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"  &amp;quot;Be honest,&amp;quot; Roger Ailes told me one afternoon over the telephone. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the worst thing you&amp;#039;ve heard about me?&amp;quot; I was able to answer him instantly: &amp;quot;People are terrified of you. You scare the shit out of people, Roger.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I wonder why,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m trying to think if I&amp;#039;ve ever threatened anyone. No, I don&amp;#039;t think so.&amp;quot; I would like to say that this is the only time Roger Ailes ever lied to me in my reporting for a profile on him, but I can&amp;#039;t. First of all, I wound up talking to him for four hours straight in a subsequent meeting, and I can&amp;#039;t imagine that he succeeded in rising above the human propensity for untruth. Second, I don&amp;#039;t think he was lying \u2014 to me, anyway. There was an element of willful amnesia in his answer, an element of apostrophe, almost of disassociation. Has Roger Ailes ever threatened anyone? Of course he has. He is known for threatening people. At least four of the thirty-plus people I interviewed claimed they were threatened by him. He told me what he told the township of Philipstown, New York, when the township of Philipstown informed him that he&amp;#039;d have to let an &amp;quot;environmental inspector&amp;quot; through the fortifications surrounding his weekend mansion: &amp;quot;I would suggest that you call first, because otherwise I&amp;#039;ll shoot him and my dog will eat him.&amp;quot; Sure, it&amp;#039;s a funny story, and Ailes, as he often does in his own stories, makes his turn in character, aware of his own reputation if not his own absurdity. But still.  Ailes also asked me, during the same telephone conversation, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the most interesting thing you&amp;#039;ve learned about me?&amp;quot; Once again, I was able to tell him, without pause, &amp;quot;that you suffer from hemophilia.&amp;quot; But I wonder if I got this answer right, after all. Certainly, the fact of Ailes&amp;#039;s hemophilia is significant for the survival mechanisms it bred in him, the self-protective predisposition for combat. Yet after spending time with Roger Ailes \u2014 and, more importantly, spending countless hours watching Fox News and absorbing its rhetoric \u2014 I wonder if the most interesting facet of Roger Ailes is not his unmatched capacity for finding threats outside himself in order to deny the threats coiled within, for whitewashing his own soul by ascribing darkness to others: his capacity, in other words, for psychological projection. And it is the signature not only of the man, but of his network \u2014 the real reason that Fox News is said to be Roger Ailes. He says that he did not watch Glenn Beck&amp;#039;s three-part call for arms against financier George Soros before it aired, and I have no way of telling whether he is telling what seems an unlikely truth. But the hallmark of Beck&amp;#039;s program was the relentlessness with which it pursued an indictment that could have been drawn up against Ailes himself, or for that matter Beck, or for that matter Rupert Murdoch. It even listed the five steps Soros supposedly uses to destabilize countries, and if they all sounded familiar, that&amp;#039;s because they were propounded by a network that inserted itself in the disputed presidential election of 2000 and took it upon itself to foment the Tea Party movement of 2010: Form shadow government, control airwaves, destabilize the state, provoke an election crisis, and then take power by staging massive demonstrations and sit-ins and telling voters what to do through television and radio stations.... But of course what makes Fox compelling, beyond its crisp competencies, is the sheer amount of psychological need that is always on display. From Fox&amp;#039;s inception in 1996, Roger Ailes has been out to overturn the chair of the &amp;quot;godly anchor&amp;quot; \u2014 the idea of the newscaster as national conscience and presiding authority \u2014 and has succeeded so well that he has also overturned our notion of what&amp;#039;s acceptable in our political discourse. It is an historic accomplishment, but also a personal one, in that it never would have happened if Ailes hadn&amp;#039;t been driven to it for reasons that are uniquely and even obscurely his own \u2014 if he, growing up the son of a factory foreman in a stratified factory town, hadn&amp;#039;t seen Walter Cronkite as someone not to admire, but to cut down. More than anyone in the history of American television, Ailes has found a way to speak through the screen without ever appearing on it, has managed, as a charmingly unlovely man, to speak through all his charmingly lovely women with a remarkably consistent voice. But watching Fox is captivating in the same way it might be captivating to watch a beautiful girl with a tic. It is not, as it styles itself to be, the voice of the silent majority; it&amp;#039;s a therapy session, which is why it&amp;#039;s so loud. It eschews weakness by projecting strength, rejects doubt by proclaiming certainty, but in the end Fox is fascinating because it&amp;#039;s a Freudian funfest. Which brings us to the matter of Fox \u2014 and, to some extent, the entire conservative movement \u2014 and the Jews. Over the past year \u2014 or, more accurately, since the arrival of Glenn Beck in early 2009 \u2014 Fox and people aligned with Fox have not engaged in incessant anti-Semitism but rather have incessantly appropriated the tropes and symbols of Jewish suffering to make the case against those they deem anti-Fox. It was not enough for Glenn Beck to go after George Soros; he had to implicate Soros \u2014 a Jew whose family was destroyed by the Nazis \u2014 in the Holocaust. It was not enough for Ailes to make political hay off the firing of Juan Williams from NPR; he had to call those who fired him &amp;quot;Nazis.&amp;quot; And, of course, it was not enough for Sarah Palin to complain that she had been unjustly implicated in the mass-murders of Jared Loughner; she had to deploy the loaded term &amp;quot;blood libel,&amp;quot; and then go on Fox and tell Sean Hannity that she knew exactly what she was doing. Beck, Ailes, Palin, and Hannity are all gentiles, of course, but such is their sense of victimization \u2014 and the extent of their animus \u2014 that they manage to conflate the two, in the ultimate historical analogy. They might not be guilty of anti-Semitism; what they are guilty of is a feat of psychological projection that enables them to say, without blinking, that we are all Jews now.... but only if we watch Fox News.  Stay tuned for more exclusive Roger Ailes reporting on The Politics Blog, but first...  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9287/fox-news-psychology-4957213/>