This article is adapted from the recently released book “Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare” by NY Times bestselling author and 14-year Fox News contributor and guest host Tobin Smith. His original Fox News expose article “Confessions of Fox News Hit Man” on Medium.com in 2017 has over 130,000 reads and was selected Top 100 Journalism articles by Time Warner media critics. As a NY Times op-Ed contributor, Smith’s recent “Why Fox News Slimed a Purple Heart Recipient” was the highest trending op-ed on November 22, 2019, with over 100,000 views and nearly 1000 reader comments
As a former 14-year Fox News contributor and host with a mixed politics family, I discovered over the years that in order to make peace with a Fox News addicted relative at a family gathering like Thanksgiving, there are two key things you must do to prevent ruining your hallowed family day of Thanksgiving.
One is you need to develop some real honest empathy for your parent, sibling, relative or longtime friend Fox News addict because, without genuine empathy for that person, all bets for familial détente are off. I’ll get to the empathy-building process in a moment.
The other part is much simpler and all tactical. First, you need to send out a simple formal behavior agreement via the digital communication system that each participant actually uses. For example, if you send me an email to my business email, good luck—I’m a text guy ok?
But I’m telling you this simple program has worked for me and many of the early readers of my tell-all book on Fox News Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare. The book tells the whole story of the dark demonizing psychological warfare I learned from Roger Ailes the maestro of right-wing tribal warfare TV. But I left out the mixed politics Rule of Four.
Here’s the simple pinkie finger agreement we call the “Rule of Four”:
1) For the good of us all, we all agree to not talk politics at the dinner table in a mixed political table (but really I just want to neutralize my obnoxious Fox News addict brother-in-law and make sure I do not strangle or maim him in front of his kids).
2) Talking politics or demonizing others (except USC football fans—that all good) means you are banned from consuming booze or wine for an hour—that is the biggest behavioral hammer of all with my crew of Scot Irish relatives and descendants.
3) We create a financial disincentive for breaking rule #1 which must be paid off by Christmas or a chore we all hate like “You have to drive Aunt Flo to her next kidney dialysis.”
But the most important tactic of all is behavioral modification 101:
4) Create a simple hand signal that tells someone visually that they are triggering your political or cultural hot button and to knock it the heck off for the good of everyone. At our house, that move is the Taylor Swift hand signal to “brush-it-off.”
When one of us feels our blood boiling over as a result of one of our relatives going into some tribalized trash talking at the table, we look ‘em in the eye and give them the “brushing something off our shoulder” move. I’m telling you it works every time for all kinds of emotional triggers—the offender stops it every time because one hour without booze at our house is a death sentence!
By the way, we now have also added the “I’ve heard that story X times” rule. Yes we are not that old. When someone goes into retelling the time “blah blah and blah” we hold up fingers representing how many times one of us has told the same story during our Thanksgiving. It’s a fun game, everyone laughs and the serial storyteller is chastened.
Now the hard part—developing real empathy for your Fox News addicted relative. Well first off, recent consumer polling research by my firm Transformity Research with highly targeted Facebook polling responses concludes:
- America has a massive epidemic of addiction to Fox News’s unique brand of tribal hate propaganda video porn programming
- Many Americans who have witnessed this Fox News addiction “rapture” firsthand whereby agree-to-disagree loved ones are transformed into raging right-wing tribalized hyperpartisan nutjobs
- Have come to refer to Fox News as “Foxycontin” because of the addictive nature and massive size of its tribal hate porn audience
- Yet 85% of Fox News fans and viewers we polled are tribal hate media illiterates who fail to possess the bare minimum amount of basic tribal psychology and social science knowledge required to consume Fox News’ white tribal identity activation propaganda content in a mentally healthy manner.
I can hear you saying “So you are saying they are a victim of Fox News? Yes, I am saying that in most cases their Fox News addiction is not their fault—their falling into the Fox News addict rabbit hole was the direct result of multiple emotionally predatory strategies and tactics not in their control or knowledge base. I know this because I performed or hosted over 2000 segments of Fox New’s tribal hate propaganda and I, like other long-timers in the “fair and balanced” charade became world-class tribal hate mongers.
