed a flawless twenty-minute Fox News opinion host impersonation to the entire world—and without a Fox News opinion segment producer!
Worse, Trump had my unofficial Fox News Tribal Warfare Playbook down cold—and it was still only in my head, for crying out loud! Was he getting the FNC daily memo too? Trump’s only deviation from our emotional grift was to dispense with the coded racial language and metaphors used at Fox News and actually call Mexicans “rapists and murderers!” Holy crap—you can’t run for POTUS and say that crap on TV! I said to myself. (Okay, I did not say “crap.”)
By the end of his POTUS campaign kickoff in NYC, to my utter amazement and chagrin, the Donald from Queens I knew as a long-time Big Apple liberal and Democratic Party member had performed the perfect grift. He morphed into a Fox News opinion televangelist clone and was channeling the highly trained conservative populist performance artist Pat Buchanan too. As a candidate, he said things and used words that if I used them on the air, I would have been fired.
He used every Roger Ailes/Fox News production trick you’ll find in this book. And since this book that you are reading did not exist, he had amazingly absorbed the entire Fox News tribal warfare playbook via osmosis—and I am sure ten thousand hours of “executive time” watching Fox News.
To top this all off, at first even Roger Ailes hated Donald Trump! But truth be told, Donald Trump is truly a white tribal activation and validation grifting genius. He just switched political sides and morphed into a right-wing culturist and political populist because he, above all else, has a feral sense of the opportunity for a world-class grift. He never thought he’d win, as the truth tellers close to him have disclosed. He just thought he could build his audience and brand and who knows—a Trump TV channel?
Trump had learned what I had learned after performing in thousands of opinion segment appearances—how to inject the right-wing audience’s bulging veins with the emotional stimulants of fear, hate, contempt, resentment, victimhood, and above all liberal/PC-induced shame.
It did not hurt him either that his Deplorables had suffered massive amounts of chronic economic trauma or that cultural and political resentment was overflowing from the psyches of old white working-class America and PC-hating business conservatives.
He spoke simply, at the fifth-grade level I was taught to use by Fox producers (“Hey Toby—you wanna take your rhetoric down about five notches to the real world and make your point in American?”).
Most important—the Trumpian form of tribal activation and cultural validation had two amazing results for the traditional political news industry: he jacked up both right- and left-wing tribal identity and validation TV networks (and the social media giants who had become tribal identity programming distributors). With Trump performances to sell, they were all making a ton of money.
With Metro America and Retro America seemingly at war, we now had a self-reinforcing feedback loop on both sides: What was Democratic/liberal cognitive dissonance content was also Republican/Deplorable confirmation bias! The more fear, anger, and hatred sewn and fertilized by Fox News’s fully weaponized tribal identity porn aimed at its Retro America audience, the more similar levels of fear, disgust, and anger grew in the liberal Metro America trenches.
Both sides were (and still are) in a manic race to the bottom of their partisan audience’s brain stem to stoke ever higher levels of involuntary fight-or-flight reflex.
Trump not only tapped into his audience’s deep reservoirs of shame, contempt, and resentment that had come into their psyches via Obama’s scolding politically correct lectures (“Listen to me—let me tell you what it means to be American . . .”). Trump’s candidacy gave birth to the “Foxocracy,” a fully aligned, twenty-four-hour, TV-to-pulpit united front of hatred toward liberals.
Trump gave his mostly Fox News audience what they had only dreamed of: permission to break free. “Thank you, Jesus!” they exclaimed—and strangest of all, the most religious part of the Foxocracy really did say “Thank you, Jesus and God, for giving us this thrice married, porn star banging, pathological liar and all-around sociopath Donald Trump!”
How did that happen?
The Fox News/Trump TV/Christian televangelist grift sells right-wing cultural heaven on earth—a very real emotional day-and-night spa and safe place from being constantly shamed by Metro America.
Anyway, after hearing and meeting Trump’s “base” up close (in the rallies I attended out of deep curiosity), I also could not help but notice that the #MAGA/“Lock Her Up” T-shirt wearing folks spoke exactly like Trump.
Why? Well now it’s obvious—they had binge-watched thousands of hours of fake Fox News “debates.” Those stadiums were packed with a lot of Foxholes. They also had been preconditioned for Trumpism from forty years of listening to right-wing talk radio in their cars and trucks. They loved all the “trumped up” accusations and half-baked truths he was slinging because he validated and normalized what they already had come to subjectively believe as objective “facts” for decades.
