by Tobin Smith
The scientists have various theories how this came about. But I can tell them and you exactly why it happened—because for a majority of American households, they are not suffering just a collapse in their social capital reservoir. There ain’t much self-esteem left in their self-esteem tank either. They need a constant self-esteem booster shot from somewhere—and for many of them, hours of watching and reacting to FNC’s tribal identity porn is their self-esteem/ego booster shot.
These psychology experts don’t read the economic data that I do. They have not visited the regions of American in the bottom 66 percent economically that I have. If they had, they would understand why Fox News’s activated and validated tribal political identity has become so important in America to so many. Sadly, for many it’s one of the only positive things going on in their lives.
For hours a day, watching and connecting with their tribal brothers and sisters on Fox News is their shared oneness with something bigger and more emotionally nourishing than the working poverty that has engulfed their daily existence.
FOX NEWS: THE DIGITAL NEO-TOTALITARIANISM CHANNEL?
When Fox News morphed from the Obama hate porn channel in 2008 into the sycophantic Trump Television network after the 2016 election, it struck me they had technically become a digital enabler for a new kind of twenty-first-century “digital neo-totalitarianism.”
When you read the experts on the ideology of totalitarianism, the general definition is it’s just another form of tribal mass movement driven by an ideology that rejects the existing society as corrupt, immoral, and beyond reform.
It projects the illusion of an alternative society in which these wrongs are to be redressed, provides plans and programs for realizing the alternative order, and is founded and developed under a charismatic leader that promises his flock nirvana but demands and gets unflinching loyalty and leeway from his tribal believers on their way to paradise.
Sound like anyone you know?
Philosopher and expert on totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote on the core elements that drove the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and ’40s in her seminal 1973 analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The similarity to the rise of Fox News’s tribal fear and hate porn driven ratings and the mashup of Trumpism and the Deplorables as a political and cultural mass movement are terrifyingly similar.
Sound like anyone you know?
Why? Read a snippet of the recent research on Trumpism and Trumpers titled How Do We Solve a Problem Like the Donald? by Julie Novkov, Professor in the Department of Political Science at SUNY Albany, and give it a moment to sink in.
The Tea Party uprising relied on interest politics to mobilize individuals into action within the Republican Party, but Trumpers are approaching the status of a modern mass in Arendtian terms; a group of disaffected, disengaged, cynical, isolated and atomized individuals who come together and derive a sense of their place in the world through association with a movement. . . .
Bereft of a positive political identity, they can be organized around principles of resentment or revenge, and require only the repetition of key simple ideas. Distrustful and cynical, they are ready to embrace any simple system that makes sense of their world and validates their resentments. Masses are particularly inclined to embrace propaganda. As Arendt explains, “They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
Roger Berkowitz, the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities (and associate professor at Bard College) captures the essence of what I have come to call Fox News enabled Digital Totalitarianism in in-depth review of Arendt’s works:
The astonishing statement Donald Trump made at a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa seems like the essential moment in his unexpected rise to power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In saying that he could kill in broad daylight and remain popular, Trump did more than draw a logical conclusion from polls showing that his supporters demonstrated unprecedented loyalty. He understood that he was not running a political campaign but was the leader of a mass movement. Most importantly, he understood something that his critics still fail to understand: the essential nature of loyalty in tribal mass movements.
That description of mass movements sounds just like the raison d’être of Fox News as envisioned by Roger Ailes in 1974 doesn’t it?
Key Point: one of the key parts of totalitarianism in the 1930s and ’40s was the totalitarians built and paid for the establishment of their own in-house tribal identity and validation networks. The totalitarians controlled the newspapers, the movie production, and the radio networks. These propaganda machines were expensive to build and run but they were crucial to the goals of delegitimizing enemies, critics, and journalists.
In contrast, for the tribal right wing in America, Fox News paid over $1 billion to build their tribal identity and validation programming machine and spends over $2 billion a year to run it. Trumpism and the Deplorables didn’t spend a dime to benefit from the world’s most sophisticated and powerful tribal identity and validation programming network ever seen.
The French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.”
George Lakoff, former distinguished professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, writes, “That’s why authoritarian leaders always attack the press. They seek to deny and distract from the truth, and this requires undermining those who tell it. . . . Corrupt regimes always seek to replace truth with lies that increase and preserve their power. The Digital Age makes this easier than ever.”
