What's it like living near Roger Ailes? Not. Fun.

Jacob Weisberg writes about his experience living in the same town as the head of Fox News:

Twenty years ago, my wife and I bought a weekend house in the town of Garrison, N.Y... We love the place for its scenic beauty, its peace and quiet, and its old-fashioned sense of community... 

A few years ago, we found ourselves with a new neighbor. Roger Ailes, the chief executive of Fox News, seemed to be looking for something different when he moved to Garrison: not an escape, but a new arena for conflict. He bought the soothing local weekly, The Putnam County News & Recorder; named his wife, Elizabeth, publisher; and set about transforming it into The New York Post with field hockey scores. He fortified his hilltop property by buying up surrounding homes and installing an underground bunker with six months of survival rations. He began appearing at local meetings...with bodyguard and lawyer in tow, demanding to be heard in opposition to a zoning plan intended to limit future development. He drafted Republican candidates to run for town offices. 

...Ailes dealt with Richard Shea, the well-liked and, as it turned out, ­impossible-to-intimidate supervisor of the small encompassing jurisdiction of Philips­town, by threatening, “I will destroy your life.” Shea is a born-and-bred local who runs a contracting business — precisely the kind of “little guy” Ailes claimed to be representing against environmental elitists. Others who crossed the Aileses...reported being threatened with lawsuits or Fox News trucks at their doorsteps, or in one case, being trailed by News Corporation security officers. Without the restraining influences of his parent company, Ailes has acted out in ways that terrified even his minions. Sherman says a young conservative who was imported to edit The News & Recorder became so frightened by Ailes’s surveillance of the staff and creepy personal comments that he quit and fled town. His replacement as editor, a destitute man’s Sean Hannity, continues to denounce critics as “anarchists” and “anti-Christian.” 

Garrison is the key to understanding Ailes because it’s a microcosm of what he’s spent his career doing to the country. He could have moved there to live and let live. Instead...he recapitulated the culture war he was already busily inciting at a national level. Within a short time of his arrival, town meetings turned ugly. Issues of patriotism, religion and political correctness overtook the normal debates about road paving and property taxes. Single-handedly and almost instantaneously, he injected a peaceable civic space with an aggression and unpleasantness that weren’t there before.