For instance, as a contributor to the New York Times op-Ed section, the overwhelming number of views, comments and feedback I received to my recent op-ed piece “Why Fox News Slimed a Purple Heart Recipient” and the response from readers of my new book “Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare” overwhelmingly supports my own direct Fox News audience research data. Everything I see and read says conclusively that “like OxyContin, the vast majority of the 80-90 million Americans who consume Fox News’ emotionally predatory tribal hate propaganda content at least monthly literally have no idea about how or why it is so insanely powerful and addictive for tens of millions of Americans.”
Let me quickly reveal just one of the core elements of the Fox News tribal warfare playbook in an attempt to at least raise your knowledge of the tribal hate porn propaganda game played 24/7 at Fox News. In doing this, hopefully, you will build a sense of empathy for those poor souls who compulsively watch 3+ hours per day of FNC tribal hate propaganda programming in a literally toxic emotional state of agita.
First off, it appears most Americans missed the memo about how the evolution of human psychology and DNA instinctively impels the human-animal to divide the world into us and them or better said “the safe and secure” and “the risky and threatening.” Most Americans we interviewed via survey don’t know that we have little control over this involuntary automatic process that resides in our subconscious.
Said another way; social psychologists I have interviewed agree we human beings are innately driven from birth to sub-consciously assess and categorize other human beings starting with friend or potential foe. In fact, social psychologists tell us during our entire lives we will instinctively seek to build a symbolic and ideological structure and narrative about who we are and more importantly who we aren’t—it’s a drive and a need that comes from our basic human survival and personal safety instincts.
Now—with their deep understanding of base human psychology and the most effective ways to manipulate our innate tribal human nature via tribalized media—Fox News tribal hate propaganda segment producers and tribal hate televangelist hosts have come to understand better than most that human psychology is not and never has been about “reality”--it is about perception and it’s about tribally accepted narratives (i.e., contagious stories) factual or not.
Certainly, Fox News incarnate Donald J. Trump has demonstrated that he innately understands these ruling concepts of human psychology better than anyone ever thought possible. But like feral Trumpism, this is also why the Fox News tribal warfare playbook feeds its 80-90 million monthly users (combined cable/website/social media platforms and YouTube) a steady stream of audiovisual tribal identity activation propaganda narratives content complete with
- a universe of tribal symbols
- tribal ideological structure
- non-stop hate-based propaganda and
- the classic dehumanizing asymmetric tribal motive narratives e.g., “Our tribe is motivated by love, care, and affiliation” while their tribal outgroup is “sinister and motivated by hate!” or “Black Lives Matter means that White Lives Don’t Matter” to name just a few of these motive attribution asymmetry narratives.
One of the deep secrets about Fox News’ to most of its user base is that its powerful tribal identity and superiority porn by design triggers and manipulates our ancient psychology—our native hard-wired instinct and reflexes to form, build, maintain and most importantly defend our cultural and political tribes (and our tribal leadership). We all know today that an attack on the Orange King Manchild is felt and considered to be a personal attack on an American who comes to self-identify as a Deplorable or MAGA tribe member. I got news for you—that behavior is innate human nature thanks to evolution.
The other aspect of what I came to describe as “tribal hate porn” is that powered by visually and verbally delivering compelling new evidence of tribal superiority and more reasons to righteously hate and demonize your binary existential tribal enemy (or “out-group” in social science speak).
Key point: Tribal hate media is a powerful exercise in tribal ego-gratification because hating on your tribal enemy is self-congratulatory. When you consciously or unconsciously say “God—how could those stupid libtards be so ignorant” all your sub-conscious ego hears is “And look how smart you are Big Boy!”
This choreographed and contrived ego-gratification is exactly what Fox News opinion content is produced to do. The whole emotionally predatory premise of tribal hate media is for the Fox News tribal hatred televangelist to hit one or more of the audiences most vulnerable tribal emotional hot buttons that, in turn, trigger the pleasurable tribalized emotional responses (actually pleasurable neurochemicals injected into your brain) in return for keeping your eyeballs on FNC content.
Yet the problem social scientists tell us with consuming thousands of hours of Fox News’ tribal hate porn every year is the extensive but poorly recognized collateral damage. What’s the brain damage and desocialization that comes to older people when 80-90 million Americans are consuming billions of hours of tribal identity activating video content at least monthly?
