Every morning, I log onto TikTok and scroll past a video that triggers my complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Most of these videos consist of a Zoomer skipping down Bedford Avenue to a Dirty Projectors song, past what once were Williamsburg’s hip warehouse clubs and are now Whole Foods and banks.

Caption: If I lived in Williamsburg in the 2010s and worked at Vice, I would be the happiest person on earth…

Vice would never have hired most of these Zoomers, with their straight hair and HR personalities. Vice would have made fun of them. I would know: In 2012, I was the youngest worker at Vice, making fun of such people. The company formed the most influential and traumatic years of my life.

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Writing all of the trauma would take a book as long as Remembrance of Things Past. So, here’s a montage of the worst (but also funniest) moments, a montage one could easily set to an LCD Soundsystem song:

• My boss taking too much Adderall and forcing me to travel America interviewing former Real Housewives.

• The same boss offering me a bag of cocaine, then apologizing, remembering I was sober.

• One of Vice’s business girlbosses buying me poppers for Christmas.

• Shane Smith, our CEO, throwing $1 million dollars in cash at the staff.

• The HR woman, who exclusively wore white leather and was known around the office as “Lady Miramax” because she’d led Harvey Weinstein’s HR department.

• My boss standing on top of a boardroom table, high, screaming, “NEXT YEAR WE DEFEAT ISIS!”

• Shane Smith turning off the office wifi because he “needed to Skype with a member of ISIS.”

• Shane Smith ordering a German executive to lock the staff in an attic so we would no longer write about bestiality because it offended Gloria Steinem and the CEO of Google when Shane sailed with them on a yacht.

• One of the associate editors forcing me to write about gay sex and/or review a sex toy whenever traffic dipped.

• An associate editor adding sexual jokes and cultural references I did not believe, let alone understand half the time, into my articles.

• An associate editor snorting too much blow and fist-fighting our boss.

• An associate editor going woke and calling me a white supremacist because I called a fat white lady… fat.

• A hooker driving her car into our photographer outside IHOP.

• A Real Housewife driving her BMW into the same photographer outside an Atlanta hotel.

• A juggalo on PCP threatening to kill me in an RV in the middle of rural Ohio.

• Aaron Carter, high on meth, threatening to kill me. (RIP.)

• Aaron Carter, again high on meth, FaceTiming me about Los Angeles County towing his car.

• HR sending an email reminding everyone to remove their drugs from the office before a Secret Service sweep ahead of Joe Biden’s visit.

The list goes on. The memories stare me in the face daily, because the youth are already nostalgic for my youth — which never actually existed outside of their imaginations.

Zoomers think Vice — the magazine, founded in 1994, that basically created early-2010s hipster Americana — was the Y2K equivalent of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, the Chelsea Hotel replaced by the Wythe. They aren’t alone. Lately, a cottage industry of “experts” has emerged in an attempt to answer the question: What was Vice?

A Pulitzer-nominated journalist at the New York Times reports that Vice was a typical corporation, albeit one with a sexual harassment epidemic. New York Magazine depicts Shane Smith as some sort of Ponzi-scheme confidence man — however, if you know anything about Shane, you know he was really just a bullshitter, and by the time Disney invested $400m in Vice, he believed his shit smelled good.

Former Vice freelancer Eddie Huang produced a documentary-length answer to this question, though as a non-employee he knew little of what was actually happening inside the company. (As anyone who sat in the editorial pit knew, Vice saw a major difference between staffers and freelancers. The hipster snobs earning $27,000/year looked down on the freelancers they paid pennies a word.)

To actually understand what Vice was, you had to have sat in our dusty white Williamsburg warehouse, where dildos flew over your head, weed smoke filtered through the vents, and, occasionally, your 40-something-year-old aging punk co-worker would show up with members of the Bloods, who stole your computer.

Those 40-something-year-old aging punks (at least one of whom was a literal crackhead) ran a bizarre business. The world knew Vice for its HBO show, magazine, viral documentaries, and Vice.com, a textual prelude to the “manosphere” — but the company operated a vast array of side hustles. Shane licensed the magazine all over the world (almost every week, it seemed, we’d discover a new Vice office in an Eastern Bloc country) and sold sponsorships to blue-chip corporations. (For instance, Unilever paid $20 million a year to sponsor a women’s vertical called Broadly.)