But psychologically more important, they wanted to believe his delusions and illusions as objective fact, like WWE wrestling fans do. Trump’s Deplorables were on the same page because they spoke the same language, and he was selling a more intense version of the shows they’d been binge-watching on FNC for twenty years.
Wow, I thought in stunned silence, Did I just see what I think I saw? Did Fox News spawn an incarnate version of itself?
And why not? We at Fox News (and the entire partisan conservative political media ecosystem before FNC) had already prepped and conditioned a huge audience for the new Trump TV reality show. What I never expected was that the audience would soon number some 65 million, or 35 percent of all American voters in 2016.
Holy smokes!—Trump was doing our tribal fear-hate-rage activation shtick better than we were. He also, ironically, became the financial savior for the beaten-down “fake news mainstream media.” Like I mentioned—the “failing” New York Times reached $1 billion in digital-only subscriptions in 2019. When Trump first went down the escalator in Trump Tower, they were losing money.
Soon, this mesmerizing
WWE/Fox News/SportsCenter mashup cartoon character protagonist with his spray-on orange face and scalp-reduction hair-sprayed pompadour became ratings gold. He said everything I could not say on TV—overtly racist things on live TV and on Twitter. If I had said these things, it would have gotten me fired or kicked off Twitter.
But then, when social media cut up his left-wing tweets and trolling into three-minute racial and cultural fear and hate digital grenades, out blazed trillions of clicks and tweets around the world. People over fifty-five became the fastest-growing audience for Facebook and Twitter. Unfriending Deplorable “Trumpers” in a blaze of sanctimonious glory became its own glorious sporting event. I should have created a “Best Unfriended Deplorable Rant-of-the-Day” blog page!
Trump even out-sloganeered Fox News founder and televised tribal shame savant Roger Ailes—Roger’s “fair and balanced” dog whistle—wink wink—had become “Make America Great Again” (read: “make America white and 1980 again”). He also stole “America First” from Charles Lindbergh and the “America First” isolationist party formed in the late 1930s on a platform of keeping America out of World War II.
Those white, small city, or rural Retro Americans I had met in Arkansas and my PC-resentful country club Republican friends connected and bonded with Trump as if he had just delivered his own sermon on Mount Fifth Avenue. (The key word and concept here is “psychically and emotionally connected”—more on that vitally important concept in a bit.)
They started using his words and terms. They did not care about his profound mental, professional, and moral deficiencies. They called the Washington Post and CNN and the New York Times and NBC and other media outlets “fake news” and “enemies of the people” as if they were all of a sudden living in some neofascist banana republic.
And then—just like Jesus of Nazareth—the Donald of Queens disciples did come and join him—although he taught them quite a different set of the Beatitudes except the eleventh one—“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Holy crap, I thought—it was undeniable—these folks were just like the ones I met in southern Arkansas who binge-watched six hours a day of Fox News tribal fear and hate content!
They had finally found their profane anti-PC and anti-Obama messiah, and to mix metaphors, they flocked to see his unscripted shit show just to hear him say something that they knew their hated PC crowd would find outrageous.
To stay in the Old Testament, it was like Trump was a modern-day digital Moses who’d come to help these slaves of liberalism break free of their hated chains of political correctness. He led them in cursing the hated liberal pundits with digital locusts for all their constant PC scolding and chronic moral superiority beatdown.
It was breathtaking for me to watch from the context of a former Fox News personality . . . and, well, you know the rest. When The Donald became the Republican nominee for president of the United States, I knew what I had to do. I needed (at least for my own sanity) to finally connect all the tribal warfare-as-entertainment product dots and figure out why the Fox News tribal warfare playbook was so psychologically and viscerally powerful that it had turned this vile New York City con man into a working class everyman’s Pied Piper.
All of the above events brought me to my atonement part—how much had I played a role in enabling the rise of this Trumpism/Deplorables cult? To save my own soul, I needed to really dig deep, put my big boy analyst pants on, and get some real answers to the real question: “What the fuck just happened and why?”
I hoped to convince as many people as possible that the Fox News grift and the “Only I Can Solve America’s Problems” Trumpian con were the same con but with different colored hair and makeup. I hoped I could help prove to anyone that would listen that Trump’s shtick was just a nuclear-powered version of a Fox News host but with the added risk of an actual nuclear disaster. You know—to add more dramatic effect—“stay tuned till next week’s episode and see if I drop the bomb on Iran.”
In other words—I had a world-class case of Trump derangement syndrome.
