Shea told him that no one was getting special treatment.
“So, they won’t be above the law and private interests?”
“No, they’re not going to be.”
“Fine. End of story,” Ailes said. He wanted to know if the law would regulate the size of his windows or the color of his house.
“No,” Shea said.
Ailes used the opening. After thanking the board and the citizens for their turnout, he had a lecture about American history to deliver. “George Washington said, ‘A violation of my land is a violation of my being,’ ” he intoned. “That is in our core for two hundred thirty years.” Ailes loved to quote Washington, but this saying does not appear in any archive of Washington’s writings or speeches.
Ailes sat down and unbuttoned his suit jacket, then noticed that a woman had been shooting a video of him with her iPhone. “Take it off,” Roger growled. He leaned forward and grabbed a chair, shaking it menacingly.
“What are you doing to the chair, sir?” she asked. Roger sat back and folded his hands in his lap.
The meeting continued for more than an hour as residents debated the pros and the cons of the zoning law. Ailes stayed until the bitter end. After the meeting concluded, he approached Nancy Montgomery, who was cleaning up her papers at the white table.
“You’re the only one I haven’t met yet,” he said, by way of introduction. “You know, I’m just here for the little guy.”
“Do you even know what I do for a living?” Montgomery asked. Ailes had already turned around and was walking away.
“I’m a bartender, Mr. Ailes,” she said, calling after him.
Ailes stopped and looked back at her. “You’re just a liberal Democrat,” he said.
It was not Ailes’s politics that bothered Montgomery, although she was no fan of Fox. She didn’t like how he showed up in town one day and started throwing his weight around.
Later, Ailes had his own version of his exchange with Montgomery. “I made the mistake of saying, ‘I think Philipstown’s in America,’ and now she’s mad at me and goes against everything I’m for and hates me and wants to kill me,” he said.
The debate on the zoning reforms dragged on for another year while Shea met with citizens one-on-one to address their concerns. In the fall of 2010, Ailes succeeded in getting a private sit-down with Shea and Joel Russell, a land-use attorney who had been consulting Philipstown on the zoning issue for years. On the day of the meeting, Ailes arrived at Town Hall with his bodyguard and Scott Volkman in tow. Ailes slapped a set of color charts down on Shea’s desk.
“What do you think of that?”
Shea looked down at the printouts. They showed ratings figures for Fox News and its rivals.
“Fox is outperforming any other cable news network!” Ailes said.
“Well, there are a lot of stupid people out there,” Shea deadpanned.
Ailes guffawed. “Ha! A friend of mine said that, too.”
The bluff pleasantries were brief. Ailes let out a blast about zoning bureaucrats depriving him of his property rights. “It was ninety percent inaccurate,” Russell later said. “That rhetoric was over the top and basically was straight out of Fox News. He kept talking about how he had a young son and his son wouldn’t be able to live in the America he knew.”
Shea told Ailes that he was misinformed about the zoning restrictions, which triggered another eruption.
“I’ll see you out of office!” Ailes snapped. “I’ve never lost a campaign I’ve been involved with!”
Shea looked at Russell. “Are you hearing this stuff? There are laws against this sort of thing.”
Volkman shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m not hearing any of this,” he muttered. “I’m here to talk about zoning.”
For two hours, Shea and Russell attempted to calm Ailes down. It turned out that Ailes’s concerns were not totally unfounded: a zoning map had incorrectly marked his mountaintop property with a scenic designation, which could have limited some development. Shea and Russell immediately assured Ailes they would make the change. As the conversation wound down, Ailes told the men that he would spend millions if necessary to keep dangerous elements out of the town. To that end, he was thinking about buying Mystery Point, a 129-acre plot of land with a nineteenth-century brick mansion that overlooks the Hudson, to turn into a corporate retreat for Fox. “That’s up for sale,” Ailes said. “I could buy it in a heartbeat. You know why I’m interested?”
The men stared back at him.
“I hear a group of Chinese investors are looking. I’m not going to have some Chinese investors set up a missile silo right across from West Point.” Shea and Russell waited for the punch line that never came.
Getting to know Ailes changed Shea’s mind about Fox News. “I used to think it was showmanship, or theater,” he later said. “I was really naive. I was awakened to the reality it’s not made up. The profit is part of it, but it is ideology-driven.”
Putnam County resident Gordon Stewart did not attend the town hall at Haldane, but he heard postmortems the next morning. It provided one more data point that the “Ailes problem,” as a friend called it, would not be going away. Unlike many in Philipstown’s progressive set, Stewart did not immediately begin to fret about Ailes’s increasing power in the community. Although Stewart and Ailes had crossed paths only a handful of times, they had shared history. Born on the South Side of Chicago in 1939, Stewart was originally, like Ailes, a midwesterner of modest means. He moved to Ohio for college, studying history and music at Oberlin, and in a remarkable coincidence roomed there with Roger’s brother. (“He was an easy guy to get along with,” Robert Ailes recalled.) Stewart’s peripatetic career, like that of Ailes, intermingled the worlds of politics, entertainment, and business: Stewart had worked as a theater director, as a presidential speechwriter, and as a vice president of the American Stock Exchange. Though a Democrat—he had served as Jimmy Carter’s deputy chief speechwriter and helped craft what came to be known as the “malaise” speech—he respected his conservative neighbor’s formidable talent. In the late 1980s, while working as an executive at an insurance industry trade association, Stewart had invited Ailes to address a group of corporate chieftains. “He talked about how television is the Enrico Fermi nuclear reactor of contemporary society, and how it shapes everything,” Stewart recalled.
In 2005, after living many years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Stewart and his wife bought a place in Garrison. They looked forward to watching their young adopted daughter run in the backyard and swim in their pool. Stewart often dropped by Pete’s Hometown Grocery on Main Street to pick up a copy of the PCN&R. Reading the articles each week, he did not at first see glaring signs of right-wing agitprop. He especially liked the paper’s tough coverage of a contract dispute at the local school board. Shortly after Stewart gave a quote to the PCN&R criticizing the Garrison school, he bumped into Ailes in Manhattan at lunchtime at Michael’s, a restaurant frequented by media executives.
“We gotta get together on this, that school sucks!” Ailes said to him.
“What’s your problem with it?” Stewart said.
“There’s no Christ child on the lawn at Christmastime!” Ailes said. “They have all this fucking Kwanzaa stuff, they have this Hanukkah shit, and you can’t even get Jesus! They think it’s illegal. You can’t show any flags. So I’m not sending our kid there.” As Stewart turned to leave, Ailes told him to stay in touch. “Call me,” he said.
In the fall of 2009, Stephen Ives, a documentary filmmaker, invited Stewart over to his house in Garrison. A group of neighbors were gathering there to brainstorm ways to confront Ailes. They called themselves the Full Moon Project, but Stewart liked to call them “the Cold Spring Village Commune.” The folk singer Dar Williams was the gravitational center of this constellation of politically active residents. As the conversations unfolded over several weeks, an idea took shape. The Full Moon Project would launch an online publication to rival the PCN&R. There was even a plan to start a Media Matters–like watchdog group to police right-wing bias in the PCN&R. They called it the Rapid Response Team.