Do American Conservatives Want Regime Change? And What Would That Look Like?

Posted on November 9, 2023 by Luke Ford

Michael Anton writes for the summer 2023 edition of the Claremont Review of Books:

The core problem with discussing solutions to truly momentous problems, at least from the right, is that anything that might work is too fundamental and astounding to gain a fair hearing. What’s more, even stating such possibilities is more likely than not to get the speaker canceled. Whereas anything that can be discussed openly is all but certain not to work…

Not just coming up with solutions, but communicating them in a way your audience understands, without getting yourself killed, calls for the most delicate judgment, a fine literary hand, and prudence that would impress Aristotle himself.

So what are the things that might improve life in the first world that are unsayable?

* We have to recognize harshness of life and people. I’m more of a Hobbesian (who saw the state of nature as brutal) than a Lockean (who saw the state of nature as leading to cooperation). Recognizing the flawed and selfish nature of people means we need ways of disciplining people. We need to give people incentives for good behavior and punishments for bad behavior.

* Recognition of the tribal nature of people.

* Recognition that almost nobody cares about out-groups.

* Recognition that the more people have in common, the more likely they are to feel at ease with each other and to cooperate.

* Recognition of the power of hero systems. Everybody has a hero system. Most people get it from their community, noted Ernest Becker. Liberalism and leftism are the hero systems that thinks they have transcended hero systems. Most people seem unaware that their hero system is a product of contingent circumstances, and it is this subjective hero system that drives liberals to condemn imaginary sins such as racism, bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia and the like while people on the right condemn sins that are imaginary from a liberal perspective such as gay sex and trans identity and drug experimentation.

* We live in a post-modern world. There’s no one narrative that adequately explains reality. Still, some narratives are more helpful for group cohesion than others. We should promote those (nationalist narratives).

* We’re all locked in an iron cage together and nobody is coming to save us. To survive, you want to become as strong as possible because you never know what might happen. The most important task for a nation-state is to survive.

* Different people have different gifts. Different plants and animals have different gifts. Different dog breeds have different gifts. When dogs kill people, those dogs are usually rottweilers and pit bulls. When people kill people outside of war, these killers are usually from a group easy to identify — young dumb men with gloomy prospects. We should regularly stop and frisk them as per predictive protocols. We need broken-windows policing.

* The more stable and cohesive you are, the better. The more divided and unstable your competitors, the better for you. We need government and social policy that incentivizes cohesion and social trust. So that means policies that reward hard work and punish slacking, that reward achievement and hurt those who act in an anti-social manner. For example, much of help for the homeless and the poor should be conditioned on regular drug and alcohol testing. For privileges such as drinking alcohol, gun ownership and drivers licenses and some forms of welfare and perhaps even the right to have children, people should need a number of law-abiding citizens vouch for them. Most horrible behavior, such as murder, comes from people who lack bonds. We should incentivize people to form bonds so that they can then enjoy the good things of life. We need to supplement our individualist society with prompts towards forming groups that take care of each other. We should allow churches and synagogues and other groups to offer health insurance and other benefits to its exclusive members. We need to get rid of much of the civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s and beyond and return to the traditional rights of private property and freedom of association.

* For the normal person embedded in a group, his purported racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, prejudice and the like are not the opposite of morality, but the proper foundation for morality. This bloke loves specific people and is loved by them and thus he has an in-group and a hero system and everything he needs for meaning and morality. Such a person is less likely to engage in reckless behaviors than those who are unmoored.

* “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.” (Maj. Kong)

* You could do worse than the TV show Yellowstone for wisdom about life:

* “Until they find a cure for human nature, a man must stand with his people.”

* “Mister, I don’t know you, but if you’re wearin’ that brand, you must be a bad man.”

* “Should is a useless word, almost as useless as hope.”

* “A man who puts a hand on a member of my family never puts a hand on anything else.”

* “No one has a right. You have to take a right, or stop it from being taken from you.”

* “Lawyers are the swords of this century. Words are weapons now.”

* “It’s the one constant in life. You build something worth having, someone’s gonna try to take it.”

* “All men are bad, but some of us try really hard to be good.”

* Marginalized movements attract marginalized people. Nothing great can be built by losers.