Shane theorized that Vice would eventually dominate every genre and medium, from the internet to cable TV to film. But selling so many products confused audiences, and you can only con Unilever and other advertisers into sponsoring shiny new verticals so many times.

Mostly: Vice was a cult. It was also one of the best business schools in modern history. Today, as a successful entrepreneur, I think about it all the time.

I wrote about the lessons I learned from working at Vice in my early twenties. You can read the full essay in Pirate Wires.

How do you separate the art from the artist? And how do you separate that art from the artist when his art is show business?

That’s the question that hovers over Michael Jackson, Jimmy Page, R. Kelly, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Justin Timberlake, Prince, and swarms of other pop stars of varying degrees of controversy. It’s also the question that haunts Peter Guralnick’s new biography, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World. Guralnick wrote the definitive two-volume biography of the King. Now, he gives full-blown literary treatment to the man who invented Elvis, and therefore, invented pop stardom: Cornelis van Kuijk, or, as van Kuijk rebranded himself, Colonel Parker. Everyone who knew him as Elvis’s manager called him, simply, the Colonel.

As with his Elvis biographies, Guralnick focuses on the art as much as the artist. While Elvis’s art was performance, the Colonel practiced the art of business long before President Trump coined “the art of the deal.” The Colonel’s business encompassed everything from record contracts to promotion. He protected Elvis, so his hips could thrust. He negotiated paradigm-shifting business deals and masterminded some of the most iconic television shows in history. Without the Colonel, you would never have seen Britney dancing with a snake at the VMAS, Michael Jackson moonwalking at the Motown 25 concert, or even the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Guralnick’s Colonel is an artist, a man who wrote the Magna Carta for pop star image-making; principles rooted in the Colonel’s huckster background.

Nonetheless, the Colonel was, by all accounts, a conman. He famously lied about his Dutch birth and illegal immigration status up until after Elvis’s death. Even after that revelation, he remained tight-lipped. He considered sitting down for an interview before he died but refused to speak to Guralnick on record before his death. If he did speak, he likely would have spun.

On top of this, The Colonel and the King arrives in the shadow of Baz Luhrmann’s award-winning, much-acclaimed Elvis biopic. The film depicts the Colonel, as played by Tom Hanks, as a diabolical and manipulative figure, who steals his Hollywood client’s fortune and prevents that client from leaving the music industry. But then the Colonel has always been a controversial figure. Google his name and the suggested search is “Did Colonel Parker steal from Elvis?” He’s practically a meme for the manager from hell; his reputation appears unsalvageable.

Guralnick, however, is not to be cowed by gossip. He relies on primary sources as far as possible, creating a far more trustworthy biography than other entertainment books that rely on secondhand gossip. His primary documents come from the Colonel’s dutiful widow, Loanne Parker, who granted Guralnick exclusive access to the Colonel’s letters, including some which he never mailed. They form the basis for the book’s first volume, which functions as a standard narrative biography. The second volume collects the letters themselves, annotated with context and commentary by Guralnick.

The first volume takes off swiftly. Most readers will be unfamiliar with the Colonel, so Guralnick breezes through his childhood. While biographies of Walt Disney, Elvis, and other iconic pop Americans typically bore readers with a throat-clearing first 75 pages about their childhood on farms and their Irish ancestors, Guralnick covers Parker’s early days in the first dozen pages. By page 20, we’re done with van Kuijk’s life in a Dutch village working for his uncle and onto his life as a hobo in America. The Colonel knew how to entertain, and so does his biographer.

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And, boy, was the Colonel’s life entertaining. An immigrant in America, he joined the carnival-circus circuit, where he “did everything and anything.” He absorbed the rudimentary tasks (and therefore, the roots of the business) and fell in love with all the “freaks.” This was not a man ashamed of his lower-class background. The next section of the book follows the traditional beats. The carnival barker becomes a country music manager, then Elvis’s manager, then a gambling addict as addicted to the tables as his client was to the pills and fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that eventually killed him.

