by Tobin Smith
Why? Because the actual act of believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for these folks to seize back some semblance of control of their lives. It inflates their sense of importance—ring a bell? The self-worth building attraction is the key: By believing the conspiracy, it makes those people feel they are privy to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb,” or “too corrupt” to understand.
In other words, conspiracy theory belief is a special form of delusions of grandeur. Trump and other conspiracy theory addicts surround themselves with QAnon, “Deep State,” FBI, and CIA conspiracies as routinely as a normal person acquires clothes or other things that make them feel more handsome or attractive. Conspiracy theory delusionists know something the world doesn’t know, and that is a powerful shot of self-esteem mojo for the clinically insecure.
It’s a manifestation of a lot of negative emotions, and not surprisingly the same emotions are shared by the crazy wing of the Trump Deplorables and the QAnon conspiracy believers. Yes, they are angry and frustrated, but psychologists tell us time and time again that conspiracy theorists also feel on a subconscious level that they are inferior, inadequate, misunderstood, and left behind by a system that “failed them.”
Trump is like any populist in modern history: He stepped forward, validated the Deplorables’ feelings, and in his delusional way promised them “only he” could and would make all their bad feelings go away. By accepting and buying into his delusional promises, they are tacitly choosing to believe their subjective feelings about empirical truth and facts vs. objective truth and fact.
The term for suspending empirical fact for illusion comes from WWE wresting fans: “kayfabe.” Kayfabe is the psychological construct between the wrestler and the fan that they both know the performance is an illusion and rigged, but neither admits it because the fan came for the feelings and catharsis they get watching an immaculately staged and choreographed fixed outcome “match.” (More on kayfabe, Fox News, and Trumpism later—it’s just so fascinating!)
By definition, both conspiracy theorists and Trump cult-of-personality addicts are practicing kayfabe—their subconscious and conscious desire to feel better about themselves and cheer for their hero and boo their tribal enemies are much more important to them than the promises and statements that are made during the performance.
Of course the embrace and confluence of the psychological co-morbidities of kayfabe and conspiracy theorist make this person highly irrational and impossible to reason with. Presenting them with empirically proven facts or evidence or fact-checking evidence of Trump’s 7.8 extraordinarily false and delusional statements per day doesn’t even reach the logic part of their brains.
That is what a “psychological construct” of delusional conspiracies is: It’s a way to see the world that makes the person feel more important, gain self-esteem, and inflate their self-worth and importance. When you combine conspiracy delusions with kayfabe and tribal levels of cultural or political partisanship, you get a very powerful cocktail of—wait for it—confirmation bias.
Now take a breath and get back to the story.
“So what do you mean by ‘act like I am a cult leader’?” I asked my executive producer friend.
“I mean act like a cult leader/televangelist and write your scripts like you are a cult leader and only you have the answers to your audience’s questions and fears.”
He went on, “To kill it here at Fox News prime time, you have to understand the subconscious ID of the audience and get into their unconscious need for feeling pleasure and feeling better about themselves. Your brand is your right-wing, tribal cult persona—are you going to be a charismatic televangelist who makes them feel great or just another stuffed shirt talking head in a suit?
“Look—have you read Richard Hofstadter’s book, The Paranoid Style of American Politics? If you haven’t, I’ll lend you my copy. Everyone in the opinion broadcast team at Fox News has read it. But the gist of what I am telling you is this: Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater, conservatism has more and more morphed into a sectarian version of Evangelical fundamentalism.
“With our audience now filled with Beck cult followers and God Squaders, the guys who are getting the best ratings treat their show like a cult meeting, and we produce the shows like they are a cult leader holding a cult meeting. Understand this: A high percentage of Fox News viewers in general belong to an Evangelical denomination. In fact, a decent percentage of Beck’s viewers are Pentecostal—you know the speaking in tongues and faith healing types? If you want to be a Fox News host and have your own show, my advice is to attend a few Pentecostal services in Virginia and look around—that is what a lot of our base audience looks and thinks like.”
I was stunned. For one thing, Beck is Mormon (okay, many folks do consider Mormonism a religious cult). But though the book he was talking about was printed in 1964, it read like it was printed as an audience profile of Fox News in mid-2009. As I thought about his words, I remembered I did speak at the very first Tea Party rally in DC earlier that year, and those old white folks were angry and had that sort of empty look in their eyes like they were at a tent revival and I was Elmer Gantry.
If you read the fabulous review of Hofstadter’s research on how successful right-wing spokesmen apply the messages of Evangelical revivalists to US politics by University of North Carolina professor (emeritus) Robert Brent Toplin on historynewsnetwork.org, you will understand the tribal fundamentalist mindset of the Fox News audience better than I could ever describe. I should also mention again for context that (a) you now know that the brain of self-identified “conservatives” is much more sensitive and reactive to fear than the rest of us and (b) there are ninety-four million people in America who self-identify as “Evangelical believers.”
Social scientists have long made the case that if you are a serious Evangelical believer you are the easiest person in the world to dupe and manipulate (because those who already believe in a thing that they can’t see and for which there is no empirical evidence proves exists are the easiest people to sell ideas that require a leap-of-faith, ok?).
According to Professor Toplin, “Historians and pundits often refer to Hofstadter’s ideas about the ‘paranoid style.’ Much-overlooked, however, is a subtheme in Hofstadter’s writing. That discussion focused on the emergence of ‘fundamentalism’ in American politics. . . .
“Richard Hofstadter recognized that evangelical leaders were playing a significant role in right-wing movements of his time, but he noticed that a ‘fundamentalist’ style of mind was not confined to matters of religious doctrine. It affected opinions about secular affairs, especially political battles. Hofstadter associated that mentality with a ‘Manichean [the ancient religion based on its belief in a binary world only comprised of darkness and light] and apocalyptic’ mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do.”
I went on to host more than fifty Fox opinion debate shows in my career, and I boiled down the Fox audience attraction and retention dynamic like this:
Modern conservatism is political fundamentalism + tribalism + cult. If you don’t know how to preach, you don’t have a future in hosting tribal partisan TV. If the audience does not emotionally connect with you as a fellow tribe member preaching the gospel of Fox News, go broadcast sports.
If you can’t connect with the ID of the audience, you are just reading news or making commentary no viewer really cares about. Make their ID feel the pleasure feelings they lust over, and now you have an audience.
The American Foxocracy tribal right-wing media ecosystems conspiracy fantasies work because (a) an ignora
nt info-siloed audience is easily duped—as recent research shows Fox News viewers know less about the news than people who don’t watch news at all—and (b) the FNC alternative reality is immune from facts because their fundamentalist faith—a personal belief that cannot be proven by ordinary empirical means—is easily substituted by a tribal TV cult leader like me for empirical reality.
Partisan tribal social identification is more important to everyday people than political ideology. When you understand the incredible power and potency of partisan identity politics, I could get anyone to believe just about anything I said as long as they identified me as a fellow conservative partisan. Most political science research tells us that partisan identity precedes partisan ideology in tribal/cult value—or what political scientist Lilliana Mason calls “identity-based ideology”—and that holds for either self-identified conservatives or liberals.
Most people don’t watch tribal TV (or vote for that matter) for what they ideologically want. They watch tribal TV to validate and revalidate who they are, and for the binary that proves once again their chosen tribe is the light and the other tribe is darkness. That moral righteousness and superiority is self-esteem gold.
At the end of the day, identity politics is defined as “I am who I tribally label myself as,” and trolling tribal identity is the only way to make it in tribal TV. It’s really the only politics we’ve got in America.
Buck up buttercups—as the astute Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, writes in the Washington Post, “To wish away identity politics is to wish away gravity. Successful politicians (and tribal TV hosts) know ‘I’m with you’ counts for much more than ‘I’m for you.’”
CHAPTER 3
In America, Politics Are Tribal . . . Period
Americans—liberal elites specifically—deceive themselves into thinking that politics are rational and just adversarial, as if Rachel Maddow could just present the best slideshow set of facts and ideas ever and the left would immediately win the day.
I hate to break this to you, but American politics are not a college debate class. At the margins, they are tribal warfare and manipulated emotions—and have been throughout America’s history.
Once I understood the power and psychology of televised tribal partisan hate porn and politics as a monetizable entertainment product, my other favorite topics of discussion with SVP Kathy was her take on the idea of politics as tribal warfare and on Fox News as weaponized military-grade political hate and social identity pornography. After all, she had worked with Roger Ailes and the famous dirty political tricks master Lee Atwater on the TV ad that blew up Michael Dukakis’s presidential bid—among other forms of right-wing political warfare. (If you don’t know the mind-boggling master of political dark arts, Lee Atwater, I suggest you read about or listen to a 1981 interview available on TheNation.com.)
You may remember the picture with Governor Dukakis in the tank. George Bush Sr. said he looked like Rocky the Squirrel. What Kathy (and others) told me about politics as tribal warfare opened my eyes to the depth of the Fox News conspiracy (and I am paraphrasing from multiple conversations): “News is just the ‘beard,’ or cover, for the real mission at Fox News. Conducting a televised conservative tribal war against liberalism and socialism is the mission.”
When I learned this, everything I had seen in my time at Fox News finally made sense to me: Fixing the outcome of Fox News’s opinion programming was right out of the Ailes/Atwood dirty tricks playbook.
As Tim Dickinson reports in his Rolling Stone article “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory”:
It was while working for Nixon that Ailes first experimented with blurring the distinction between journalism and politics, developing a knack for manipulating political imagery that would find its ultimate expression in Fox News. The reason was he knew his candidate was a disaster on TV. . . .
To bypass journalists, Ailes made Nixon the star of his own traveling roadshow—a series of contrived, news-like events that the campaign paid to broadcast in local markets across the country. Nixon would appear on camera in theaters packed with GOP partisans—“an applause machine,” Ailes said, “that’s all that they are.” . . .
Ailes had essentially replaced professional journalists with everyday voters he could manipulate at will. “The events were not staged, they were fixed,” says Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. . . .
As for actual journalists? “Fuck ’em,” Ailes said. “It’s not a press conference—it’s a television show. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set.” The young producer forced reporters to watch the events backstage on a TV monitor—just like the rest of America. “Ailes figured out a way to bring reporters to heel,” Perlstein says.
To understand the Fox News tribal warfare playbook, understand that Roger Ailes and his team not only pioneered the idea of rigged political TV. They also pioneered fear and hate based TV attack ads.
So why does Fox News fix the outcomes of the white tribal opinion “debates” they produce and broadcast? The answer is the same—it’s always been the same: If we did not control the narrative and outcome of the segment, the right-wing tribe member—even with his or her powerful built-in confirmation bias—was at risk of suffering the pain and confusion of processing noncongruent tribal evidence or information (tribal cognitive dissonance). If he did, he’d change the channel.
No “consistent conservative” tunes in to feel wrong or embarrassed about his political or cultural judgments. Have you ever met a person with strong feelings or opinions about anything that questioned themselves and found that they enjoyed being proven wrong? I never have.
Creating video content that by design allows viewers to see, hear and, most of all, feel their tribe’s superiority to their tribal enemy and feel a climactic victory is the other white tribal identity porn superpower—and don’t you forget it. Whether you are watching right- or left-wing tribal porn does not matter; by watching the porn, you are, either consciously or subconsciously, watching and listening to experience the exhilarating self-congratulatory self-esteem building feeling of your judgmental righteousness—and of course the dopamine and serotonin chemical hits that automatically turn your brain into a pleasure chest.
Let’s look at some things I heard from my Fox News production colleagues, many of whom were masters of politics at tribal performance art. (I’ve condensed and paraphrased multiple discussions here.)
“Look, tribalism is just a code word for personal safety and ‘us vs. them.’ The ancient brain psychology is incredibly leverageable. Your in-group is safe, the out-group tribe unsafe.” Check.
“Atwater taught that to win elections, you have to make your guy be the tribe that 51 percent or more of the electorate consciously and subconsciously—instinctively—wants to join. Which tribe do they want to join? The one that their subconscious feels is the safest for them and their family. Moral: Winning the war to the voter’s subconscious is what wins elections.” Check.
“One way to win elections is to make the opponent into an out-tribe that at least 51 percent of the electorate doesn’t instinctively want to belong to, where they subconsciously feel less safe. In short, he or she with the safest personal-value proposition is the most attractive tribe to the voting electorate and wins.” Said another way—personal attack ads work by making the other guy unelectable. Check.
“Politics and culture are all about the tribe, and therefore Fox News is all about the tribe and innate tribal instincts. We praise the tribal hero and vilify the tribal enemy. Tribal leaders play off of the same emotions of fear, hate, and blame. If they do the job well, hate and blame combine into an intense brew of tribal emotions that wins votes and viewers.” Check.
Finally, I love this gem:
“In a political race, what you are selling is free membership into your candidate’s tribe and the pitch is ‘In my tribe, you and your fam
ily will be safer than the other tribe economically, physically, spiritually, culturally, and racially. In the other tribe, you will be less safe. In the other tribe, you will be dangerously exposed to unnecessary risk economically, physically, culturally, and racially. Dear voter, you and I have to keep that other tribe from power—by any means. This election is existential; your safety and your families’ safety are at risk if we don’t.’”
In other words, as I stated previously, attack ads don’t make the advertiser attractive from an ideological perspective. They work when they make the other person more unelectable. For example, according to a New Yorker article written around the time of Lee Atwater’s death in 1992: “When Mr. Atwater, President George H. W. Bush’s young campaign manager, was contemplating how to defeat Michael Dukakis, he consulted The Art of War,” by Sun Tzu, the well-known ancient Chinese political consultant. Among Sun Tzu’s pithier bullet points: “Know your enemy.” Atwater conducted a bit of opposition research, identified Dukakis’s vulnerabilities, and gleefully promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard.” The two TV spots ended Dukakis’s political career.
I was taught at Fox News what you must learn: Yes, politics may be seen as the civilized way (in contrast with war) for organized conflict, but it’s the reverse of the famous Carl Von Clausewitz bromide (“War is merely the continuation of politics by other means”): American politics and culture are merely tribal wars continued by other means.
Roger and Kathy didn’t see political and cultural information as news; they saw it as potential ammunition to be used against our liberal enemy during opinion segments. I figured out later this was totally congruent with the Ailes political advertising strategy of “make ’em hate the other guy more than my guy” and the attack ad goal to make the other person more unelectable. It was Roger and Kathy’s job to evaluate the political and cultural ammunition of the day for its potency and lethality because watching that tribal warfare and victory story transpire was entertaining to our audience.