Foxocracy: Inside the Network’s Playbook of Tribal Warfare

by Tobin Smith

  Above all else, Fox News’s core middle-class and fallen-middle-class viewers are a prideful and stoic chip off the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America block. From meeting hundreds of core Fox News viewers in person and via social media, I found deep wounds of lost pride and lost self-esteem have been sewn together with toxic sutures of tribal resentment, crippling anger, and outright despair.

  Fox News’s continuous tribal blame porn programming is for many a very real communal victimhood that helps mask the pain of living in once proud and vibrant communities that have fallen into disrepair.

  Social scientists tell us there is perhaps no emotional force more powerful than gain or loss of self-pride, and Fox News exploits and panders to resentment and fear caused by wounded pride and lost hopes and dreams as a cat plays with a scared mouse.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Two Superpowers of Fox News

  It may be hard for those who don’t regularly watch Fox News opinion programming to fathom these facts:

  According to Punditfact.com, “78 percent of statements made by FNC and FBN personalities and their right-wing pundit guests check out to be Half True (18 percent), Mostly False (21 percent), 100 percent False (30 percent) and ‘Pants on Fire’ (wholly made up delusional gibberish: 9 percent).

  “Only 10 percent of statements made by on-air FNC/FBN personalities and right-wing pundit guests are 100 percent factual.”

  FNC and FBN hosts and guests do not burst out laughing as they say and repeat easily disproved propaganda statements over and over again.

  Many nonpartisan folks (and any liberal/Progressive) who happen upon a Fox News prime-time opinion segment shake their heads and ask, “How does the audience buy this horse crap? Don’t they care that they are being lied to and manipulated?”

  The answer—as you know now—is no, they do not.

  As you also know now, the Fox News viewers do not tune in to learn about well-documented and proven objective facts and figures. They tune in to get their cultural and political hate on and so they can get the rush from a well-produced tribal-validation feedback loop. Only a small number of independent and non-tribal conservatives are watching Fox News—usually to see how the right wing is spinning the latest political or cultural news event.

  That brings us to the psychological construct I’ve alluded to, what the WWE calls “kayfabe.”

  Stay with me; this is one of the primary keys to understanding why tribal partisan fear/rage/blame-and-hate-as-entertainment works so well with tribal partisans.

  WHAT I BELIEVE IS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

  I discovered the concept of kayfabe and the two-way acknowledgment between actor and audience of performance art when I attended a WrestleMania event in DC courtesy of a WWE friend. As I sat watching the wrestlers throw each other off ungodly high stairs and beat the stuffing out of each other with metal chairs, I asked the young female fan next to me, “You know this whole match is set up by the WWE for XYZ to win, right?”

  She looked me dead in the eye and told me, “Not to me it isn’t.”

  I pondered that answer and why she said it until Nick Rogers (uniquely a sociologist, lawyer, and pro-wrestling aficionado) explained the concept of kayfabe exceptionally well in a New York Times article in April 2017. To paraphrase Mr. Rogers, when Alex Jones (the conspiracy monger who runs the uber-right-wing conspiracy porn outlet InfoWars.com) told the judge in his child custody suit that “his antics are irrelevant to his fitness as a parent, because he is a performance artist whose public behavior is part of his fictional character,” some people assumed that Jones’s devoted fans would abandon him because he had essentially admitted to being a fraud.

  Mr. Rogers’s analysis was that they would not, and he was right: Jones’s web traffic went up! Remember the backfire effect and what happened when the multiple-week KKK newspaper stories were published in the early 1920s and the KKK gained more than one hundred thousand new members?

  According to Rogers, “Alex Jones’s audience adores him because of his artifice, not in spite of it. They admire a man who can identify their most primal feelings, validate them, and choreograph their release.”

  Take that in for a moment. The Fox News contributor/host kayfabe contract with the tribal TV addict audience at home is the very same dynamic. I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked by a self-identified “very conservative” Fox News fan in public somewhere about what Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity is like in person. When I’d tell them what a sex predator O’Reilly is or what a low-brow Hannity is in person, they always look at me and say, “I don’t believe it. I love those guys—you’re dead wrong!”

  Back to Nick. “To understand this, and to understand the political success of other figures like Donald Trump (who not coincidentally is in the WWE Hall of Fame for his many appearances), it is helpful to know a term from the world of professional wrestling: ‘kayfabe.’ For at least fifty years ‘kayfabe’ has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you the illusion of something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.”

  After reading that explanation, I finally understood not only the core Fox News audience better but also the Trump base voters too. To a wrestling audience (many of whom live in the same 2,626 counties as Fox News fans and Trump voters, so let’s assume at least some audience crossover), the fake and the real coexist peacefully. Ignoring the fake is a trade-off for, in the case of pro wrestling, a jolly good and rowdy time rooting for their hero and hissing at their hated villain. In other words, allowing themselves to believe in the fake “cage match” is harmless fun.