Guralnick ably captures each new persona, skillfully showing how the Colonel created Elvis, even as he disputes myths about Hollywood fantasy. Guralnick reveals how the Colonel’s earliest job as an agent was pushing back against the all-powerful William Morris Agency, who urged Elvis to tone down the provocative hip-thrusting at his live performances. Negative headlines scared them. Defending Elvis, Guralnick suggests, became the Colonel’s full-time job. When restraint was urged by William Morris, the Colonel simply pushed forward.

He had a knack for engendering, and then boosting controversy, often contradicting established myths. If we believe that Ed Sullivan boosted Elvis, Guralnick reminds us that Sullivan “vowed never to have Presley on his Sunday night show because of his threat to public morals.” He was understandably nervous; the Catholic weekly America blared “Beware Elvis Presley”, and the New York Journal American wrote that Elvis was “tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.”

Sullivan was apprehensive, but the Colonel knew scandal sold. By the time that Elvis appeared on the Sullivan show, the Colonel ordered William Morris to ensure that all contracts stipulated Elvis had complete creative control, much to the terror of the network. The potential for disaster boosted the star, scared people, and made them realize that the show — and it definitely was a show — was out of their hands. The Colonel recognized the scenario as a supreme bargaining position. He didn’t learn this at business school or the William Morris mail room, but at the literal circus.

Actions such as this set the stage for Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Britney Spears, Kanye West, and the other musical giants of scandal. But alongside the innovations, so too came the sins. Yet even they, and their progenitor, were more complex than the usual accounts have it. Toward the end of the King’s career, Guralnick writes, “Elvis seemed to need more money.” The Colonel knew how to make it, even if it was in the lowest-common-denominator fashion: Elvis performed in casinos, played in mediocre movies, and released terrible albums. But making money was an artform for the Colonel, and he excelled at what he did.

There has been no end of criticism for the Colonel personally, who has been blamed for Elvis’s wretched late period. Blame has been ascribed to him for the Vegas residencies and Elvis’s ballooning weight, amongst other things. But Guralnick, a fair-minded and comprehensive biographer, again complicates the picture. He describes Guralnick masterminding Elvis’s “triumphant” Aloha show, where Elvis sang from Hawaii. It gave us one of his most enduring ballads, “Unchained Melody,” which blasted across iPhones and TV screens during the Elvis movie PR blitz and created the Elvis-in-Hawaii aesthetic that has permeated everything from Lilo and Stitch to the indie band Beach House to the later Beach Boy singles. Not bad for a circus huckster.

But for all the greatness of Aloha, the Colonel was unable to keep all the plates spinning. While Elvis gorged himself, the Colonel spent twenty-four hours at a stretch in a casino. If he (inevitably) incurred gambling debts while he was there, no matter; he had his golden goose, in the form of his protégé, who could be wheeled out to make him more money. Yet at the same time, he could argue that he was merely exploiting an asset that he had done more than anyone to create. The Colonel contained multitudes.

His complicated nature makes the first volume deeply enjoyable, but I preferred the second, written mostly by the Colonel himself. It serves up a smorgasbord of simple but effective business advice. While many managers allowed their showboating clients to demand extravagant treatment, he advised Elvis, “It is better for you to wait on them than they wait on us as they are paying the bill.” It’s visionary business advice, which many A-listers follow today, leaving the D-listers in their wake. Tom Cruise is famously, endlessly charming; an influencer would cut you as soon as look at you if you get in the way of their big photo op. As I oft say, the “D” in “D-list” stands for “diva.”

There are other, hard-won tips. At one point, the Colonel offers business advice to a record executive, passing on lessons he learned from his time in the circus:

“When I was advance man for the circus and put up a twenty-four sheet with a big picture of an elephant, I didn’t have to print what it was for they surely knew it wasn’t a giraffe.”

Yet the letters reproduced here reveal a complex character, offering quasi-paternal wisdom to his young act. When Elvis and his father take over the family enterprises, the Colonel writes to Elvis, “I wish to point out to you again the important decisions that you will have to make.” He cites copyrights and contracts and warns Elvis to watch out for “friends and close associates,” telling him, “You have been more than fair and generous with everyone.” The Colonel aimed to keep the yes-man crooks at bay, and he was right to do so. Perhaps because English was his second language, or because he was so much better at publicity than everyone, the Colonel would get to the point, and you can often hear the eye-roll in his prose.

