Let me tell you exactly what Fox figured out in 1993.
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) March 29, 2026
Roger Ailes looked around and asked — who’s the threat?
Not Bill Clinton, the threat is Hillary Clinton.
They spent billions of dollars over decades destroying her narrative.
By the time she ran for president 51% of the… pic.twitter.com/pFvYV2G5sJ
Let me tell you exactly what Fox figured out in 1993.
Roger Ailes looked around and asked — who’s the threat? Not Bill Clinton, the threat is Hillary Clinton.
They spent billions of dollars over decades destroying her narrative. By the time she ran for president 51% of the country had a negative opinion of her before she said a word on the campaign trail. That’s the playbook.
Now ask yourself — where’s the threat today? California.
The fourth largest economy in the world. Agriculture, Defense, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, AI. — which is literally the exportation of American culture globally.
A politician coming out of California from the left could beat the right decisively. ‘
So what do you do? Spend billions destroying the narrative around California. Make it synonymous with crime and homelessness and radical politics. Do it for two or three decades until the brand is toxic.
Newsom has an image problem today the exact same way Hillary had an image problem. It was manufactured. Deliberately. Systematically.
And don’t kid yourself, the media has done its share to help this narrative along, and not just about Newsom but California in general. And yes, they have been doing it for decades, portraying the state as a grotesque hellhole that only the most depraved human would want to live.
This report from a couple of months ago captures Mooch’s thesis perfectly:
The arrival of the Super Bowl this week in the Bay Area has given San Francisco its biggest opportunity since the pandemic to change hearts and minds. And, in a polarized nation in which many Americans seem incapable of moving off deep-seated beliefs, some visitors said they had been wrong about San Francisco after actually seeing it in person.
“What we thought we were walking into here was, uh, a dump,” Pat McAfee, the ESPN host who caters to a young, male audience, said during the first national broadcast of The Pat McAfee Show from San Francisco. “It’s not at all. It was a beautiful walk this morning.”
On social media, posts about the city’s parks and sandwich shops from journalists covering the Super Bowl have often outpaced commentary about the game itself. A stretch of February sun and 70-degree weather has helped the cause, especially as the rest of the country was recovering from snowstorms.
Among the first-time visitors this week to San Francisco was Brayden Landis, 21, a sports management student at York College in Pennsylvania, who was in the Bay Area as part of a class trip.
The city had been an immediate shock to the senses, Mr. Landis said. On his first day in town, he passed out from heat exhaustion. He was struck by the city’s contrasts. Toward the ocean, the lush expanse of Golden Gate Park greets visitors with scents of eucalyptus and morning dew. Elsewhere in the city, there are alleys where pedestrians have to avoid needles and feces.
“To me, the city was known for homelessness, fog and hippies,” he said. “But the stereotypes melted away. You see the city for what it really is, good and bad, pretty quickly. I think it’s my favorite city I’ve ever been to.”
It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world and always has been.
This isn’t just a recent thing, of course, it goes back even farther than Ailes and Clinton. Despite the fact that both Nixon and Reagan were Californians, the right decided to target the state for derision back in the 1980s. The “San Francisco liberal” hit, first coined by a former Democrat named Jeane Kirkpatrick, drew on stereotypes about hippies, gays, feminists and Latino immigrants to their hated California archetype. Since Trump they’ve added typical delusional MAGA bullshit about the place being an unlivable hellhole.
And at the same time, they whined like little babies for years about the slightest insult to the Real Americans in the heartland (or the south.) It would be infuriating except for the fact that Californians know very well that they live in a very nice, if imperfect, place and they aren’t nearly as interested in the Real Americans as the Real Americans think they are. That’s part of the problem.