  For twelve years, I thought FNC’s fixed-outcome gladiatorial shows were harmless fun too. Fox News kayfabe is more subtle . . . but there is a very cathartic aspect to it as well. (Cue the “Man I wanted to throw a brick through my TV!” guy in the airport.)

  When I asked the young lady next to me at WrestleMania if she realized the match was set up for XYZ to win, I was asking the wrong question. According to Rogers, “If you ask a fan whether a match or backstage brawl was scripted, the question will seem irrelevant. You may as well ask a roller-coaster enthusiast whether he knows he’s not really on a runaway mine car. The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares enough about the viewer’s emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn’t about factual verifiability; it’s about emotional fidelity.” He goes on to point out that “skilled wrestlers captivate because they do what sociologists call ‘emotional labor’—the professional management of other people’s feelings. Diners expect emotional labor from their servers, WWE fans demand it from their favorite performer, and a whole lot of voters desire it from their leaders.”

  Key Point: It is the job of the Fox News producers to script the host to do the “emotional labor” and manage the feelings and expectations of core Fox News viewer.

  Look, it is no coincidence that Donald Trump is enshrined in the WWE Hall of Fame. Trump performed in the WWE multiple times, most famously in the ring in the Battle of the Billionaires. It is also no coincidence that Donald Trump’s WWE-like character and his campaign filled with commonly believed Fox News propaganda connected with more than sixty-three million Americans. Donald Trump learned kayfabe from the best: the WWE, Vince McMahon, and Roger Ailes.

  When Trump demonizes the media as “enemies of the people,” that’s a character he is playing and emotional labor he is giving to his tribal liberal-hating believers—in short, it’s kayfabe. His summit with the cartoonish WWE-like heel North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was kayfabe at its best. As conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg accurately points out in an August 2018 column, “Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was entirely kayfabe, particularly Trump’s ridiculous claim that ‘there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.’”

  According to
Mr. Rogers’s cogent analysis:

  Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, “I don’t think so, but I believe so.”

  That’s kayfabe. Chants of “Build the Wall” aren’t about erecting a structure; they’re about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.

  Wow. The intellectual clarity of that analysis hit me like a ton of bricks.

  Kayfabe isn’t merely a suspension of disbelief; it’s a philosophy about truth itself.

  Kayfabe, like a Fox News opinion panel performance, rests on the assumption that feelings are inherently more important and trustworthy than facts.

  After meeting hundreds of the white middle- to lower-middle-class core audience at Fox News (now the “base” of Trumpism), I could never put my finger on why, other than poor economic and history education, they fervently believed what they heard from their Fox News hero (or Trump for that matter) as unambiguous fact. Kayfabe is a big part of the answer: The positive tribal feelings and validation they get from watching FNC (and by extension now a Donald Trump performance) are more valuable to them than the delusional ideas and flawed assumptions presented as objective facts. Besides, they live inside the right-wing media bubble so they actually don’t see or hear any contradictory empirical data.

  Maybe we have more in common with North Korea than we thought? The point is Fox News’s tribal TV opinion panels are most certainly kayfabe-based entertainment. Donald Trump base rallies are a new form of kayfabe entertainment. Why do his followers fall for it? Now you know—because it emotionally feels so good to spend ninety minutes away from their actual lives of downward mobility cathartically yelling, chanting, and throwing their fists in the air. It feels great to dress up in the tribal uniform and put on the MAGA hats and T-shirts and blame faceless others for the economic trauma they feel every day of their lives, or their lost racial and cultural dominance.

  Stephen Colbert captured the concept well with his term “truthiness,” defined as “the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”

  Key Point: We in the media and punditry can fact-check Fox News or Donald Trump and point out glaring lies and made-up “facts,” but kayfabe and truthiness render all that effort beside the point. When the media, as Goldberg points out, “breaks the fourth wall” by reporting that almost every claim and statement of fact from Donald Trump or Sean Hannity is not true, they revert to their tribal cognitive instincts and decry that objective evidence as “fake news” and “liberal mainstream media lies” and become even more loyal to Trump. Fact checking merely confirms in their tribal minds the liberal media bias against him and strengthens their support for him as he lashes out at “fake news.”

  As Nick Rogers so perfectly sums up kayfabe: “Rationalists can and should make the case that empirical data is more reliable than intuition. But if they continue to ignore the human need for things to feel true, they will do so at their political peril.”

  Kayfabe is indeed about the innate emotional need for things and illusions to feel true. And yes, kayfabe isn’t merely a suspension of disbelief; it’s a philosophy about truth itself. A Fox News tribal fear opinion panel performance rests on the assumption that feelings are inherently more trustworthy than facts and that only a tribal sovereign or blood brother has the “real facts.”

  But there is another deeper emotion at play, I think, with the Foxholes who fit the description of some psychologically addicted to their time within the FNC unreality machine—visceral human connection.

  FOX NEWS: RETRO AMERICA’S MECHANISM

  In the last week of August and first week of September 2018, two Americans that I greatly admire—Senator John McCain and former President of the United States Barack Obama—officially declared war directly against Donald Trump’s political tribalism, and by extension, they attacked Fox News’s tribal warfare programming, since they are now both the same tribal identity brand.