Yes, it does, Mr. Lakoff. Especially if one hundred million Americans are engaged within a self-reinforcing tribal activation and validation feedback loop and 35 percent of voters do not interact with mainstream news media. Professor Lakoff writes on his blog: “Yet we live in an age of weaponized information, where nefarious memes and false narratives of dubious origin can also travel far. These can become dangerous when repeated millions of times. . . . They wrongly believe that bare facts and logic alone win the moral debates. A recent study of the strategies used by Russian and terrorist trolls online found that they have a strong grasp of basic brain science.”
According to cyberwarfare expert Haroon Ullah: “Recent research into both the Russians’ and the Islamic State’s models of propaganda, as well as interviews with defectors, unveil that: 1) people tend to believe something when it is repeated, 2) Russia and Islamic State fanboys gain the advantage when they get to make the first impression, and 3) subsequent rebuttals actually work to reinforce the original misinformation, rather than dissipate it.”
Sound familiar????
Roger Ailes, in his dream of a Republican television network, most certainly understood the essential nature of mass movements and tribal psychology. He also knew Donald Trump for decades. But I still bet he had no idea that Trump would morph from swashbuckling reality show host and self-centered C-level celebrity clown to become the messianic leader of a mass movement of white working-class Americans.
Think of it this way: It cost Rupert Murdoch $1 billion or more to build a weaponized right-wing tribal activation and vali
dation entertainment channel. It cost Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter tens of billions to build the digital infrastructure to distribute Fox News tribal hate porn content to one hundred million Americans every month. It didn’t cost Donald Trump a dime to build the mass movement of Trumpism.
Key Point: Can you imagine what a real Fascist totalitarian regime could achieve with a nonstop tribal activation and identity validation feedback loop? As long as Trump sucks the oxygen out of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, he can only grow more powerful unless the reality-based world starts to see the Trumpian kayfabe for what it really is.
As conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg reminds us, Donald Trump’s demonization of the media as the “enemy of the people” is mostly kayfabe.
Now you know that the term kayfabe means presenting staged events as if they’re real. Pro wrestling is theater, not sport. But it thrives on the illusion that it is the latter, not the former. And so, of course, is Fox News theater, not news. Goldberg implores us to “see Trump’s kayfabe for what it is. Don’t overreact, and don’t fall for the performance.”
Yet as Nazi propaganda genius Joseph Goebbels told the world:
“It would not be impossible to prove that with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly—it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
“Man is and remains an animal. Here a beast of prey, there a house pet, but always an animal.”
My take: If you have gotten this far in my book, and you are not yet irreparably lost down the Fox News/Trumpian kayfabe rabbit hole, you are now well armed to never fall for the Fox News/Donald Trump kayfabe performances.
CHAPTER 14
How Fox News Became a Significant Branch of the 94-Million-Strong Evangelical Church
So who is Fox News’s real competition for the attention of their core elderly small city and rural right-wing audience? By now you know it’s not MSNBC or CNN.
Listen to Jordan Riley, a Christian pop singer in Seattle who works with Daystar, the largest televangelist network in America. Despite the fact that Daystar describes itself as a church, if you watch Daystar programming, you will find that it does not resemble a church in any traditional sense. “Church to me is when I’m gathered with other believers,” Riley says. “I don’t consider [Daystar] an electronic church—it’s just church.”
Take that concept in for a moment.
Fact: the combined revenues (read: nontaxable donations) and viewer ratings of the top thirty “TV ministries” dwarf those of Fox News and every other news and broadcast network combined. The Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian televangelism racket puts FNC’s white tribal activation and identity porn business to shame.
Ed Stetzer, executive director of Nashville-based LifeWay Research, recently released data on Christian television viewership that would stun most Americans—especially secular Americans. “Most people would be surprised that one in three of their neighbors is watching Christian TV. Do one in three adult Americans watch the nightly news? I don’t think so. It’s an overlooked segment of society that is larger than most people think,” he said.
Much of the market for right-wing partisan television overlaps the sixty-five million viewers of Christian TV. Roger Ailes did not overlook televangelism as his real competition; he purposely programmed against it with his own televangelists that Fox euphemistically labels “political talk show hosts.”
Christian TV is selling everlasting life and forgiveness of sin. Roger knew that to get right-wing cultural conservatives to Fox News, FNC’s programming had to be a lot more fun and much more addictive than Christian programming.
It worked better than anyone ever imagined.
For many Fox News viewers, their radicalized partisan conservatism might as well be a religion or cult, with Fox News as the televised “church” service. As you know now, that’s by design. Many of the Americans who self-identify as political and social conservatives and fundamentalist or Evangelical Christians (more than ninety-four million) learn their tribal rules, belief systems, and ideology today not just from the pulpits of their churches.