* There are no solutions. Only tradeoffs. (Tom Sowell)

* There’s no magic key to unlocking how the world works. The closest thing we have to a magic key to reality is the predictive power of IQ for large groups. Goodness, for example, requires empathy, which is a form of abstract thought, and the capacity for abstract thought is measured by IQ. If a thousand 80 IQ people spill a drink on the floor of a public gathering, a thousand 100 IQ people spill the same amount of liquid, and a thousand 120 IQ people spill the same amount, the higher IQ groups will be more diligent about cleaning up the spill.

* If you want to preserve native life, you have to restrict invasive species.

* If it becomes socially acceptable for minority groups to pursue their own interests without regard to the majority’s interests, majorities will start acting in their own interests without regard for minorities (see India under Narendra Modi).

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Analyzing Internet Freedom Activist Mike Benz aka Frame Game Radio

Posted on November 8, 2023 by Luke Ford

Kristen Ruby made this transcript of part of my video:

Frame Games was a public commentator in 2016-2018. He was alt right adjacent, openly Jewish, but he kept his name and identity and face hidden. Brandy Zadrozny at NBC News finally revealed who he is. He is Mike Benz, former State Department official who advocates for Internet freedom, which was a big crusade of Frame Games back in the day.

It’s kind of amusing that the guy who is Frame Game Radio went on to be a State Department official and then be incredibly influential now. He’s very good at framing and when you watch his videos you see a lot of similarities between what he did as Frame Game and what he’s doing now on behalf of Internet Freedom.

He says that back in the day, he was part of a group deradicalization effort. I am pretty sure he was just one guy. I never had any sense that there was a group behind him. I never saw the slightest bit of evidence that there was any kind of group behind Frame Game. Everything he did, everything he said, everything he produced struck me as a solo effort.

There was a Twitter group that was frequently actively hostile to him. The Twitter group of alt right adjacent Jews thought that he was too unnecessarily critical and over the top critical of Jews. Frame Game did not like this group. Many members of the group did not like him.

They would mock his lack of Jewish education. In his bizarre rejoinder to Brandy’s report, he starts off by saying, I’m a proud Jew and the child of or descendant of Holocaust survivors. I thought it was a very weak response, and that is, it implies that almost anyone who’s actually leading a Jewish life, studying traditional Jewish texts and observing traditional Jewish commandments, rarely bothers if ever to say, yeah, I’m a proud Jew.

It’s something that you say to compensate for something, such as lack of knowledge and lack of practice. So, he did seem extremely ignorant of Judaism, that always shone through, so now in his rejoinder post, he says that I was taught in Hebrew school that the word Moshe means messenger.

No, it doesn’t. The word Moshe means savior. The word Navi means messenger, prophet. So, he just keeps getting elementary Jewish things wrong. Now he houses the head of this electronic foundation, but one gets the sense that this electronic foundation is primarily just him. We get the sense that he didn’t run this by anyone, because if he’d just shared that with some people, they would have helped him avoid the mistakes he made. But there was nothing that was unethical, underhanded, dirty or dastardly about what Brandy Zadrozny did on Mike Benz. It was a legitimate by the numbers work of journalism and reporting.

I had Frame Game on my show probably about five times. He had some smart, interesting and sometimes truthful things to say. Overall, he was hyperbolic, overly dramatic, somewhat conspiratorial. Frame Game Radio is not a scholar and he’s not someone who optimizes for truth. He admittedly is someone who optimizes for making a difference, making a change.

He’s an activist. And so, he believes in saying anything, doing anything to make a change in the world. So, if that requires lying, whatever it takes. He had a more ‘whatever it takes’ attitude than I did. Frame Game is amazing at the way he frames things. He’s incredibly compelling. On the other hand, he does not optimize for truth. That’s a big downside with his type of approach.

Frame Game would be much more hostile towards the establishment than I was. He was much more hostile towards the established elites. At the same time, he was more credulous when they would say things that would align with his narratives.

What do you know about Mike Benz’s network of Jews infiltrating the alt right?

I don’t. I strongly do not believe there was any such thing. There’s no evidence of that of trying to steer them away from the JQ. Frame Game did not try to steer people away from the JQ.

Can you remember anything he said, or did, produced, created, or put online that at all struck as having a group component?

