by Tobin Smith
IT’S TIME TO CALL OUT FOX NEWS FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS: THE FOX HATE CHANNEL
As the 2020 run for the presidency ramps up, America’s Foxocracy (Fox News plus the Trump Reality Presidency TV Show) and their white tribal identity porn programming strategy have both morphed into Fox News 4.0—the Foxocracy as white ethno-nationalist ego gratification channel.
By July 2019, Fox News and Donald J. Trump quit pretending to be the voice of forgotten working-class Americans—there is a much bigger mission afoot. Donald Trump has always been a very effective race warrior. Now, the Foxocracy has tacked its toxic playbook even harder right to join him in a new effort to activate, validate, and radicalize the new American white nationalist movement.
The Foxocracy’s tribalized white identity audience is no longer the disrespected and downtrodden forgotten Intolerables brand—they are now being rebranded by Fox News and Donald Trump as the proud white nationalist “Inevitables.”
It is undeniable that in the first nine-hundred-plus days of his presidency, Mr. Trump never made one iota of effort to expand his base. Fox News has added a few token new Democrats to its contributor lineup, but then it doubled down on the tone and tenor of its white nationalist identity porn programming in prime time.
Today, Fox News and Trumpism’s white tribal identity and white-grievance politics programming strategy has shifted: It is now to inflame, radicalize, and weaponize Trump’s base into an even more toxic race warrior cycle of “Us vs. Them” existential white tribal ethno-nationalism. The promise: victory over the immigrant Others is inevitable if you rally behind Trump for four more years.
Fox News now mainstreams this hate-filled white nationalist ideology twenty-four hours a day with impunity to its deadly consequences. Elizabeth Warren had it right when she was asked earlier this year if she would ever attend a Fox News Town Hall, and she slammed Fox News as a “hate-for-profit machine” and vowed never to accept an invitation. In the wake of the two mass shootings over the first weekend in August 2019 that left thirty dead and fifty-three injured, Warren doubled down on her stance, tweeting, “We need to call it out: Fox News is a hate-for-profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspirators.”
Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the Indivisible Project, gets it just right in his tweet: “Let’s be really clear on this—The shooting in El Paso was a terrorist attack targeting Latinx people. It was spurred by the same white nationalist ideology that is promoted by the President of the United States and mainstreamed by Fox News.”
The new Foxocracy white nationalist membership drive strategy had already become crystal clear in Greenville, North Carolina, on July 17, with the mob-like chants of the assembled Trumpian crowd induced by their leader to scream “Send Her Back, Send Her Back.”
The crowd of MAGA hat- and uniform-wearing Trumpists was referring of course to POTUS Trump’s overtly racist tweets regarding the newly elected Somali immigrant Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and three other new congresswomen of color from the 2018 election—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). In his tweets he suggested that if they have complaints about America, they should “go back” to their own countries.
After the show, the President of the United States of America tweeted: “Just returned to the White House from the Great State of North Carolina. What a crowd, and what great people. The enthusiasm blows away our rivals on the Radical Left. #2020 will be a big year for the Republican Party!”
Most history-challenged American adults might not know that telling people of color to “go back to where they came from” is almost literally the foundational white nationalist insult in America. America’s nativist streak has run through the anti-Catholic riots of 1844, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942.
But when nine black teenagers integrated a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, a televised mob of a thousand-plus white people heckled them with screams of “Go back to Africa.” And my guess is that that image and sound must have struck a chord within the mind of one ten-year-old future POTUS living in Queens, New York.
Donald J. Trump has undoubtedly become the Foxocracy voice of the permanently enraged and perennially victimized white Americans in search of revenge against their elite oppressors and America’s heterogeneous invaders. Fox News is now the very willing digital content creator and broadcast network of the instant gratification tweets and musings of demagogic Trumpism. Both Trump and Fox News together instinctively understand that their committed white tribal identity believers need ever-stronger doses of the hate-based, self-congratulatory, self-esteem-building video content. Today that tribalized white conservative ego-gratification can only come from their leader, and their white tribal identity glorification cable TV network of choice, Fox News.
Thus, America’s symbiotic and symbolic Foxocracy reigns supreme in 2020: Trump speaks and tweets overt messages of white nationalism and nativism only slightly less overtly racistly toned than Alabama governor and candidate for president George Wallace.
Then Fox News prime-time programming produces and scripts monologues and B-roll video proof of white tribal apostasies perpetrated by the socialist left. Finally, all this white tribal fear and hate porn is edited and cut into three-minute algorithmically hyper-targeted white tribal identity porn videos.
But as I hope this book made clear, what follows in the wake of this white identity video porn content explosion is a tsunami of digital fear and hate content delivery and retargeting. What follows next no one ever imagined would happen in the liberal Western culture: every minute of every day, social media platforms will pour billions of these emotionally smoldering white identity porn segments into the digital information cocoons of self-identified aggrieved white social media users.
The most powerful 24/7 white nationalist digital moral panic spiral and tribal superiority validation feedback loop in history is being created.
