Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare

by Tobin Smith

  Video tribal identity porn is massively more powerful than conservative talk radio—let’s end that misunderstanding now.

  CHAPTER 6

  How the Fox News “Fair and Balanced” Tribal Warfare Playbook Works

  Okay—now it’s time for you to see the FNC white tribal warfare playbook and how it works and why it works so amazingly well.

  “Toby you cry at movies and TV shows? Dude—do you have that liberal gene and did not tell me? Real conservatives don’t cry at movies or TV shows. Real conservatives get emotional about their kids, their dog, when they hear “Taps” or the National Anthem or when their team wins the World Series or Super Bowl. Only liberals cry at make-believe movies, opera, and TV cultural arts bullshit.” That’s what a Fox News executive producer told me when I mistakenly told him I cried like a baby watching Les Misérables on Broadway.

  Another veteran news executive producer asked me: “So Toby, did you go to a liberal arts college? Did you study liberal arts?”

  Me: “Yes—and finance and marketing.”

  Executive Producer to me: “Well forget that liberal arts shit if you want to be a host on Fox News. As far as Fox News is concerned, there are two kinds of Americans: 33 percent who graduated from college and 66 percent who did not. By a large margin the majority of our audience did not either attend or graduate from college.

  “Within our college graduates in America there are two basic kinds of educations—general liberal arts where you learn all that liberal airy fairy crap or specific occupational credentialing that gets you a good job. Very few of our audience attended a liberal arts college or took much (if any) college or post-graduate liberal arts or humanities courses in the first place. Only people who get to Fox News by hitting the wrong button are liberal arts majors.” (In fact, most actual print and TV journalists go to liberal arts colleges and studied media or journalism at a liberal arts college/university.)

  But here was the real kicker in what she told me: “If you want to understand our audience and see the world through their eyes, listen to classic and contemporary country music and go watch and listen to an Evangelical televangelist—to our primary audience, country music and TV televangelism are the ‘liberal arts.’”

  After a number of psychotherapists and PTSD treatment specialists read my first draft of Foxocracy, their conclusion could be summed up this way:

  Toby you may not be aware of this, but the behaviors you describe and the real story your letters from people who have lost parents, siblings, and longtime friends to Fox News derangement and desocialization syndrome tell are symptoms of repetitive trauma syndrome—a cousin to PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder happens after a single major trauma or a series of repeated deeply traumatic events. What you describe are people who are currently traumatized by intense, repetitive, and ongoing economic or cultural traumas.

  What you call “Fox News brain” is actually more accurately described as an ongoing unresolved cultural and economic chronic traumatic syndrome.

  Fox News’s Senior Executive of Political Affairs and former Roger Ailes employee Kathy Arleigh told me this fact of life early in my Fox News career (here I paraphrase many conversations): “Toby you gotta understand this—any video content that causes involuntary physical and emotional arousal or has an automatic conditioned emotional response is pornography. Playboy is in pornification of women business. To condition you to subscribe or buy their magazine, they weaponize physical female sexuality with a camera and Photoshop.

  “When a guy grabs the magazine and has opened the centerfold a few times and gets sexually aroused, he has created an involuntary emotional and physical arousal response and brain pattern. He has been conditioned by opening his previous issues and boom gets a boner.

  “We at Fox News are in the pornography of white right-wing cultural and economic fear and hate business—we weaponize images of fear and disgust and storylines that are fearful and disgusting to conservatives because by the time they get to watching Fox News, they already have developed a conditioned emotional reaction to a picture of Hillary or Bill or Harry Reid or Muslims. And if they don’t, after watching enough of our right-wing porn or propaganda, they will—and then we own their brain stem.

  “Here is the kicker: We are in a war with two hundred other cable and network TV channels to get and keep an audience’s attention—but once we have made it to an old white folk’s brain stem and we get a conditioned emotional response, we own their attention.

  “Once we own their brain stem, we keep presenting them with more fearful or outrageous images and content until the segment ends and they experience the feeling of righteous tribal victory and a happy ending. When they shake their fist at their TV and put their arms up in victory when they watch you verbally shred their viscerally hated tribal enemy, we’ve won—that’s the happy ending, and we know we will get them back after the commercial—which is how we monetize their attention. No happy ending, channel changes.”

  THE FOXOCRACY AND PORN

  My guess is when you think of the term porn, you think of the traditional definition; filmed sex acts watched to sexually arouse the viewer(s). This definition and understanding is not wrong, of course. But in the context of Fox News the key words are “emotionally arouse.”

  Today the term porn (thanks to social media) is used loosely to mean any video or image that “arouses primal emotions.” Thanks to the constant digital emotional surveillance machine that we inaccurately label social media, we now hop online and view three-minute emotionally arousing videos of kitties and puppies and baby elephants, depending on what Facebook’s or YouTube’s digital surveillance says you are most emotionally susceptible to viewing.

  And of course we now call those social media images, videos, or the social messaging memes “kitty/puppy/baby elephant porn” for fun.