If the first volume establishes the Colonel as a muck-raking Machiavelli, the second depicts him as a considered, even wise figure, and knowing about the intricacies of his life makes the correspondence an even better read. The Colonel and the King doesn’t require readers to separate the art from the artist. Its protagonist was complicated, containing both good and bad; so is show business. But the Colonel was more decent than his reputation suggests, and his legacy was better than he’s been given credit. And his letters, as revealed here for the first time, are worth the price of purchase alone. It’s a pity the Colonel never wrote an autobiography because he, unlike so many Hollywood types who pen memoirs, can write. And what a story he would have had to tell.

There are new trends (which have yet to hit the discourse) and also new risks. First off…

Publicists Are Now Characters in the Plot–Myself (Reluctantly) Included

Readers latched onto the Blake Lively/Justin Baldoni lawsuit and now want to know how the PR sausage gets made. Journalists are now treating behind-the-scenes flacks as characters. Myself included.

I hate attention (I work in the shadows for a reason), but as I tell clients, you must play the card media deals you. Reporters were digging into my business, so I played the game with the journalists. You can read the results in the Vanity Fair profile of BCC Communications.

An excerpt from the piece:

Mitchell Jackson arrived at The Odeon 10 minutes early for our photo shoot, getting out of his Uber with headphones on for a phone call. With a large coffee in hand and an L.L.Bean tote embroidered with “Cancelled” over his shoulder, the PR strategist and crisis consultant took a lap around the block, finishing his phone call privately, before meeting in front of the Tribeca restaurant promptly at 10 a.m. “I hate this,” he says of the attention, before politely introducing himself to the photographer, whom he towered over in black Doc Martens boots.

Being in front of the camera, and the subject of a story, is uncomfortable for Jackson. A self-described “interloper,” the 33-year-old PR pro is accustomed to working behind the scenes on behalf of high-profile (and frequently shit-stirring) clients, such Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, Adam Friedland, Caroline Calloway, and Adam22. “I gravitate toward clientele that have something to say because otherwise I’d be bored,” Jackson tells me, adding, “The idea of working with Pod Save America makes me want to gouge my eyes out.”

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Jackson occupies a unique space in today’s combustible internet news cycle, where reams of outrage can cut short a budding media career—or propel one to new heights. A once-canceled journalist for consorting with conspiracy theorists, with a voting record that includes backing Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden, Jackson is thriving in the chaos that comes with repping conservative podcasters and contrarian comedians, while also managing various A-list crises. Though he generally sticks to the shadows, a recent New York Times profile of Cooper, the conservative YouTube star and freshly minted Fox News contributor, noted how her “publicist” had “enticed a whole row of reporters” to watch her perform at a New York comedy club earlier this year.

I was one of them, and in dealing with Jackson regarding various personalities, I’ve become accustomed to his frenetic fashion, usually rushing from one meeting to another, almost always on the phone. We were at a Broadway show once and he left his seat multiple times during the performance to field calls. Sitting down for lunch at Odeon, he was just as efficient, immediately ordering a water, an Earl Grey tea, and a cappuccino at the waitress’s first appearance.

You can read Natalie Korach’s full story here.

Changes in Crisis PR

Crisis PR has evolved in other ways. Five years ago, you dealt with old media and podcasters, but now TikTokers and Substackers carry just as much weight as the loud voices and old-school reporters. While Lively won the traditional media game, Baldoni pummelled her on TikTok. Given that the people (i.e., the women who buy Lively’s products) live on TikTok, Baldoni’s P.O.V. has murdered what remained of Lively’s image. TikTok slayed the cover girl.

I wasn’t surprised. I’ve treated TikTokers like journalists for some time. I wine and dine them, just as I do reporters; albeit, I know TikTokers don’t do “off the record.” What I say can and will be used as fodder for a short video.

But other crisis comms experts are also winning and dining them. There’s competition to entertain the TikTok gossipers!

The Collapse of Podcast Networks

Not all new media is thriving. Over the past few months, major podcast networks have shown the same problems as the new media giants of a decade ago.

I understand why. People listen to podcasts for their personalities. Nobody cares if a podcaster is signed to so-and-so’s network. It’s different from cable TV, yet these networks keep trying to rebuild cable, just as BuzzFeed News and Vice failed to do. Cable is not happening again. Accept it.

Where podcast networks do help is that they can launch a career. Their value is for nobodies trying to make a name for themselves. You don't need a network if you’re already an established player. You can make more and own all your content, operating as your own small business.

The Floundering Anti-Woke Centrists

The same problems are emerging for the anti-woke brigade. A particular segment of the media expanded during 2020 because it could oppose all the woke nonsense. The problem: woke died. So these people no longer have anything to talk about. They’re Cartman in the most recent episode of South Park. They need woke to thrive, but woke is dead, so they serve no purpose. Unlike South Park, their audience is vanishing.

Rupert Murdoch Remains the Smartest Media Baron

The media has changed, but one thing remains the same: Rupert Murdoch is the smartest media baron in the world. For one, he was the only person who understood that you can stand up to Trump, while still catering to his base. Secondly, he’s rolled up new media in the most innovative way. As Ben Smith reported in Semafor, last night:

As it turns out, Fox’s small size carried two advantages: It has allowed it to dive decisively into new media while CNN owner Warner Bros. Discovery and NBC owner Comcast muddle through corporate spinoffs and keep their powder dry. (One of the current puzzles of the media business, for instance, is why MSNBC continues to produce expensive shows of its own rather than moving to syndicate preexisting hits like Pod Save America and The Bulwark’s programming.) Tubi and a planned Fox One are rational entries in streaming. The company’s stock has outperformed big media rivals over the last five years.

And in a politicized US business environment, staying small has offered Fox and its sister company, News Corp., some protection from Trump’s apparent use of the regulatory apparatus to pressure media owners to soften their lines. Companies like Paramount, and billionaires like Jeff Bezos, may fear interference in everything from mergers to drug regulation to space flight. Fox News continues to nervously guard its right flank in its programming. But the Murdoch family have, perhaps improbably, turned out to be the media owners most willing to challenge the president, most notably in the pages of The Wall Street Journal; the Murdochs are also on track for a courthouse showdown with the White House.

I’d bet against many in the media, but I’d never bet against Murdoch.

America couldn’t get more divided–at least, that’s what I thought until President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, on Thanksgiving. Biden decided to pardon his son on Thanksgiving but announced it on Sunday–the evening before reporters returned to work. In other words, he assured his son would dominate the headlines.

Is Biden inept at comms, or does he just want to fuck with everyone on the way out of Washington, DC? I’m unsure. I am sure that Biden managed to divide the country further. After years of bragging that Democrats love “norms,” he pardoned his son. Now, Republicans (rightfully) believe Biden was full of it. Many conservatives want blood.

To be honest, who can blame them? Multiple jurisdictions charged Trump, while Biden insisted he would never pardon his son. Now, Biden is turning on his word and insisting the Hunter prosecutions were political. Sure, they were. So were all the Trump prosecutions. If Trump wasn’t a political threat, would the Democrats have targeted him? I doubt it.

In the second Trump term, expect repudiation and blame Biden for it. Nobody can stop Trump in a month, but right now, there’s one way Biden can prevent Trump from seeking an eye for an eye: pardoning Trump and the lower-level January 6 offenders.

Pardoning Trump sucks the oxygen out of the room. It kills the current mood for the Republican base demanding Trump take action against his enemies–and trust me, the MAGA base currently wants to see Trump target his haters. Just ask the MAGA people in your life, and they’ll tell you.

With that said, Trump faces charges from January 6. He will likely walk free no matter what (he is a president), but many January 6 rioters sit in jail. Conservatives–even those who oppose January 6–see hypocrisy in the January 6 trials because few people faced charges for the 2020 BLM riots. Unless Biden issues these people pardons, divisions will grow.

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Personally, as an independent moderate, I see January 6 as a freakshow. But I also hated the 2020 riots. I can see conservatives’ issues with the treatment of conservative rioters versus leftist rioters, and I understand why Democrats see January 6 as a threat to America. The rioters did want to stop the certification of votes, after all.

However, a more significant threat to our country is political division. Want to heal America? Issue pardons to the January 6 rioters along with Trump.

These pardons would save America but also help Biden and his ego–and make no mistake, Biden has a huge ego. This is a man who dragged his young son Hunter to a photo op after his mother died. Biden’s ego must be worried. His legacy currently rests on defeat. If he wants to be remembered for anything but disasters, he should pardon Trump and the Jan 6ers and call a truce. Someone needs to calm down the nation. Biden might as well do it, for both the nation and his legacy.

This isn’t my only take this week. I’m in Los Angeles for work, and as I drove through West Hollywood past the usual Netflix billboards and homeless people, I saw robots delivering food. I have no idea what these robots are called, but they look like coolers on wheels. One day, I saw a self-driving Waymo car drive around them.

While robots roll around all over LA, the city falls apart. Hollywood is dying. Yes, Wicked and Moana 2 succeeded, but television employs way more people than film. With cable TV in a downward spiral, people keep losing jobs. The jobs aren’t coming back. Now, robots are set to replace all the gig workers, many of whom are out of work in Hollywood.

If you thought the culture war over immigrants replacing working-class Americans’ jobs got ugly, wait till we have immigrants and working-class Americans rioting over robot gig workers. Politicians should solve the problem now. The divisions are getting worse. Our politicians need to do something about it before it’s too late.

What I’m Reading

• Cher: The Memoir, Part One

• The Day of the Locusts by Nathanael West

• Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik

What I’m Listening to

• A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

• Elvis’s Christmas Album

• A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra

What I’ve Seen:

• La Boheme

• The Radio City Christmas Spectacular

• The Cher Show

What I’m Watching:

• Lioness

• Matlock

• Moana 2

The 2024 election often felt like a late-stage Marvel Cinematic Universe movie: the umpteenth version of a story we’d all watched before. Democrats were fumbling the ball, Trump was trending for tweets, and there were too many Trump arrests to count. Assassins even failed to shoot Trump not once but twice. The second assassination barely registered as news. It was another repeat in a year of repeats. 

However, on the first Tuesday of November, Trump won again–and it was, somehow, a shocking twist. Sure, pundits had speculated he could win–they presumed it was a classic toss-up election–but the so-called mainstream media (more on that later) envisioned slim margins. The supposed “bad Orange man” won the popular vote after he dominated podcasts and Vice President Kamala Harris refused to sit in Joe Rogan’s now iconic Austin studio.

If this was a reboot, it was with a shocking twist. At least a twist to the 20th century’s powers-that-be: the networks, cable news, and beltway reporters. In avant-garde YouTuber land, it was apparent what could and would happen. My Gen Z YouTube clients don’t even know what certain prestige magazines are. They care about Adin Ross. They saw a Trump landslide months ago. 

It was a twist still, and like all twists–“Luke, I am your father,” “I see dead people,” etc.–Trump’s Reaganesque win revealed facts that were obvious… if you were paying attention. 

The Empire’s Last Gasp

As Tina Brown, Ms. Empire herself, wrote in her (yes) Substack, the old empire has been crumbling for years. Bret Easton Ellis wrote a 2011 viral Newsweek op-ed about the empire’s death. He was referring to Charlie Sheen’s meltdown and social media. Since Obama’s first run, Facebook and other platforms have dominated our politics alongside legacy cable channels, networks, and newspapers. Later, new media outlets, mainly BuzzFeed and Vice, promised to supplant them. The powers that be believed in these news sites, but Vice filed for bankruptcy, and a single BuzzFeed stock now costs less than a Starbucks latte. Finally, in 2024, new media finally supplanted old media, but it wasn’t the VC-funded news blogs that resembled the media of old. It was podcasts and live streamers. 

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The New MTV

Most columnists dismiss these outlets–such as Joe Rogan–as conservative, but they’re more than that. In the case of Rogan, he’s a literal independent; he endorsed Bernie Sanders, only for woke Dems to attack Sanders for going on Rogan. Yet even the actual conservatives are more than that. They’re pop culture.

I work with many of these podcasters (either as their publicist or booking my clients on their shows), and these hosts are as fluent in pop culture as politics. They can discuss the deep state and Diddy in a single breath. When I listen to them, I don’t hear 90s talk radio. I hear old-school MTV: a mix of hip-hop, politics, and irreverent jokes.

Those new media sites of the 2010s were supposed to replace MTV, but the new MTV isn’t a single channel. It’s a collection of independently owned YouTube shows. And it’s listened to by what I call the Me Too generation. 