Scared? I am too. No one knows what happens to a country when 40% of its voters entertain themselves by hating on each other’s tribal cultural enemies—but I can tell you this: I don’t want us to find out.
For your information, historians tell us that at its height, the Nazi Party in Germany was joined by only 6.5 million, or about 9 percent, of Germany’s citizens. So yes, self-reinforcing authoritarian and Fascist tribal feedback loops constantly using the infamous “Big Lie” tactics have been proven by history to be extremely powerful and dangerous to free democracies when fewer than 10 percent of their citizens swear allegiance to a disruptive tribal banner.
WHEN WILL THIS CYCLE OF TRIBAL BLAME-AND-HATE PORN “ENTERTAINMENT” END?
The answer is simple: When we as a nation and a society rise up against it and tell the advertisers who finance this plague on our lives, families, and country that we are done—enough is enough. Advertiser boycotts have been the most effective weapon against the producers and distributors of weaponized tribal identity porn.
Data shows that Fox News advertisers benefit and Fox News suffers from consumer-driven boycotts. As Michael Hiltzik points out in a Los Angeles Times column, “Advertisers of consumer products fear controversy more than anything—especially political controversy.” In June 2018, Fox News’s most tribally hateful and polarizing prime-time shows (Hannity and Ingraham) reported 20 percent lower ad revenues. That’s a good start!
In short, white tribal identity porn needs its own #MeToo moment. The #StopTheFoxocracy hashtag is a start.
Organizations like Media Matters and Think Progress are leading the charge against Fox News’s commercial right-wing identity porn. I started www.StopTheFoxocracy.com to build awareness about the tragic effect that addiction to tribal identity porn is bringing to millions of American families and to our “agree-to-disagree” adversarial form of democratic self-government.
HOW CAN YOU START FIGHTING BACK?
You can start by sharing this book, then posting on social media about your experienc
es with tribal hate porn. Just sharing the link to www.StopTheFoxocracy.com or sharing social media comments on what you have learned from this book will make a difference to many of the people you socialize with on Facebook or Twitter.
And by all means, visit and join, like, share, or tweet our StopTheFoxocracy Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/StopTheFoxocracy.com).
Let’s make no mistake here: Staying with the status quo of the American tribal identity activation and validation industry is the moral equivalent of driving down a freeway where you see a pile-up of crashed cars on fire.
Would you consider it to be ethical and moral for you to stop your car, pour gasoline on those car fires, and then post the video to YouTube to earn money from the pre-roll advertising attached to your video?
Is that the country we want to be? Is this the country that our forefathers fought and died to protect from tyranny and to promote “our better angels?” I can’t help but remember the marvelous thoughts and words from Presidents Obama and Bush at my friend Senator John McCain’s memorial at the National Cathedral in DC.
“So much of our politics can seem small and mean and petty. Trafficking in bombast and insult, phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It’s a politics that pretends to be brave and tough, but is instead born of fear. John called on us to be bigger than that, to be better than that,” Obama said. “Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be, but what will happen in all the other days will depend on what you do today. What better way to honor John McCain than follow his example.”
President Bush added, “if, as a nation, we forget who we are, John’s voice will always come as a whisper over our shoulder: ‘We’re better than this, America is better than this.’”
Senator Joe Lieberman, who became an Independent in 2006, also took aim at the current political climate, saying McCain’s death has “reminded the American people that these values are what make us a great nation, not the tribal partisanship and personal-attack politics that have recently characterized our life.”
Our country and leaders allowed the First Amendment to become weaponized. Unlike the dawn of the TV age in 1948–49, where Congress carefully set nonpartisan ground rules for televised political commentary and opinion programming, today’s political and cultural identity porn industry is allowed to flourish unchecked while it addicts and monetizes our most vulnerable citizens.
How do we fight back against Fox News and overcome tribal identity pornography?
We must take personal responsibility for ourselves and our family members first.
Now that you understand the strategy, tactics, and adverse outcomes that power the tribal-identity-porn industry, we have to convert your newly minted awareness of these techniques into something good for ourselves, our families, and our country.
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of adults, parents, teachers, business leaders, and elected officials to not ignore the personal and social ramifications of the oncoming tsunami of new televised and streamed tribal fear and hate TV coming in 2020.
At the end of the day, the consumer is responsible for the management of her own personal tribal partisan hate-porn diet. As Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, suggests, “Ultimately it will be up to users to choose, and stick to, their own information diets. There’s a huge buffet. If you eat whatever’s put in front of you, you’re not necessarily going to be making the best choices.”
Look—we stood up to cigarette addiction, sugar water addiction, and junk food addiction. Now it’s time to stand up against weaponized white tribal identity porn and white nationalism. Think of it as digital junk food. If you don’t manage your diet of right- or left-wing tribal hate porn, you will become susceptible to the next big thing in tribal partisan pornography. I can’t tell you today what that is, but I can tell you with certainty that it is coming.
