**Today I’m honored to open up my Substack to a guest post. **** **is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents and the Deals They Made. He founded Dezenhall Resources, one of the first crisis management firms, and served in the White House Office of Communications during the Reagan presidency. He frequently appears on CNBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR and in other media discussing controversies in the news.
Within hours of Ed Sheeran dropping the turbo-antisemite Macklemore from his tour, Jewish and non-Jewish pundits alike claimed that stadium owner Robert Kraft had martyred the rapper by putting pressure on Sheeran.
Of course, the fear of blowback for canceling a bigot like Macklemore isn’t altogether foolish. Years ago, a tech reporter coined the term “the Streisand effect” after Barbra Streisand sued a photographer who filmed her Malibu estate from the air and posted it online. The ensuing publicity metastasized attention to Streisand’s house, precisely the kind of spectacle she had been trying to head off.
Hammering the “Epstein class” Jewish billionaire was predictable, but so was the “we wouldn’t want to make them angry” canard coming from some Jews who opposed Kraft’s move.
Many times, in my long crisis management career, I reluctantly advised clients to leave things alone to avoid the Streisand effect. This became especially true with the advent of social media, where every response begat thousands more and “telling our side of the story” was a pipedream cooked up in a college PR course. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, for every company that dove before cameras to broadcast their We’re-SO-not-racist bona fides, there were ten who said little or nothing and fared better. Why? Because it’s social media’s job to “spark outrage” and extend the half-life of negative attention by declaring whatever a well-known institution or person does as having been botched. Nobody wrote news stories praising the quiet ones for dodging controversy.
The Macklemore affair is a whole other beast because since the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, there has been no threshold that antisemitism can’t cross. Meanwhile, I worked on cases where people lost their jobs for making the “OK” sign with their hand, which, unbelievably, in tiny corners of Outrage-land, is considered a shibboleth of white supremacy. Curious, I asked several black friends if they were familiar with this “signal,” and not one had ever heard of it. In fact, they all rolled their eyes, as if to say, “this nonsense doesn’t help us.”
Now, we have Macklemore wearing a hook-nosed, bearded, Nazi-style Jew caricature mask doing a “Heil Hitler” salute that every sane person would recognize as an antisemitic provocation, and this shouldn’t be flagged? The man declared Gaza a genocide about a week after the attacks, well before Israel’s counter-offensive had hit high gear.
As I have loudly argued during the past few years, Jews are deluding themselves with the belief that they, along with Israel, are facing a “PR problem.” No, this conflict requires both kinetic and political force to survive. Both involve communications, but the “to know us is to love us” PR delusion should be seen for the farce it is.
I recoiled at the Bob Kraft-sponsored Super Bowl advertisement where a Jewish nebbish was rescued in the school hallway by a big, cool, biracial kid. No wonder antisemites are confident they can get away with Macklemorian stunts: they can, because they can count on a whining response. Except in Israel — and that’s what antisemites cannot abide.
Many online commenters are under the mistaken impression that Jew baiters are routinely getting fired for their public antics. While some have been, based upon my own informal tracking with input from watchdog groups, far more have remained gainfully employed. Why? Because the unspoken consensus is that they were drawing attention to natural predators, Jews/Israelis, a public service. How can it be hardcore bigotry if it’s, ya know, civil rights, or something?
Race-baiting has risks. You can always lose an audience with racist or homophobic stunts. With Jew baiting, you can barely lose a handful of Jews. After October 7, a Veterans Administration official took to Instagram and mock-sobbed, mimicking Israeli hostages and the families of the dead. She remains safely ensconced at her desk. Imagine what would have happened had she blubbered, pretending she was George Floyd or his grieving family.
Historically, propaganda has rallied supporters and warned enemies, not made people who hate you like you. I spent more than forty years in damage control, and much of that time defining reality for a generation of leaders who came of age hearing the insipid phrase “hearts and minds,” as if you could change public opinion like an HVAC filter.
My clients included the richest and most powerful institutions in controversy on the planet — think oil companies and financial behemoths. Guess what? Nobody likes them. That’s the bad news. The good news is that with the help of hard-nosed pushback, they survived and thrived. This was the aim of crisis management: To beat back the attackers.
After winning a high-stakes legal case, one client asked me how this victory, which required communications air support, helped improve their image. “It didn’t,” I answered. “It kept you alive.”
Propaganda won’t counteract thousands of years of hatred and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to reinforce the ancient conviction that Jewish self-determination is aggression per se. The only reason why Jews enjoyed a respite in the second half of the twentieth century was because of the vivid documentation of the Holocaust along with a universal equation of Nazis with evil. In today’s climate, Israeli strength is a PR liability and iron-jawed, jackbooted Nazis are anachronistic cartoon characters whose heirs have blue hair, wear keffiyehs and tearful expressions. In my circles, when Israelis have been referred to as Nazis in the context of Gaza, well over ninety percent of the Jews who hear this comparison agree or don’t object.
With Macklemore, we’re not talking about a singer like Streisand who wanted privacy in her retirement years; we’re dealing with an entertainer brazenly showing support for a genocidal regime, trafficking in propaganda for which the endgame is to make the unthinkable happen again.
Who profits from the push to deprive Kraft, the owner of a private establishment, Gillette Stadium, from exercising the same kind of discretion that any owner would demand? The answer is anyone who seeks to weaken Jewish participation and self-determination in public life. There is something that happens in the minds of some of the most liberal-minded people I know that crosses into psychosis the moment a Jew vocally decides that enough is enough. No, bouncing Macklemore won’t help with the PR-war fantasy, but it will bring risk into the debate.
When Jews survive, it is not because they become loved, although plenty are. An acquaintance who always calls Israelis Nazis denied being an antisemite, citing his love of Mel Brooks. “Yes,” I said, “But if he shot an intruder, you’d say it was overkill.” In other words, he only likes Mel Brooks if he can turn the channel and get rid of him if he wants to.
Jews survive because there is a fear of losing them because they add something to society — and because there is some force protecting them, such as laws, the ethic of religious tolerance, or, in the case of Israel, superior weapons systems.
There’s an old Borscht Belt joke about a judge who summons a Jewish jury for its verdict. After much hemming and hawing, the foreman, Mr. Goldman, timidly renders the verdict: “We the jury have decided that it’s best not to get mixed up in this.” Hollywood Jews, purportedly all-powerful, have barely uttered a peep at the likes of Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo, whose careers are doing just fine.
There will come a time for communications of a certain type, but you can’t rebuild a house in the middle of a hurricane. My experience has been that when a madman in a family or organization is calling the shots, everyone else twists themselves into spaghetti to rationalize why the freak must be accommodated so they don’t get eaten alive. Few of us have the power to draw a line. Bob Kraft did. Drawing lines must remain the taproot of lethal battles.