  There is of course nothing sexual about those cute or funny videos, yet we call them “porn” because they are shamelessly produced and algorithmically streamed into your social media for one and only one reason: to evoke an involuntary, conditioned emotional reaction and mild cognitive engagement. Your “awww” and “how cute” reaction is a conditioned emotional response that is evoked involuntarily (unless you hate puppies or cats—how dare you!).

  Another term for placing smiling puppy videos in your social media is “targeted emotional manipulation.” Via digital surveillance (remember, you agreed to this in return for a free social media app!) you have revealed your personal interest in and emotional susceptibility (via clicks, likes, and shares) for puppy porn or kitty porn or whatever—and that is why it is in your social media stream.

  But it is really there because this digital surveillance machine revealed your exploitable emotional weaknesses. Facebook or YouTube shamelessly provides you with a stream of ever cuter and more powerful puppy/kitty/lion cubs/baby elephant porn until you forgot you just spent an hour on your phone or digital device.

  And, of course, during that lost hour you were fed a dozen or more highly targeted advertisements.

  And finally, this is my TED Talk that I plan on making after this book comes out:

  You wanna know what the real incredibly powerful and amazing Jedi Mind Trick at Fox News is—you know the one that turns normal agree-to-disagree people into stark raving mad right-wing lunatics who watch five hours of Fox News opinion programming and never turn their home TV off of Fox News?

  The trick is this: Roger Ailes and his team of right-wing attack ad producers used what they learned from twenty years of learning how to make people believe magical thinking or hate the other candidate more than they hated their client via their one-minute right-wing attack or propaganda ads.

  At Fox News, the same team already were masters of how to make already scared and frightened, economically and culturally traumatized over-fifty-five-aged white people living in Retro America believe that Retro America actually still has hope of winning its economic and cultural war against Metro America.

  W
hy is that an amazing Jedi Mind Trick? The Retro/Metro cultural and economic war is over. Retro America totally and unequivocally lost to Metro America twelve years ago. But when watching Fox News, they would never know it! Retro America has 42 percent of the US population but generates just 32 percent of the American economy. Metro America has 58 percent of the population but generates about 68 percent of the US economy: The economic war is over by a landslide, and Metro America won. Eighty percent of the entire United States lives in urban regions.

  The incredible power of the Fox News Jedi Mind Trick is we make them believe they still have a chance to win the twenty-first-century economic and culture wars—when they in fact have

  No chance of winning.

  No hope of winning.

  Are in fact losing more and more ground every minute of every day.

  Now that is an amazing feat—and okay really, it’s more of a Jedi Mind Grift!

  But the most amazing thing? Donald Trump stole Fox News’s Retro America con and made it his own! He stole our fantasy narrative and told Retro Americans that they could have their 1980s economy and jobs back if:

  We got tough with China and Mexico that stole their jobs.

  Mexico paid to build a wall on our southern border.

  We got rid of illegal immigrants who lowered their wages.

  We started and won import tariff wars with the rest of the world.

  We nominated enough probusiness Supreme Court Justices.

  And we turned Obamacare into Trumpcare with much lower premiums, much lower prices, and much better coverage.

  The final battle of the Retro/Metro war for economic and cultural supremacy was when Metro America emerged from the Great Recession and soared and most of Retro America did not.

  But really, the Metro/Retro America battle was over in 1994 when Metro America brought China and its eight hundred million sets of hands into the low-skill assembly supply chain willing to perform low-skilled manual labor work for $5 a day and room and board and this thing called “the internet browser” was invented and the entire world began to be become digitized.

  Republicans didn’t understand what happened—they thought “globalism” was gonna be great for white collar America (they knew it would be amazing for big corporate profits too). It turned out that the only globalism that benefitted working class America was Walmart. To middle and working class Americans, Walmart is the only globalism they know: They just don’t know that Walmart’s global supply chain cost them millions of low-skilled manufacturing and assembly line jobs.

  On Fox News opinion programming, they have created this fake Retro America liturgy like that Wag the Dog movie where Dustin Hoffman makes people believe that the moon landing was fake only in reverse. On Fox News, Retro Americans never see or process that irrefutable fact that not only did Metro America win the economic and cultural war by a landslide in 2009, that economic and culture war is now turning into a slaughter.

  In fact, Metro America pulls even farther ahead every day:

  a tech start-up is launched.

  that tech company is funded by Metro Americans venture capital.

  another Metro American IPO comes to market.

  a kid graduates with a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degree.

  a famous Evangelical fundamentalist televangelist scares away another Metro American company from moving to Retro America

  or that minister convinces another Retro American kid that the Christian Bible is not a book of metaphors, analogies, and parables whose purpose is to teach you the ethics of evolved non-tribal humanity and a moral code via storytelling written by hundreds of people over hundreds of years but instead the inerrant creationist word of God and Jesus to be taken literally and not metaphorically.

  another Retro American dies a premature death (with 20 percent lower life expectancy relative to Metro Americans) because of poor access or inability to pay for healthcare, suicides, drug overdoses, gunshot wounds, obesity, alcoholism, and the most deadly disease of all: chronic visceral loneliness or hopelessness with all the mental and physical health destruction that they create.