I can recall nothing. His work was clearly the work of a solo practitioner. There’s no group behind him, and he generally had a hostile reaction towards the alt right adjacent Jews, he generally had a hostile reaction towards. He was much more friendly with the alt right than he was with the alt right adjacent Jews, who did not go as far as he did in pushing an anti-Jewish power narrative.

Frame Games response to Brandy Zadrozny was particularly weak. He was self-pitying. It was both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. He was talking about how influential and powerful he was and at the same time, how oppressed and beaten down he was. About Brandy’s supposedly poor journalism and it was just basic reporting.

In his response, Mike Benz said a lot of ridiculous things, which again shows me that his quote unquote foundation is just Mike Benz, because if he’d run his response by anybody, they would have given him some valuable feedback so he wouldn’t have made a fool of himself.

He argues in his response that he was part of a group effort by Jews to deradicalize people. No. I saw absolutely no evidence for that. There was no effort to deradicalize people. He wanted to empower and strengthen people to advocate for their group. One particular group.

You put under Stephen’s stream that Frame Game was a psyop. It was no more a psyop than you or me or anyone else. Every living thing tries to create an environment around it that is most conducive to its thriving.

You would think that any living thing would try to do that. Frame Game tried to create an environment around him that was most conducive to his thriving. I try to create an environment around me that’s most conducive to my thriving. We’re all trying to make real our own hero systems, the way we see the world and what we believe will be most conducive to our own thriving.

There was no psyop going on with Frame Game beyond normal human levels of trying to create a conducive environment. His whole thing is framing and he’s very good at that. He’s very exciting and compelling to listen to. Even now, you watch some of his Electronic Freedom Foundation videos and they’re compelling. But it’s clear he does not optimize for truth.

Sometimes one can get so caught up in one’s own ability to frame things, that you get a little detached from reality, which I think happened to Frame Game.

He developed an exaggerated sense of his own powers, because he had so much success. And people were telling him that he was great and he tried to frame away this Brandy Zadrozny critique. I don’t think he did it effectively. Compare Frame Game’s efforts to what Richard Hanania did.

Richard Hanania just came out and said, yeah, I wrote a lot of things that I regret. I had an attitude towards life back then that I regret and I’d like to think that I’ve grown up and improved. Richard Hanania apparently has taken no significant hit from these revelations. Richard Hanania got the tone and apology apology right. He handled this unpleasant situation with as much grace and realism as possible. I don’t think Mike Benz got it right. You can probably learn from Richard Hanania’s response.

These are the dangers of posting online anonymously. You don’t use the same care and discretion that you would if you were operating under your own real name. If Frame Game Radio wasn’t a psyop, why does he say he was? Because it’s a lot more preferable to portray your work as a Psyop as having a Mossad-like quality than what he was, which was, beyond just a white advocate, close to the alt right nationalist brand. He’s trying to frame himself and position himself as something more socially acceptable.

It’s socially acceptable to run a psyop against the alt right. It’s not socially acceptable to say many of the things that he said. If he’d said them under his real name back then, it would have had to be much more careful, much more nuanced, and it would have had to pay a much heavier price.

Sometimes when you try to avoid paying a price in the present moment, you create a much bigger price for yourself down the road.

Anonymity online does as many good things as it does bad things. Good people can use anonymity online to do good things. People predisposed to the bad will probably use anonymity online to do bad things, but it does create all sorts of dangerous temptations. It can unmoor a person from his foundations. If I say anything wacky, I hear about it from people in my real life.”

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Why Did Tucker Carlson Get Fired?

Posted on November 8, 2023 by Luke Ford

I suspect that Tucker was fired for the same reason that millions of people get fired — they irritated their boss.

If your boss doesn’t like you, it doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. You’re a dead man walking.

Brian Stelter’s book, Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy, will be released Nov. 14. Vanity Fair published an excerpt Oct. 31:

When Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott called Tucker Carlson around 11:15 a.m. on Monday, April 24, and said, “We’re taking you off the air,” she didn’t give him a reason. To Carlson, cancellation was unthinkable. He was the highest-rated host across all of cable news—and he was suddenly sentenced to execution. It was like somebody canceling Taylor Swift mid-tour or removing Stranger Things from Netflix before anyone could stream the ending. It made no sense…

Though Carlson would later suggest his ouster was a “condition” of the Dominion suit, there’s no evidence to support that theory, and both parties deny it. According to my reporting, many factors contributed to the defenestration of Carlson, which ranks among the biggest bombshells in cable news history, not only because of what his exit meant for Fox, but also what it meant for the Republican Party…

Carlson was believed to have Trump-like hypnotic power over the GOP base. He was believed to be irreplaceable. But that impression was, in large part, a creation of Carlson’s. In truth, Carlson had alienated so many people, instigated so many internal and external scandals, fanned so many flames of ugliness, that his firing was inevitable. After all, he’d been fired from CNN and MSNBC earlier in his career. That’s why, at Fox, he puffed out his chest and pretended to be immune to attack. His long relationship with career vulnerability caused him to foster an image of untouchability. And it worked so well that even now, more than six months after his exit, people are wondering why it happened…

But some of Carlson’s staffers were not entirely shocked. They knew they pushed the envelope far past the point of a paper cut. “It was always going to end badly,” one Carlson producer said. “We knew we were burning too bright.” The royal we was something Carlson always used. He portrayed his production team—and only his team—as a force for good in the battle against the evils he presumed nightly. His entire show was about us versus them, and this approach extended to the rest of Fox, where Tucker Carlson Tonight had the appearance of a rogue unit. According to a Grossberg lawsuit, Carlson’s “bro-fest” environment was antagonistic toward other Fox shows…

I found that Carlson’s producers and writers were more loyal to him than to Fox as a network. They were a saboteur squad of true believers, regarding the mother ship as almost enemy territory, since as a Fortune 500 company, Fox Corp had policies in place promoting diversity and supporting transgender employees—the very types of things Carlson railed against on air. Of course, Carlson always genuflected to Fox in public, praising the network for letting him “say what we think is true.” But his expressions of gratitude to Fox didn’t fool management because they knew how he acted in private. Six years in prime time had reshaped Carlson, darkened his heart, driven him to the edge. He berated Fox News executives in New York. He belittled people (like me) who scrutinized him. In the view of some of his own colleagues, he became unglued…

While at Fox, Carlson always specified that he worked for the Murdochs, which was a way to elevate his standing and diminish what the org chart said: that his opinion show, like all the others, reported through executive vice president Meade Cooper to Scott, who was a rare female CEO in the male-dominated TV business. According to sources on the staff, Carlson shit-talked both women as well as his number one enemy within Fox News, the entrenched public relations boss Irena Briganti, whom he called a cunt….

Carlson’s internal critics, of whom there were many, viewed his treatment of the female executives as part and parcel with the misogyny displayed on his show. More than a dozen current and former Fox staffers brought this problem up to me, unprompted. “Tucker is very titillated by misogyny,” a host said. Some of the staffers theorized that his mother’s mistreatment—she abandoned the family when Carlson was six—engendered a negativity toward women….

Most Fox hosts didn’t know Lachlan personally, but Carlson did, and he made sure everyone else knew he did…

The Fox board retained Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a notoriously powerful white-shoe law firm, to investigate Carlson and any other malign messages that might exist. “There were major concerns about liability,” an executive told me. Within a week, Carlson was out…

Yes, he was in the sights of the Fox board. Yes, he was under scrutiny for his “cunt” texts. Yes, his “white men fight” message made matters worse. Yes, his show’s climate was so hostile that Grossberg had standing to sue. But there was so much more:

Carlson repulsed large swaths of the company he worked for.
He created internal strife with his conspiratorial commentaries.
He exposed Fox to defamation suits from the likes of Ray Epps.
He offended key executives and seemed to take delight in doing so, to the point that managers believed he broke rules and norms just to show he could.
He strained friendships, as Rupert’s and Lachlan’s chums repeatedly complained to them about his poisonous rhetoric.
He triggered so many ad boycotts and turned off so many advertisers that his time slot was far less profitable for Fox than it should have been.
And he committed the cardinal Fox sin of acting like he was bigger than the network he was on.

It was a tale as old as TV. Stardom is a potent and often destructive drug. Icarus flew too close to the sun; he got his wings melted. Carlson flapped away, higher and higher, until one day the Murdochs just couldn’t tolerate his flapping anymore. “He got too big for his boots,” Rupert told at least one confidant.