I finally had a political tribe—the Never Trump tribe. I became a “Trumphole”—which is as obnoxious as a Foxhole, trust me!
By May 2017 I had collected my notes and Fox News memories and written a short essay published on Medium.com entitled “Fear & Unbalanced: Confessions of a 14-Year Fox News Hitman.” When my social media following and liberal digital media discovered it, it went viral. Hundreds of thousands of readers later, I knew I had just touched the surface of the audience I felt I needed to reach. The article was named one of the best examples of journalism in 2017 by the Time Warner media critic (take that, Woodward!). I later crowdfunded a paperback expanded version of my article.
And then the good people at Diversion Books said, “Toby—you have to tell the rest of your story to the world. Think of the New England Patriots—how would the Rams have done if they knew the entire Pats Super Bowl playbook before they played in the dullest Super Bowl in history! We will publish the real Fox News tribal warfare-as-entertainment story and expose the playbook of the entire Fox News tribal identity activation grift for the world to see and judge. Your book will make a difference” (cue the angels singing and the atonement bells ringing).
So here we are—I present you the con men grifting behind and in front of the curtain and the grift they are working for the entire world to see and judge.
In the eighteen months since the original Medium.com article, in addition to my editing and publishing day job at www.transformityresearch.com making self-directed investors hopefully richer, I have researched, analyzed, and written “the rest of the story.”
I hope Foxocracy in a small way brings some justice to the emotional and relationships wreckage I helped Fox News bring to millions in America and American families. I can tell you after reading dozens of social and political psychology research papers and books, and then interviewing more than a dozen political and social science experts and psychologists covering every aspect of the base psychology that is the driving emotional engine or tonic behind high-powered tribal identity activation porn, I feel like I earned a master’s degree in “Foxology.” Plus a minor in tribal psychology and maybe a concentration in involuntary limbic system neuroscience.
But in all seriousness, after the Medium.com article went viral, I also received a much more personal and compelling reason to complete my quest—I read thousands of gripping and tearful letters and emails from the people on my social media. All of these thousands of notes described people whose lives and family relationships had been literally destroyed by Fox News. I also met Jen Senko, the director and producer of The Brainwashing of My Dad, which tells the story of her own father’s decline from what I now call Fox News brain.
Then I got an even greater sense of urgency in the fall of 2018. That is when America witnessed acts of political violence by extreme radicalized Fox News addicted zealots in Washington, DC, and a Pittsburgh synagogue.
I truly believe political and cultural activation media literacy has to be now considered essential for all voters. It needs to be spread throughout America just like basic “social media literacy” and knowledge of social media’s powerful algorithmic emotional manipulation shenanigans were exposed by insiders from the social media industry (undoubtedly atoning for their sins against America too.)
I mean really—if Facebook is “dangerous to 250 million Americans” as was claimed in their congressional hearing for simply redistributing this powerful tribal activation media, what does that make Fox News and the other tribal partisan political arms merchants who are the ones who actually create and publish this powerful tribal political/cultural activation media?
Finally, for what it’s worth, here is the point most people miss about Fox News addiction: The Fox News junkies I’ve com
e to call Foxholes are not addicted to “political news media.” True inside baseball politics is addictive to a relatively small group of nerdy political junkies and political professionals. I lived in DC for twenty-four years—political junkies laugh at tribal TV commentators like me at their favorite watering hole as “retail politics.”
As the saying goes, “Washington, DC, is Hollywood for ugly people” and not perfectly coiffed blond hair bimbos with perfect white teeth. Real political news media nerds get their dopamine jolt and serotonin high from scoring killer STFU argument points against adversarial contemporaries that they respect while drinking in bars on the campaign trail.
Fox News junkies, on the other hand, are definitely not addicted to right-wing tribal activation and validation porn for nerdy political policy fascinations. What I finally discovered was what they get off on by watching a faux Fox News “debate” are not the debate points—they get off on the wonderful feelings they get from:
being in an ideological cognitive dissonance-free safe room especially created for self-identified conservatives/Deplorables
and watching their smug, PC, holier-than-thou mortal enemy eviscerated on TV by their tribal hero/imaginary buddy.
Fox News addicts do not get off on feeling smarter—they get off on having their righteous conservative political and cultural worldview’s superiority validated. They get high when they are carefully and artfully led to perceive they and their tribal heroes and teammates are winning a never-ending existential cultural holy war that is morally and intellectually righteous.
Mental health professionals tell me Fox News tribal activation porn is addictive because it:
