by Tobin Smith
So yes—I am suggesting strongly that allowing a for-profit commercial industry to weaponize the First Amendment into us vs. them social identity activation and amplification porn is perhaps the most damaging governmental mistake since allowing OxyContin prescriptions to become commercialized and weaponized.
At least we now acknowledge the stupidity of Oxy deregulation.
But the deregulation of tribal identity activation and amplification porn?
It’s just good fun—it will blow over.
But it’s not. I suggest you also think of your degree of self-pride or self-worth as a psychic bank account with very real deposits and withdrawals. Social psychologists tell me running a combined social capital and self-esteem deficit is very psychologically damaging.
For one thing, it’s the road to deeper emotional trauma and depression. Worse, when a person lacks meaningful personal or social identities and a positive and nurturing social capital account, Fox News or other social identity/social capital providing cults are happy to provide a social identity and virtual social capital for you as well. (Now you get why so many Fox News addicts consider Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson as their literal “friend.” Let’s call that psychological phenomenon “virtual” social capital!)
Key Points: Forty percent of the nearly fifty million seniors over age sixty-five regularly experience loneliness, according to a University of California, San Francisco study. According to the ALICE Working Poverty reports in June 2018, forty-five million American households are living in working poverty. At three people per household, that is 135 million Americans. And that does not count the forty-two million Americans living below the poverty line. If 177 million Americans are in working or actual poverty in a country of 326 million, that is 54 percent of Americans. As Ray Dalio points out, the “haves” are separating from the “have nots” at an accelerated rate.
My point? To truly grasp the immense emotional and psychological impact, power, and manipulation embedded within Fox News’s tribal identity activation and validation media and the American Foxocracy’s self-reinforcing digital feedback loop, you had better understand this fact of life:
Mankind’s ignorance of the scale and intent of the psychological manipulation in our daily lives is the feedstock that empowers the monetization of media illiterate people for billions in profits for tribal identity pornographers and the social media platforms.
I want to break the ignorance and mental chain reaction. This is not a Don Quixote quest—I know how to manipulate the world of social media too. The most important reason for this book is to help you break that negative but upward self-reinforcing partisan spiral that results for many in a downward self-reinforcing desocialization spiral—especially for the 54 percent of people who live in an America where twenty-first-century capitalism is not working (and that number is spiraling upward).
Older Americans who are already suffering from an epidemic of chronic loneliness and the unhealthy co-morbidities that come with the chronic depletion of their precious social capital.
Or those who live in the conservative culture and work in traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century Retro American industries targeted for extinction by the ironically labeled “Progressive” and “Democratic Socialists.” Somehow their definition of “progress” has little or no plan for how those people would make a decent living post facto.
Remember this fact of human nature and you will get the rest of this book: When you show a political or cultural media manipulation company your proud cultural or political social identity colors, you send up a digital flare that says “I’m yours—take my social identity pride and manipulate my cognitive bias and use them to make me feel great about myself as long as you can.”
Again, I am not comparing Fox News social identity porn to Nazi Germany, so don’t go there. But make no mistake: The Fox News tribal warfare playbook is 100 percent predatory. Its predation is all about seducing and converting as many vulnerable political and cultural conservatives as possible into hyperpartisan conservatives, okay? With Roger Ailes out of the picture, Fox News 3.0 is about money and power Rupert Murdoch style. But to illustrate how powerful well-produced social identity pornography and propaganda can be, it is fair to point out a comparable period of time where a significant percentage of citizens were exposed to constant social identity media programming, and that was Germany in the 1930s and ’40s. According to the US Holocaust Museum historical website, “The high quality and impact social identity propaganda used by the German Nazi Party in their newspaper and movie media for the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler’s leadership of Germany was a crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the implementation of Nazi policies. . . . The Nazis were skilled propagandists who used sophisticated advertising techniques and the most current technology of the time to spread their messages. Once in power, Adolf Hitler created a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to shape German public opinion and behavior. . . . It incited hatred and fostered a climate of indifference to their fate.”
I’ll leave the relevance of this comparison up to you—but to me FNC’s powerful social identity porn and GOP propaganda is like history; it may not repeat itself entirely, but it does rhyme. But I will say this: If the preceding paragraph does not put a shiver down your spine, check your pulse.
The power and impact of Fox News’s nightly nuclear powered tribal social identity/tribal connection porn and the way it speeds up the viewer’s conversion and radicalization into a highly intense tribal right-wing social identity is beyond most of our comprehension and life experience.
But for the millions of families that now have estranged family members they have watched with their own eyes convert from mild mannered “agree-to-disagree” conservatives to Foxholes and Fox News addicts, the power and outcome of binge-watching thousands of hours of tribal social identity pornography is very real and very devastating to their family.
All Donald Trump did in 2016 was put new packaging on Fox News’s tribal identity and cultural connection porn formula—converting the existing out-group prejudices and cultural/racial resentments into a new form of American politics with a bull horn. Instead of Richard Nixon’s famous “Southern Strategy,” which required using code words appealing to white Southern racism without alienating white suburbanites who recoiled at overt racial language, he just skipped the code words and subtlety.
Fun fact: Who do you think Nixon’s code-worded Southern strategy was designed and developed by? Yes, my new friends—it was indeed Roger Ailes and his political advertising partner Lee Atwater. Yea, I know—you can’t make this stuff up, right?
Look—Like I said, social identity activation and ego-building is the same reason people watch reality TV; it’s the ego and self-esteem boost that makes people watch Cops or laugh out loud when they read about some poor schmuck who is arrested running down the street naked after trying to shoplift a pack of Ho Hos from the local Walmart or Piggly Wiggly. Of course the article fails to mention the guy is off his schizophrenia medicine and is starving because he is homeless—but where’s the self-esteem boost if you knew that?
Here is the difference between tribal hate and cultural superiority porn and trashy reality TV. The low-rent reality TV show Jersey Shore makes you feel great when you compare yourself to Snooki and JWoww—but you don’t hate them; you feel fortunate you aren’t them and feel (relatively) you are obviously a vastly superior person.
The visceral attraction of reality TV (you know—where Donald Trump came from) is also based on social identity theory—but it doesn’t make you hate the characters—you just mostly feel sorry for some and root for others.
Right-wing tribal identity porn only works when you hate the “other”; you don’t feel a bit sorry for them—you hate them because they are a threat to you and your tribe.
“MAN, YOU LOOK JUST LIKE TOBIN SMITH!”
Fast forward to my wife Marjorie and me walking into a restaurant in North Scott
sdale, Arizona. We have a winter escape home there in a zip code reported to have the highest concentration of registered Republicans in America. The golf club I belonged to for many years had multiple golf courses and 125 televisions in its various facilities. All their TVs are tuned to Fox News during every hour the club is open.
If someone asks to change the channel, they get asked to leave—not the venue, but the club!
An older man walks over to me as we get near the restaurant entrance and says, “Do you know you look just like Tobin Smith from Fox News?”
“No,” I respond, “who is he?” He looks me dead in the eye as Marjorie stands there biting her lip (she has seen this movie many times before) and answers, “Well—he is one of my heroes on Fox News. He hates those socialist liberals on his show as much as I do—as we all do up here in Scottsdale. I watch every Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m., and he just kills those libtards.
“Look, I’m retired—and I’m scared to death Black Jesus Obama is going to bankrupt America and leave me and my wife dead broke with no Social Security. Tobin rips those libtards a new one every time they prance one out—he’s a true patriot and great American. Do you watch Fox News? You should watch him!”
“Well,” I said. “Yea, he sounds like a hell of a guy. Just for the record, I am Tobin Smith from Fox News—nice to meet you.” His face went ashen—like he had seen a ghost. I took my driver’s license out to prove it was me, and he sat there stunned.
I asked him how much he watches Fox News. He replied, “All day—we never turn it off.” Then he said, “You know, Tobin, I’m really scared about the future. These socialist commies have taken over our country, and I’m afraid my Social Security is going to go broke with all this new Obamacare spending. The stock market is slowly recovering”—this meeting was 2010—“but who knows what’s going to happen with these people in charge. Thanks for sticking up for us real Americans—God bless you!”
When we sat down for lunch Marjorie said, “Geez, Toby—that old guy looked at you like you are a cult leader or something. Do all these Fox News addicts really hate liberals that much? Are they all that afraid of losing all their money and everything they worked for?”
My answer was that considering the fact that guy had, I am sure, consumed ten thousand segments of emotionally eviscerating Fox News tribal identity porn for more than a decade, what would be surprising is if he was not a blithering tribalized right-wing cult member afraid of losing everything.
By that time, I had had that same conversation five hundred times before with other cult-like, star-struck Fox News addicts. But for millions of the true Foxholes, Fox News is a cult of fear, blame, resentment, personal absolution, and self-esteem replacement just as much as any other cult I’ve ever heard about or studied.
Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the executive director of a conflict resolution group founded in the aftermath of the 2011 assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman. She was quoted in the Wall Street Journal recently: “Among the requests for conflict mitigation she has received recently: rabbis and pastors whose congregations are at each other’s throats; Fortune 500 companies where productivity is down because employees bicker over politics; and a mother in New England who feared her family’s holiday would be ruined because her two daughters who were returning from college had not spoken to each other since the 2016 election.”
She ends her interview like this. “This [political tribalism] is now deep in our homes, deep in our neighborhoods, deep in our places of worship and deep in our workplaces,” Ms. Lukensmeyer said. “It really is a virus.”
When I talk about the untold stories inside the cult of Fox News, it’s no exaggeration. I found the top producers, executives, and talent at Fox News acted and performed just like I would imagine cult leaders would. Later I found out that was not by mistake or coincidence. The entire production process of the fear and hate based tribal identity pornography was just a series of cult-like recruiting ads.