  That is now the entire Fox News format:

  Rule #1. Never ever let them know their tribe already lost the Retro/ Metro America economic and cultural war in 2009 and are now getting slaughtered by Metro America.

  Rule #2. Do everything you can think of to convince these Retro Americans that there is still hope to crush the evil liberal empire if they just pass more tax cuts and deregulations and let Retro American corporations crush the mental disease of liberalism and progressivism and let prosperity trickle down to the working and middle class again.

  Rule #3. Never ever forget Rules 1 and 2.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Few Key Stories to Illustrate the Playbook

  I’m going to share with you all the most important stories and lessons learned from my days at Fox News. I hope they give you the insight you need to understand how Fox News works behind the curtain. Then after you have seen the playbook, we’ll talk more about the why—why the FNC tribal warfare playbook is so psychologically powerful.

  My first story is about how the immense manipulative power of televised political attack advertising got baked into the FNC white tribal identity production playbook.

  One day after watching one of our favorite TV shows that was saturated with political attack commercials, my Canadian born and raised wife Marjorie asked me, “Toby—how is it possible for a candidate to run these fear and hate based commercials on TV that don’t talk about the issues of the campaign? In Canada these are not allowed.” (Point-of-fact: they are not allowed in any other modern democracy in the world.) “These ads don’t tell me why I should vote for the candidate—they just tell me why I should hate the other candidate. What kind of campaign is that? What kind of democracy do you have here?” (I should add that she eventually did become a US citizen, bless her heart.)

  Pre-Fox News, I did not have a good answer for her question. I had become numb to these attack ads—they had been around for most of my adult life. What I was not aware of when I started with Fox News as a paid market/economic analyst and contributor in 2000 was that before there was a Fox News Channel, co-founder Roger Ailes was the father and master of political TV attack ads. Roger and his partner Lee Atwater literally invented and mastered the dark arts of the uniquely American political attack ad (just ask Michael Dukakis).

  TRIBALISM

  Tribal in this case does not of course mean you are a member of an actual ethnic tribe—like a Navajo or Tutsi ethnic tribe.

  To be “tribal” means that, as a result of marinating your partisan brain in hatred, fear, and resentment media for thousands of hours, your proud political partisan identity has literally reverted to your primal caveman operating system. That means that as a tribal or tribalized partisan, you view your opposing political or cultural outgroups as an existential (“life or death”) threat to you and your family.

  Key term—existential threat. As a tribalized hyperpartisan you see opposing political or cultural tribes with a binary (all good or all bad—black and white—no gray), zero sum (for me to win, you have to lose), existential/life-or-death warfare (it’s you or me brother—and it’s going to be me) prism of logic.

  Key terms here again are existential threat and perspective. If you are a tribal partisan animal lover, you might stand outside an animal shelter and spray paint the cars of people who brought in pets to take back to the pound. You might bring home half a dozen dogs or cats because they were at risk of euthanasia. You are a hard-core hyperpartisan, and you are proud of it.

  If you are a tribalized hyperpartisan political conservative or liberal, you are politically and culturally hard core. You watch hard-core white tribal identity pornography—today at Fox News that means you watch Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Judge Jeanine Pirro. You read Daily Caller and Brietbart.com when not watching Fox News. You literally can’t stand to be in the same room
with your political or cultural counterpart. You would practically (or actually) disown your own child over marrying a person who belonged to your tribe’s political enemy. You cannot hold a civil political or cultural conversation with even a loved one (let alone a stranger) you consider your existential tribal enemy for more than a few minutes.

  In short, there is not an agree-to-disagree bone left in your body when it comes to your social or cultural political identity—and you are very proud of all of this.

  Now, if you continually bring home half a dozen puppies or cats (and they have to live inside) and your spouse or roommate was not like-minded, you will eventually become estranged from that person—trust me. Does the term “cat lady” ring a bell?

  Same applies to tribal hyperpartisans. If you have devolved into a tribalized political hyperpartisan, unless your spouse, family, and longtime friends are all similarly hyperpartisan, you will eventually estrange the non-tribalized ones (or if you have a ton of cash, your loved ones will use it to stay as far away from you as possible).

  We will talk a lot about this “tribal partisan derangement” syndrome because it is a big part of the Fox News dark side.

  What I later learned from Fox News executives was that the Ailes/Atwood political advertising strategy was simple—use what Roger called “the most powerful force in the world—television” to broadcast images and words into the viewer’s home that were never intended to make the viewer understand his client’s policy positions better nor their big ideas for a bigger and stronger America.

  The Ailes/Atwater political advertising strategy was to harness the enormous emotional power of the combined visual and audio medium of TV to simply get the viewer to fear and hate their client’s opponent more than they hated or feared their client. As Chuck Todd recently observed in his “journalist call to arms” article against Fox News in the Atlantic magazine, “Ailes’s greatest gift as a political strategist lay not in making his clients more electable, but in making their opponents unelectable.”