Roger Ailes doesn't just run Fox News as a political enterprise. He tried to do the same thing in his weekend community of Garrison, New York. Unfortunately for him, it didn't work out quite so well.

In a revealing article in the New York Times, author Jacob Weisberg, also chairman and editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, validates and expands upon Gabriel Sherman's portrait of Roger Ailes in the new unauthorized biography, "The Loudest Voice in the Room." Weisberg blends anecdotes from the book with his own experiences as he recounts what happened  after Ailes and his wife bought a house near to Weisberg's own weekend getaway:

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, Gabriel Sherman writes in his new book, 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.

According to “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” 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.

...

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, in a way that seems to have been almost involuntary, 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.

But fortunately for the rest of us, Ailes was not able to run Garrison the way he runs Fox. Weisberg notes that the town "rejected (Ailes') takeover bid." Ailes' NY Post-style paper now has competition and Shea was re-elected without any Ailes-backed opponent on the ballot.