I was just reading this 2005 classic, Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know – and What to Do About Them, and much of its analysis applies to people like Carlson:

* Beware that you always stay on the correct side of these true agendas:
MOTIVATION 1 : Protection
If a company feels you are opening them up to any severe liability or inconvenience (even if it is justified), many will remove you as quickly as possible. When you put your own needs ahead of a company’s protection, you are red flagging yourself as someone who is not a team player and cannot be trusted. In today’s litigious society, many companies value protection above all else. Threatening a company’s sense of protection is the number one cause of job loss today.
MOTIVATION 3 : Open support
If your company feels, for whatever reason, that you do not openly support their policies, positions, or direction you will be out. Naysayers beware!

* Even if you have the best skills in the company, you will have no security, none of your needs will be met, and no doors will be opened to you unless you gain the trust of those at the top. Trust is based on the company’s perception of you. Whatever that perception is at this moment is actively determining your job security and value.

The trick to learning what your company’s opinions or perceptions are is to get a handle on what its hidden agendas are. It involves looking at what your company truly protects, rewards, and values, then holding up a mirror to yourself and evaluating your own actions in the workplace.

* Look at your actions through the eyes of an owner. Do you outwardly act like someone who supports the company policies and interests, no matter what you think on the inside? Do you openly behave and speak like someone with ownership and passion, or someone looking for more money in your paycheck? Look at your actions through the lens of the company values. How close in alignment do your actions seem when viewed from the outside?

* Because any legal complication for the company would affect you in a much more negative way than the temporary discomfort of resolving the issue on your own. These issues can cost huge amounts of money in legal consultations (even if it never goes to a formal legal forum), not to mention the wasted hours of high – level people who should be spending their time guiding the company toward success and not evaluating a situation between two employees. And if it does go to a formal court setting it could eat up all the profits for the company for that year, or even several years. A problem like that can take a company under. No one with a vested interest, or ownership, in an organization would even come close to risking it. And if you truly cared about the well – being of your company, neither would you.
That’s the mind-set you must acquire: high – level “ownership” of your company and its interests, not just the ownership of your personal interests and comfort levels. There’s a big difference.
Putting yourself and your personal interests before the company will label you as a traitor, not to be trusted, and not to be invested in.

* The closer you bring yourself into the appearance of alignment through your daily actions and choices, the more favorable the company’s opinions of you will be, and the more secure your job will be.

* Highly skilled employees, with seemingly great value to their organizations, are let go every day because they are perceived to be a potential risk and cannot be trusted.

* Companies value younger employees for their enthusiasm, passion, fresh thinking, energy, and relatively low cost…

* Companies value older employees for their experience, knowledge, professionalism, consistency, and levelheadedness. What scares companies about older employees is the potential for a lack of flexibility, stagnation in thinking, and health issues.

* Companies look at your appearance as a sign of the way you think. Dated clothing translates into dated thinking. Don’t wear glasses from the ’70s or clothes from ten years ago. No matter how good you are at your job, a dated appearance will give you an image of someone behind the times, someone who might keep the company from moving forward.

* There’s no right to free speech in the workplace… If you say anything against the company or its policies there very well could be retaliation.
Companies are not allowed to tread on your right to free speech, so they will never censor you or tell you to stop. But they also can’t have someone in their own company speaking out against their policies, work environment, or practices. Their interests are best served when their employees are openly supportive, not subversive.

* Employees feel it’s their right to speak out on a policy they disagree with, a boss who’s causing problems, or a situation that’s making them unhappy or less productive. It is your right, sure enough, but every time you voice a negative opinion you’re unknowingly creating a strong image as a “victim,” “unlucky,” and “unsuccessful.”

* Negativity is highly contagious. Companies know all too well that all it takes is one rotten apple to turn a group of happy employees into a mass of disgruntled workers seething with the seeming injustices of their situation.

* So who is this person with such tremendous power over your career? For better or worse, it is your boss. Without his or her support your career goes nowhere… The powers – that – be don’t take kindly to insubordination. They will expect you to get along with and support your boss no matter what your personal feelings are about him or her… It doesn’t matter if you like him or not. You have to respect him, if for no other reason than for his ability to propel or destroy your career. No one else has as much sole power to do so… In the eyes of the company, you are your boss’s opinion of you… Your job security lies solely in your boss’s hands… It’s just too tempting to remove any employees who have become a thorn in his side, those who are unsupportive or just generally unfriendly. Just too tempting. So, rather than skills, ability, or fairness, the decision can sometimes be based on whether or not the boss personally likes you.

You may think bosses come and go. But the truth is, their feelings about you will haunt you for the rest of your career. In references, lost opportunities, HR files, you name it… Things may not turn around even if he leaves because the first thing the new boss will do is ask the previous one who the troublemakers are and who to watch out for. And each time you interview for a job, your potential new employer will track down your previous bosses to get their opinion of you.

Pitting yourself against a boss is a losing battle because companies always side with their managers. They have to. A company will almost always take the manager’s word over yours. That’s just the way it works.

* You are there for the sole purpose of making your boss successful. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like her, didn’t pick her as your boss, or don’t agree with anything she does. If she doesn’t feel you’re providing the support she desires, she can and will retaliate. She has full authority to do whatever she needs to achieve the high – performance team she desires. If that means removing you, so be it.
All managers are in a precarious position, squeezed from both sides and operating in a glass house. They will react very strongly to someone they think might be trying to throw stones. They will retaliate, and the company will back them.

* Don’t challenge or threaten your gatekeeper — ever… Managers don’t like to be cornered, attacked, or accused — even in private.

* Employees think they’ve been hired for their smarts. Eager to show all they know, they blurt out their ideas and suggestions. They correct their bosses in meetings, offer up ways to make things better, and submit presentations on how procedures can be improved. How can this be a bad thing?
Because if it’s done before you’ve earned the right, it comes across as nothing more than criticism of the current workings of the company. Companies don’t want your smarts unless you’ve shown respect first.
It doesn’t matter if you have good intentions, voicing your opinion before earning the right will make your boss feel threatened and your company will see you as a disruptive force.

* Never take the spotlight away from your boss to show your smarts, and never believe you could do a better job.

* Gossip can take many forms and appears in virtually every area of the business world. All are detrimental to your career. Gossip falls under that sticky “right to free speech” issue, so no employer will tell you the damage it can do, but secret retaliation against gossiping is happening in our organizations every day.

* It doesn’t matter what you like to gossip about. Companies don’t like loose lips — of any kind.

* Whether fair or not, companies tend to judge guilt by association. This means, not only do you have to stay away from the behaviors companies distrust, you also have to stay away from other employees who indulge in them.
If the company sees that you spend time with those who spread negativity, they will assume you share those same views. You might refrain from gossip, but if you listen to what the gossiping crowd has to say, you will be associated with them. If one of your friends develops a bad relationship with a key person, you could be sidelined by association. That’s the way it works.

Fox News makes money meeting the needs of a particular niche. It does not make money when people such as Tucker trigger massive advertiser boycotts. Tucker’s words created headaches for its leaders, employees and advertisers. Many Fox executives knew that Tucker despised them so they were looking for an opportunity to let him go.

Glenn Beck, more than a decade before, got monster ratings for Fox News but was pushed out because he was too much trouble. In his 2014 book, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Country, updated in 2017, Gabriel Sherman wrote:

The most potent force in Fox’s reinvention of Obama was Glenn Beck, who debuted in the 5:00 p.m. time slot the day before Obama’s inauguration. Within weeks, he was pulling in more than two million viewers a day, a 50 percent increase. Only Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity put up better numbers, and that was in prime time, when the television audience was vastly larger. Although Ailes was often unsparing in his praise of hosts, he told Beck in one meeting, “You are probably the most uniquely talented person on television I’ve seen.”