Today, Evangelical leaders report that a lot of their Evangelical liturgy and belief system comes from their nightly five-hour visit at the pulpit of the Church of Fox News. As Kaitlyn Schiess from the Evangelical Dallas Theological Seminary recently told Molly Worthen, a professor of history at UNC Chapel Hill and a New York Times columnist, “A new ritual has superseded Sunday worship and weeknight Bible studies: a profane devotional practice, with immense power to shape Evangelicals’ beliefs. This ‘liturgy’ is the nightly consumption of Fox News.”
Ms. Worthen points out, “Liberals love to complain about conservatives’ steady diet of misinformation through partisan media, but Ms. Schiess’s complaint is more profound: She sees Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson aren’t just purveyors of distorted news, but high priests of a false religion.”
In other words, Evangelical Christianity is losing out to the major Evangelical TV channel of Fox News. “The reason Fox News is so formative is that it’s this repetitive, almost ritualistic thing that people do every night,” Ms. Schiess says. “It forms in them particular fears and desires, an idea of America. This is convincing on a less than logical level, and the church is not communicating to them in that same way.”
Sound familiar?
So yes, sports fans, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, and good old Lou Dobbs at FBN really are high priests of the partisan conservative tribal religion, making up their tribal liturgy and writing new scripture every night like any good televangelist. Hmm—that is just like I was taught to do as a Fox News host by a big time Fox News EVP—coincidence?
One of my favorite conservative columnists, Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative magazine, puts a fine point on how the rise of American political partisan tribalism has exploded under Fox News and now Trumpism:
The world isn’t being destroyed by Democrats or Republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist—the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world.
The world is being hurt and damaged by one group of people believing they’re truly better people than the others who think differently. The world officially ends when we let our beliefs conquer love. We must not let this happen.
How did we get to the point that America is being destroyed by one political and cultural tribe believing the other tribe is destroying the world? At least partly it’s because that tribal identity message conflated with a fundamentalist Armageddon message has been preached to Fox News viewers and users at least one billion times since 1995.
When Fox News reached just 50,000 or 500,000 people a month with little digital footprint or social media redistribution, this message did not matter. When Fox News started reaching more than one hundred million Americans via TV, streaming video, and social media, the daily drumbeat of this message became perhaps the most powerful and destructive media force in America.
Reality: The $10 billion-a-year industry of creating and broadcasting toxic political tribalism is growing every day. The collateral damage of its emotional toxicity is multi-dimensional. That damage includes getting one side believing the other side is destroying the world just like Richard Hofstadter amazingly foresaw in 1964.
Fox News: Turning the conservative tribe into virtual jihadists and building a religious schism brick by brick against the liberal tribe is just what we do.
PS: Ever wonder why the Fox News/Intolerables/Fundamentalist Christian “Believers” don’t care about Trump’s 7.8 lies every day on Fox News?
Neuroscientist Bobby Azarian from George Mason University writes that one reason Tr
ump supporters believe his lies comes from a basic fact about the brain: it simply takes more mental effort to reject an idea as false than to accept it as true. In other words, it’s easier to believe than to not believe. This fact answers a lot about the surreal situation we find ourselves in today with a pathological liar POTUS whose lies are repeated as gospel truth by the Trump TV network and believed by theoretically sin-averse fundamentalist Christians.
This insight is based on a landmark study published in the journal PLOS One in 2009, which asked the simple question, how is the brain activated differently during a state of belief compared to a state of disbelief?
What these findings show is that the mental process of believing is simply less work for the brain and therefore often favored. Azarian the neuroscientist tells us “the default state of the human brain is to accept what we are told, because doubt takes effort. Belief, on the other hand, comes easily.”
Hey that’s just great, isn’t it?
For Fox News-watching Christian fundamentalists (many Fox News viewers self-identify as fundamentalist Evangelicals and belong to fundamentalist denominations), Azarian claims that being taught to suppress critical thinking begins at a very early age. “It is the combination of the brain’s vulnerability to believing unsupported facts and aggressive indoctrination that create the perfect storm for gullibility. Due to the brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to be sculpted by lived experiences, Evangelicals literally become hardwired to believe farfetched statements.”
When you think about it, this sort of makes sense. This hardwiring begins when they are kids and taught to accept Biblical stories not as metaphors for living life practically, purposefully, and morally, but as objective truth. Mystical explanations for natural events train young minds to not demand evidence for beliefs. As a result, Azarian claims, “The neural pathways that promote healthy skepticism and rational thought are not properly developed. This inevitably leads to a greater susceptibility to lying and gaslighting by manipulative politicians and greater suggestibility in general.”