  The most important lesson I learned from my journey into discovering why the Fox News tribal programming I performed in for fourteen years had morphed into a literal addiction for millions of Americans was this—for most of the hard-core Fox News fans, swearing allegiance to the destruction of “those socialist libtards” is not really an outwardly tribal act.

  When you experience a strong rush of emotion—it is a catharsis if you feel better after the rush. If you’ve been feeling like you need a good cry, you should watch a cathartic movie like Bambi—or any film that’s sure to make you weep. Things that are cathartic don’t always call up tears. Things that makes you scream, like a roller-coaster ride or a boxing match, are also cathartic. Whatever causes you to release a sudden flood of feelings is cathartic. Some therapies ask you to hit a pillow or break dishes because those are cathartic activities.

  For most, their daily six-hour pledge-of-allegiance and addiction to Foxism/Trumpism (now one in the same) is actually a more of a psychological coping mechanism to digest and cope with the constant pain of the unresolved emotional and economic traumas in their daily lives.

  Now again—I am not a psychotherapist or addiction professional, nor do I play one on TV. But for this book I consulted with many. One that really struck me as the root driver of this Fox News tribal identity pornography came from the recent book Lost Connections by addiction expert Johann Hari. He talks about his decades of work in the fields of trauma and addiction and why he believes that the root of almost everything we suffer through in life is trauma that we never figured out how to repair.

  Hari tells us that “trauma” is not just a term just reserved for the most severe and unrelenting atrocities one can experience. What struck me as so relevant to the millions of Americans who are quite literally addicted to what addiction experts refer to as a “process or behavioral addiction” and what I have termed white tribal identity activation and validation pornography is Hari’s decades of experience with other behavioral addictions.

  His analysis of what causes behavioral addiction is also what I have come to understand as one of the core underlying strategies embedded in the Fox News tribal warfare playbook. According to Hari, “Anytime something scares us or enrages us and we do not get over that fear or rage, trauma is created. When we don’t believe we have the resources or abilities to cope with a certain problem or stimuli, we create adaptive behaviors to deny or avoid it.”

  Emotionally speaking, Fox News gets you coming and going—either our tribal activation and validation segment produces the emotional reaction of righteous tribal victory that involuntarily spews happy chemicals into your brain or we produce for you another person or thing to fear or find outrageous so your trauma cycle never ends. Either way, Fox News wins the race to your brain stem and your amygdala (limbic system actually).

  Have you ever watched a Fox News opinion show segment with a critical eye? If you do (and after reading this book) you will see Fox News opinion programming for what it really is: a masterful self-contained behavioral addiction and trauma creating feedback loop. Good FNC opinion programming is almost a perfect vicious self-reinforcing circle. Truly every one of the thousands of FNC opinion segments I appeared in or hosted was based on either:

  Creating an unresolved trauma-forgetting event based on a choreographed WWE-like emotional roller-coaster entertainment of fixed outcome righteous victory featuring the viewer’s tribal heroes pummeling their viscerally hated tribal enemy (which thanks to your brain stem/limbic system involuntarily spits out the happy dance brain chemicals that temporarily deliver the glorious feelings of intense pleasure).

  Or a viscerally traumatic fear or rage creating event where the segment plants new traumatic images of fearful people, events, and ideas in the viewer’s mind (via the 4K high-def display of fearful
or anger baiting images and “sound on tape,” or SOT in TV speak) which in turn serves to fertilize a new trauma inducing fear or outrage via an overwrought monologue or fixed outcome “debate.” After weeks of repeating, an embryo of trauma grows into a new fear or rage (or renews an unresolved existing fear) that then is deeply implanted in the psyche of the Fox News viewer.

  Even more fascinating, Hari believes (along with a growing number of addiction specialists) the root cause of addiction is not the happy dance brain chemicals themselves. What his research says is happening is those happy making involuntarily released brain chemicals and hormones (dopamine, adrenaline, and heroin-like serotonin) mask (for a while) the real addiction cause—a lack of human connection. Hari points out the work of the well-respected behavioral scientist Richard Cohen who points out that “Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond. And when we’re happy and healthy we’ll bond and connect with each other.”

  Here is Dr. Cohen’s money shot on Fox News’s right-wing tribal identity porn as a coping mechanism for trauma and human disconnection: “But if you can’t connect or bond with a likeminded person—because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life or people—you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. . . .Now that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s driving by human nature, that’s what we want as human beings—we are psychologically hard wired to want and need to consistently feel the experience of oneness/connection.”

  Hari defines “connection” or “bond” as “the experience of oneness.” Anthropology and social science tell us there is no more powerful bond in the human animal than the experience of oneness with a tribe of like-minded human beings.

  Thus watching six hours a day of Fox News tribal identity porn is also a very powerful form of feeling that oneness connection because it’s also a tribal connection. When we love a TV show like Game of Thrones, we don’t viscerally connect at a tribal level—we love the story and the grandeur and it’s entertaining and all that, but there is no innate tribal connection.