Eventually, many of these tribal identity activation content binge-watchers become tribalized hyper-partisan fanatics.
Now the problem here is not their partisan politics. The problem is when you come to self-identify as a “tribalized anything,” you see your tribal outgroup enemy through a new set of eyes and a new set of dangerous cognitive filters. In short, you begin to see your tribal outgroup as a binary existential enemy to your tribal “in-group.”
What’s wrong with that? Well, when a Fox News addict sees cultural or political liberals or progressives not as a partisan rival but as their mortal tribal enemy, a whole set of cognitive processes are switched. These ancient tribal instincts service to multiply the tribal bonding and out-group tribal hate effect by an order of magnitude. I detail this 30X Fox News Tribal Impact Multiplier Effect in my book; it has never really been researched and identified and is the one thing I am most proud of in my book.
But psychologists who treat Fox News addicts and have seen this amazingly powerful digitized psychological impact multiplier effect call this “cognitive conversion.”
In fact, this Fox News based tribal cognitive conversion process begins when the Fox News “Foxhole Rapture” effect starts. This is when the FNC tribal hate porn propaganda binge-watcher coverts from an “agree-to-disagree” casual conservative partisan and begins their identity transformation into a full-blown “Foxhole.” This is the final part of the cognitive conversion process that social psychologists call "identity fusion."
Key point: Identity fusion is where your tribal social identity (“Deplorable/MAGA Trumper/ or Never Trumper for that matter) becomes your dominant identity. Needless to say (but why stop now), when your tribal identity becomes your dominant personal this-is-who-I-am-and-what-I-am-about, you are a full-blown raging Foxhole.
My real point? Via this emotionally predatory, highly choreographed and the digitized tribal identity fusion process, becoming a full-blown Fox News addict is very unhealthy both socially, mentally and physically for the victim unless most everyone they live around happens to be Foxholes too.
But in general, it’s this unrecognized power of Fox News’ white tribal identity hate-based propaganda porn programming + Fox News social media retargeting to massively speed up this process of cognitive conversion and full-blown tribal identity fusion is what my book identifies in deep and I think stunning detail (at least I was stunned). Also, there are various and dangerous mental and physical health issues that come to these partially desocialized Foxholes starting with a 45-60% higher risk of premature death.
Yes, 45-60% higher risk of premature death. Many desocialized Foxholes report they are chronically lonely—and that is another huge health epidemic as all now should be aware. With new polling research by Frank Luntz that nearly 1/3 of American adults (80 million-ish) report being estranged for at least one close family or long-time friend over politics, that’s a lot of Foxholes/Trumpholes (same thing.)
In short, when your parent, sibling, relative or in-law psychically ingest thousands of hours of Fox News tribal hate propaganda porn and interact for many hundreds of more hours with their fellow white tribal conservatives online, the combined emotional impact multiplier effect is an abnormally fast pathway to a tribal identity fusion or Foxhole syndrome for short.
For newly minted Foxholds, things go off the rails quickly. As a tribalized Foxhole, now all tribal narratives are truly contagious. The anger and hate emotions you feel from watching and hearing from your Fox News white tribal identity televangelists (aka talk show hosts) are contagious. Like songs you can’t’ get out of your head, they elicit strong thoughts and emotions. But unlike rather benign musical earworms, binary (“it’s us or them”) tribal narratives become toxic to many healthy relationships and, in the worst-case scenario, impel tribal defense action.
In the worsts case scenario, tribal identity fusion into a Fxhole is now proven to be a gateway drug to the wrong end of the tribalized right-wing continuum that leads to right-wing extremism (Cesare the Fox News mail bomber illustrates this point exactly.)
So in conclusion, there you have it. That didn’t hurt, did it?
To not have this Thanksgiving with a Fox News addict turn into another tear-filled scream fest complete with slamming doors, hurt feeling and lasting antagonisms:
- play the Rule of 4 games
- strictly enforce the rules
- laugh as much as possible and
try to understand with the median age of Fox News tribal hate content users and viewers is 68 years old (so 50% of Fox News folks are over 68 years of age for the stats challenged).
The fact is that most of them just never got the tribal hate media warning and primer that you just did. Maybe you could share this article with them before dinner is served, eh?
Thanks for the privilege of your time.