A HOLLYWOOD ELITIST SCRIPTED ROGER AILES'S EULOGY

Roger Ailes got quite a sendoff from his only child over the weekend:

Friends and family of former Fox News chairman and founding CEO Roger Ailes gathered together and mourned his death Saturday during an intimate service at the St. Edward Roman Catholic Church in Palm Beach, Florida....

“I loved my father,” Ailes’ 17-year-old son, Zachary, told LifeZette. “He considered how much certain people hated him as a measure of success.”

Zachary pledged to fight to clear his father’s name after a series of sexual harassment allegations led to his ultimate ouster from Fox News.

“I want all the people who betrayed my father to know that I’m coming after them,” Zachary Ailes said during a speech at the ceremony, “and hell is coming with me.”

Wow, that's a tough, take-no-prisoners line. Where did it come from? Did a famous soldier say it? Maybe a fearless member of law enforcement?

Nahh. It comes from evil Left Coast communist metrosexual Hollywood. As the right-wing site BizPac Review acknowledges, it's a line from the 1993 film Tombstone -- a threat made by Wyatt Earp (played by Ken Kurt Russell) to a member of an outlaw gang called the Cowboys:



On the one hand, we now see that the Ailes family regards the women who have accused Ailes of sexual harassment as the moral equivalent of a murdering Wild West gang. On the other hand ... Hollywood? I thought conservatives hated Hollywood. Never mind that their favorite president was a Hollywood actor and their second-favorite president, the current one, was a TV star. Never mind that Roger Ailes's longtime boss runs a Hollywood movie studio. Never mind that Ailes worked in TV and theater before becoming a right-wing hit man. Hollywood is supposed to be anathema to right-wingers -- and yet that's where Zachary Ailes, a rich, private-school-educated scion, gets his idea of courage.

Though I wonder if using the line was really Zachary's idea. We know that Roger Ailes, a lifelong hemophiliac, had long thought about his own death. As his biographer Gabriel Sherman reported, "A couple of weeks before his thirtieth birthday, [Ailes] told a reporter, 'Most people think I'll be dead before I'm 35.'"

We know that having a young son made Ailes focus even more on his own mortality:

Due in part to the large age gap between father and son – 60 years – Ailes had compiled a memory book so that his son could remember his life when he was gone, according to Vanity Fair.

Since Zac was four, Vanity Fair reported in an excerpt from Zac Chafets’ book, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, “Ailes has been putting things away for him in memory boxes; there are now nine, stuffed with mementos, personal notes, photos, and messages from Ailes to his son. They are meant to be opened when Ailes is gone.”

He showed the author one box, a plastic container “stuffed with what appeared to be a random assortment of memorabilia. There was a pocket-size copy of the U.S. Constitution in which Ailes had written, ‘The founders believed it and so should you'” and photos of Zac and Beth Ailes on vacations, according to the magazine.

In one note, Roger Ailes had written his son, “Avoid war if at all possible but never give up your freedom—or your honor. Always stand for what is right. If absolutely forced to fight, then fight with courage and win. Don’t try to win ... win! Love, Dad,” reported Chafets.

Did the elder Ailes ask his son to use that line in his eulogy? That's my guess. I can easily imagine Papa Roger in his last year telling young Zachary that he wanted him to threaten Dad's enemies at his funeral, in those carefully selected words.

Roger Ailes was never really a tough guy. He lived a life of fear. His had bombproof windows installed in his Fox News office, where he also kept two handguns. He maintained a bunker underneath his house with half a year's worth of supplies, in anticipation of a terrorist attack, and, as a neighbor recounted, he "was said to have ordered the removal of all trees around his house so that he … had a 360-degree view of any leftist assault teams preparing to rush the house." He hired private investigators to "discredit anyone perceived as a threat to the channel or Ailes himself," as The Hill noted. He order Fox public relations employees to create dummy accounts so that undetectable Ailes trolls could rebut Fox critics online, even at obscure blogs.

And he was a creature of the elite coastal media, regardless of his self-image. So of course the tough-guy words that saw him off were Hollywood-fake.