Okay, so here’s a blinding flash of the obvious: For Foxholes, Fox News is by almost every modern definition of the term a cult. For that matter, the American Foxocracy has become nothing more than a new fundamentalist religious denomination competing with Evangelical TV and even church services. FNC’s prime-time tribal identity porn hosts perform more like televangelists than political talk show hosts for a very good reason—they are televangelists for Fox News’s religion of tribal identity redemption and blame shifting absolution—can I get an amen!
Roger Ailes was the master right-wing political ad man who had never produced a minute of TV news but had mastered the dark arts of tribalized, zero-sum tribal manipulation media. Fox News built its tribal social identity brand the same way all cult leaders build their cult brands: by making the public hate and fear the “other” tribes more and promising the only truth that matters is their truth.
After thousands of hours of tribal identity binge-watching, the cult of Fox News Foxhole spiral conversion is complete. I mean, how could it not be?
All of which brings us to our next big major Fox News tribal partisan identity porn playbook strategy: the power of tribalized fear porn.
CHAPTER 11
The Incredible Power of Weaponized Visceral Threat and Fear
Now you must understand the key part of the Fox News tribal civil war playbook—for self-identified conservatives, the easiest and best emotional hook is fear: fear of others, fear of destitution, fear of death by jihadist—there’s a million riffs on conservative hypersensitivity to fearful images.
I learned this lesson in my first year as a paid contributor.
THE QUIET LADY ON THE SEVENTEENTH FLOOR
Near the coffee room that I visited hourly on FNC’s spartan seventeenth floor (occupied by the Fox News opinion-programming team, far away from the basement hard news operations) was the office of a VP I had not been introduced to. I had no idea what she did. I was eventually told that her name was Kathy and that she used to work for Ailes at their GOP political advertising and TV consulting firm along with his infamous GOP tribal dark-arts partner and pioneer Lee Atwater.
Kathy came over to my cubicle one day with a print advertisement she had received in her mail for my investment newsletter at the time, ChangeWave Investing. She introduced herself and said, “So I got your newsletter sales pitch in my mailbox. When I read it, I thought, this guy is in the same business we are.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, you guys are in the financial fear porn business,” she said. “Your sales-porn flyer here is full of FOMO—fear of missing out—we call that greed porn. You also use fear-of-financial-loss porn, or FOLM—fear of losing lots of money.” Then she added this insight: “But the real emotional impact comes from your fear-of-losing-money story and how you promise to prevent major losses happening today for your scared-to-death investor audience.” It was October 2000, during the dot-com crash, and investors were losing a ton of money. “I like it. Well done.” Then she asked, “Who wrote this piece, may I ask?”
“I did,” I answered. “You look at me like I’m a stock market guru, but for most of my newsletter-publishing career, I have mostly been a professional direct-response copywriter, editor, and marketer.”
“Wow,” she said as she looked at me. “So you know the secrets and superpowers of fear porn too, eh?” And then she stunned me. “Only a few people I have ever met”—I’m paraphrasing here—“understand that all purposely emotional and brain-stem arousing communication media is just another form of pornography.”
Wow. I had never thought of Fox News opinion programming that way before. I also had not thought of my sales copywriting as fear porn, but, damn, I realized she was right on both counts. Doh! Not coincidently, the primary customers of my investment newsletters are—wait for it—over fifty-five-aged conservatives!
“You’re in the pornography-of-financial-fear business at your newsletter company,” she continued, “and we at Fox News are in the
pornography-of-right-wing-tribal-fear-and-rage business. Porn is porn. If it effectively arouses your emotions, it’s a form of pornography. You obviously know and practice the secret superpowers of sales porn well. You will do very well here at Fox News—you’re a natural!”
From this and other conversations, I learned the most important lesson about Fox News and what Fox News really is, as conceived by Roger Ailes (drawing on his prior partnership with dearly departed right-wing political advertising partner Lee Atwater):
Fox News was to fulfill the vision of the liberal-targeting killing machine Roger had dreamed of since 1974, when he wrote a secret memo to Richard Nixon about a “Republican TV channel.” In this memo, he told President Nixon, “Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch— listen. The thinking is done for you.”
The Fox News iteration of this original vision would create and produce the most visually powerful and emotionally arousing right-wing tribal-hate-video pornography the world had ever seen, according to Roger’s tribal-fear-and-hate-porn attack ad formula perfected in their production of GOP political attack ads.
With soft-core sexual porn video-production values plus careful hard-core scripting and gamified visual and topic orchestration, FNC would essentially hack and hijack the tribal partisan’s brain while they sat hypnotically entranced to their TV at home. (This was before the on-demand digital streaming platforms and social media, of course.)
Because viewers watched while sitting comfortably at home (as opposed to listening in their car, where at least some of their attention had to be on the road) Fox found it ridiculously easy to frighten and manipulate the emotions of the mostly geriatric right-wing partisans.