When Ailes hired Beck, he imagined him hosting a conventional cable news talk show. “I see your show being more of a Jack Paar show,” he told him. “Jack delivered a monologue, but you also have guests and it has a variety component.” Beck had a different idea. He conceived his program an anti – television show — partly because Beck said he didn’t like television — which would feature Beck roaming his set in plain view of the cameramen and cables. There would be few guests. Instead, his studio was like a one – room prairie schoolhouse where he delivered daily sermon – like lectures before a chalkboard, on which he traced a web connecting his progressive enemies, George Soros central among them, though Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was a supporting player. With the Dow plunging from its peak of 14,000 toward 6,000, Beck’s dire scenarios — FEMA concentration camps, societal collapse — were fears that became imaginable.
Beck broke the mold at Fox. Unlike most of the unknowns and has-beens Ailes recruited, Beck joined Fox at a time when he was well on his way to becoming a star. He was also a driven businessman. He founded his own company, Mercury Radio Arts (a play off Orson Welles’s radio broadcasts of the 1930s), and brought in executives to run it. In a break from Fox tradition, Beck had his own team of aggressive public relations counselors who had worked with Katie Couric and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
But Beck’s show built on Ailes’s playbook, making the culture wars personal. He seemed to many to be Fox News’s id made visible, saying things — Obama is a racist, Nazi tactics are progressive tactics — dredged from the right – wing subconscious. Beck crossed lines that weren’t supposed to be crossed, even at Fox, and the presentation — childlike, angry, often tearful — was as remarkable as the content. Some at Fox were alarmed by Beck’s rhetoric but Ailes was fully on – board. Privately, Ailes said Beck was telling the truth. The day after Beck said on air that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” Ailes told his executives, “I think he’s right.” The only question was how to manage the fallout.

* But Ailes’s biggest stars — Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin — were burning hot — too hot — which posed new problems. Beck’s numbers were moving toward three million a day, a stunning achievement. “I’ve never seen anyone build an audience this fast,” Ailes told executives. The concern was that Beck was almost engulfing Fox itself. He did not follow Ailes’s directives, and some of Fox’s other big names seemed diminished by comparison — and were speaking up about it. Sean Hannity complained to Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck, scheduled him as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further. In March, The Washington Post ran an article that reported on grievances Fox employees had about Beck’s inflammatory rhetoric and his self – promotion.

* [Ailes] was also losing his biggest star of the Obama era. On Monday afternoon, March 28, Ailes called Glenn Beck to his office to discuss his future at the network. He had spent the better part of the weekend in Garrison strategizing how to stage – manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable.

* The relationship had been strained since Beck joined Fox. In early 2009, Fox News executives denied a request from Beck’s production team to allow Beck’s head writer and close friend, Pat Gray, to accompany Beck to the Fox News studio for his daily program. At CNN, it had never been an issue for Gray to join Beck at the studio; in fact, Beck leased space for his entire staff at the Time Warner Center. Beck wrote an email to Ailes stressing that Gray was a key writer for the show and that his presence in the studio was important. Ailes responded that he did some checking and it was against the “policy” to give out a building pass. In private, Ailes expressed wariness about Beck’s staff. “I don’t want too many of his people here,” he told an executive.
Things took a turn for the worse as Beck gathered 300,000 of his devoted followers in front of the Lincoln Memorial for a “Restoring Honor” rally — scheduled for the August 2010 anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Fox executives showed little enthusiasm. “I’m going to D.C. in case something happens, and we have to react,” Bill Shine told a colleague the day before. “We’ll probably do a cut – in during the news.” In the end, Fox gave the event scant coverage; CNN actually seemed to cover it more.

* Beck could not understand why Ailes did not actively promote an event that drew so many potential Fox viewers. Brian Lewis was selling Ailes on the idea that Beck, who had graced the covers of Forbes, Time, and The New York Times Magazine, was amassing a power base independent of Fox. “Beck had his own PR apparatus and Brian resented that,” a colleague said, “so Brian one day explained to Roger during a meeting called on a completely other topic, that Glenn’s problem was that he felt he was bigger than Fox.” Ailes agreed: talent should never eclipse the brand. “From that day on, that was Roger’s theme with Glenn: he didn’t appreciate the platform Fox had given him and needed to be pushed out,” the colleague said.
Tensions continued to escalate when, a few days after the rally, Beck launched The Blaze, a conservative news website. Fox executives told Beck he couldn’t promote his new venture on air. At times, The Blaze undermined stories that Fox pushed, like its piece debunking conservative provocateur James O’Keefe’s NPR sting, which had received wall – to – wall coverage on the channel. After the New Year, the cold war turned hot. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, hired an executive from The Huffington Post to run The Blaze, and later poached Joel Cheatwood from Fox. The moves signaled Beck’s ambition to build a conservative media empire of his own — a clear encroachment on Ailes’s turf. Brian Lewis retaliated by having his department tell the entertainment news website Deadline Hollywood that Cheatwood had earned $700,000 a year at Fox, a low-ball figure that was designed to damage his earning potential at future jobs. “Joel lost Roger’s respect and trust a long time ago,” an unnamed unnamed Fox “insider” told the website. Reporters began highlighting that Beck’s ratings had been slipping and that progressive groups had orchestrated an advertising boycott of his show. But ratings for his time slot were still nearly double those from before he joined the network, and Fox simply shifted the advertising inventory to other programs.
On April 6, Fox and Beck announced the breakup. Both were careful to squelch the anonymous backbiting that had been going on for weeks in the press. Ailes did not want a public meltdown to alienate Beck’s legions of fans who had become loyal Fox viewers.