BIG BOLD DISCLAIMERS MUST BE PLACED ON THE TV SCREEN BEFORE ANY TRIBAL HATE PORN SHOW ON ANY NETWORK EVEN STARTS
This technique is sorely needed and is easy to implement. We have long detailed disclaimers on infomercials, for crying out loud. We have disclaimers on addictive slot machines and video games. We used to have disclaimers on editorial TV content that clearly stated, “The following opinions are not from the news department, and we do not, in fact, check or endorse any opinions discussed on this program.” Even that disclaimer at the beginning of the Fox News tribal-identity-opinion-porn programs would be a good first strike at the tribal identity pornographers.
Yes, it will take a return of a Democratic majority in Congress and the White House to get a twenty-first-century Digital Media Fairness and Disclosure Doctrine. But a simple disclosure like this attached to any tribal partisan identity porn from any producer or distributor would go a long way to raising awareness of the mission and manipulation the industry:
The following program and opinions are not from the Fox News Channel news department and should be considered entertainment programming and not news programming. Research has proven consumption of more than a few hours per day of political or cultural entertainment programming can be addictive for many viewers. Fox News does not fact-check any opinions discussed on this program. The host of this program is an entertainer and not a journalist. There has been no effort in the production of this program by Fox News to provide a fair and balanced presentation of the issues discussed in this broadcast. The paid contributors appearing on this program are paid by Fox News and should be considered to be explicitly and exclusively partisan in the views they perform on this entertainment-not-news program.
Why don’t we do this kind of forced disclaimer for explicitly partisan FNC or MSNBC opinion/entertainment programming now? The only answer I can come up with is that we as a society are in massive denial about what cultural and political warfare as entertainment has done (and continues to do) to our nation.
WE ALL NEED TO RAISE AWARENESS OF WHITE TRIBAL IDENTITY PORN
Our Founding Fathers, from Madison to Lincoln, recognized that the default behavioral wiring of human beings was not to seek our “better angels” but to seek safety and inclusion within ideological tribes. A big part of the original idea of America was to become no longer subservient to our innate human wiring for tribalism and tribal behavior.
Call me old-fashioned and out of touch, but apparently, this reality seems to be lost among a broad cross-section of America. Our schools have failed to teach advanced democracy for decades; this mistake has caught up and bit our culture in the rear. A big part of making democracy work is to be educated so we can’t be manipulated by tribal identity pornographers.
Key Point: America was created mainly to be the antidote to kings, aristocracy, and tribalism. We swear allegiance to an idea, not a king or tribe; we swear allegiance to the idea that all men and women are created equal, that everyone who becomes a citizen of America signs up to pursue a mutually shared vision of citizenship with responsibilities conferred therein. In exchange, everyone gets a shot to pursue their ambition and dreams with (mostly) unlimited opportunity.
In short, our Founding Fathers fought and died for the right to not be subservient to the old tribal ways of living and of defining themselves by the enemies they hate.
What happened to us?
I hope you now understand that the inescapable short answer is that many of us have allowed our innate tribal nature to retake control of our lives and impulses.
ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE RIGHT NOW TO STOP THE TRIBAL-VALIDATION FEEDBACK LOOP
Visit www.StopTheFoxocracy.com and join the movement. It’s free, and I promise we will keep you in the fight against Fox News’s tribal identity pornography.
Email/text/social media post and spread the word and mission of this book and of StopTheFoxocracy.com to your social media followers repeatedly!
Join the petitions to boycott Fox News advertisers. As the Hannity and Laura Ingraham ad boycotts proved, attacking the sponsors of tribal identity pornography is the most effective tool we have in fighting
back against Fox News.
Share your story! If your family is suffering estrangement from a loved one with a severe case of Foxhole disorder, tell the world. Email me at [email protected]
Support BetterAngels.org who are sponsoring and running group depolarization workshops in schools, churches, and synagogues.
Support HearYourselfThink.org. They have taken the lead in advocacy and training against tribal hate pornography. As they say on their website, quoting Benjamin Franklin: “We the People are—and will remain—the world’s oldest constitutional republic. If we can keep it.”
America is better than this. I hear John McCain’s voice whisper over our shoulders. We can do better. We have to do better.
Each journey starts with a first step. By reading and thinking about this book, you have taken not just a step but also a leap!
Spread your knowledge of the dangers of weaponized tribal identity pornography with those you love!
At the very least, we all must acknowledge that the American democracy is under attack by purveyors of white nationalist moral panic spirals who are in business to profit by weaponizing and monetizing our tribal fears and hatred of the Other. Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post, “History teaches us that the way to deal with hateful demagoguery is not to ignore it, not to downplay it, not to hope it somehow exhausts itself, but to confront it. Trump’s fomenting of hate has to be called out. It has to be denounced. It has to be resisted.”
That goes for Fox News too. The 2020 election must be a referendum on both Trump’s weaponized racism and all Fox News predatory business practices. The Associated Press reports that Trump and his campaign believe that placing “racial polarization at the center of his call to voters” carries “far more benefits than risks.” That of course means Fox News will follow Trump’s lead.