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The Orwellian Life

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Colin Burrow writes in the Oct. 5, 2023 issue of the LROB:

The Orwellian person seeks surgically to separate himself from every person who materially or emotionally supports him, but then finds he can’t actually live that way. You leave your family, and despise them for supporting you, so you can go off and write about yourself as the freestanding freedom fighter. The Orwellian hero needs a wife to keep the ego-show on the road. But he also needs to edit a wife out to satisfy his own conception of how a hero lives. To me in my teens Orwell’s Orwellian aspiration to escape the aspidistra of domesticity looked like heroism and a radical search for freedom. To me now it looks like the extension of self-harming lovelessness into the realm of conscious cruelty to others.

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Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know – and What to Do About Them

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2005 classic:

* Many employees mistakenly believe the law will provide them with protection from retaliatory or unfounded job loss. In many of today’s workplaces, this is nothing but a false sense of security.

* Whether formalized or unwritten, there is always a “layoff list” of employees the company wouldn’t mind getting rid of without the potential for legal complication — which is precisely what layoffs provide. That’s why human – resource departments secretly refer to layoffs as “cleaning house.” Conversely, and more importantly, every company has a hidden indispensable list of protected employees who are virtually guaranteed job security no matter what. These are the favorites.

* In today’s litigious society, companies are more afraid of being sued than of lying to or replacing an employee.

* All companies have layers of unspoken hidden agendas. They’re lurking just beneath the surface of a glossy corporate spin. If you allow yourself to navigate via corporate spin instead of learning hat’s actually going on behind the scenes, you could find yourself getting caught in the void between what the company says and what it actually values, or between its true agendas and its public statements.

* Beware that you always stay on the correct side of these true agendas:
MOTIVATION 1 : Protection
If a company feels you are opening them up to any severe liability or inconvenience (even if it is justified), many will remove you as quickly as possible. When you put your own needs ahead of a company’s protection, you are red flagging yourself as someone who is not a team player and cannot be trusted. In today’s litigious society, many companies value protection above all else. Threatening a company’s sense of protection is the number one cause of job loss today. (More about this in the next chapter.)
MOTIVATION 2 : Money
Their money, not yours. If they feel you value your money more than theirs, you will be gone. The best defense is to always treat your company’s money as if it were your own.
MOTIVATION 3 : Open support
If your company feels, for whatever reason, that you do not openly support their policies, positions, or direction you will be out. Naysayers beware!
MOTIVATION 4 : Maintaining an “edge” in the marketplace
Companies are highly fearful of those who appear to be stagnating, have fallen behind, or have become distracted by something in their personal lives. They feel their only chance at keeping their edge is to constantly stay ahead of the curve. This motivation/fear is one of the main reasons companies continue to replace older workers with younger workers.
MOTIVATION 5 : The image of success
Companies are compelled to surround themselves with people who act and appear successful. If you are expressing negativity, pessimism, or a downtrodden persona, you will be replaced by someone the company feels can help generate a more positive atmosphere. Companies fear pessimism and negativity more than any other behavior in an employee because it erodes the environment of success they are constantly working to create.
Finding your company’s hidden agendas
Those listed above are the core agendas for most companies, but each company you work for will have its own set of guidelines and unwritten rules. To truly protect yourself and your job, you need both.
To find the hidden agendas in your company, look at what its key decision makers consistently reward and value (even if it’s never talked about, even if it’s openly denied or politically incorrect).
Don’t look at the good intentions and well – meant speeches.

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