The Me Too Generation

Me Too impacted a generation, but not how feminists expected. This year, boys who entered puberty at the height of Me Too became young men–and first-time voters. Me Too has been a part of their lives since the fifth grade. Most of these young men voted for Trump. The media blamed the so-called manosphere podcasters: Rogan, Theo Von, etc. Who can blame these boys for listening to these shows and voting for Trump? Since they were children, the mainstream media has talked about the wickedness of young men. It told boys they were racist predators. Of course, these young men ran into Trump's arms. Democrats and Democrat media, from CNN to Pod Save America, slammed their doors in young males’ faces. Where were these boys supposed to go? 

Cancel Culture Fails 

Ironically, these boys would have had another home if not for the Democrats’ mass cancellations in 2017. Following Trump’s first victory, liberals canceled anyone who crossed any line, even if that person supported Hillary. In the process, the Democrats forced canceled males to create their own independent media. That media supplanted the so-called mainstream media. 

The biggest irony is that the most popular of these hosts, Rogan, previously supported Dems. He endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020. What did the Democrats do in response? Demand Bernie apologize for associating with Rogan. In other words, Democrats sacrificed a relationship with the biggest media platform in America so they could feel righteous. It’s a loser’s strategy. Hence, Democrats lose. 

The Pod Did Not Save America

Dems believed they could ignore Rogan because their donors funded Crooked Media, which created dozens of podcasts. The one breakout, Pod Save America, peaked with the resistance, but you’ll rarely see it today in the top 20. It also differs from Rogan and conservative podcasts because it solely discusses politics. Democrats tried to create the audio equivalent of MSNBC. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson discusses pop culture, religion, and aliens, among other subjects. 

The manosphere covers an even more diverse array of subjects than Tucker. Theo Von rarely discusses politics. He and his ilk are just more comfortable talking to conservatives because conservatives don’t try to cancel them. Trump was fine talking to Von about cocaine. Kamala wouldn’t even touch him. 

Liberals once didn’t need a manosphere. They had Hollywood, but Los Angeles is basically Detroit with a beach now. If Disney didn’t own theme parks, it’d be junk stock like Buzzfeed. 

Long-Term Effects of Media Resistance 

Resistance media, in general, was less popular than it was hyped to be. Remember the political days of Teen Vogue? Anna Duca no longer works in the media. Editor-in-chief Phillip Picardi now works for Weight Watchers. The resistance was so unsuccessful that Teen Vogue stars even ditched it. 

The Return of Mark Halperin

One star is back–Mark Halperin. Without the support of his cable news colleagues, Halperin skyrocketed back into political news-breaking dominance. He broke when Biden would drop out. He accurately predicted the Trump landslide. And he did it all without corporate backing. He launched his newsletter and just tweeted out the news. The news was so breaking that his old haters had to credit him. Halperin was more plugged in than the most supposedly “acceptable” reporters. An intelligent book publisher will publish Halperin’s Shattered account of the Kamala campaign imploding. 

Americans Love Criminals 

Behind the scenes, the exact opposite of Halperin, hip-hop publicists, predicted what MSNBC missed: Arresting Trump would boost him with the American public. Americans loved Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, rock stars, and nineties gangster rappers. Every hip-hop publicist I know predicted Trump would win the second his mugshot debuted. They were right. Trump’s mugshot was when his polling reversed in the primary, and he ultimately won. Americans love to support an anti-hero. 

Democrats missed this fact. They thought Americans wouldn’t elect a criminal, that Americans would want to protect “institutions.” But we love criminals and hate institutions. Some days, it’s unclear if Democrats know what country they live in. Democrats mistook a blow-shit-up election for a manners election. Good grief. 

Literal Hitler

On that note, Democrats mainly ran on protecting institutions from an orange man who was “literal Hitler.” Yet they conceded to “literal Hitler” the second he won. I’m sorry, but if Trump was “literal Hitler,” would you just roll over and give him power? This exact behavior points to why Americans ignored Kamala’s warnings about fascism. They’d heard the lines too many times about Mitt Romney, Bush, and a man who was president four years ago and was running in 2024: Donald J. Trump. 

The Brat Myth

The Democrats’ other clear message: “Kamala Harris is Brat.” Her surrogates referenced a pop album that never topped the Billboard charts and mainly played in coastal cities. Imagine telling a swinger voter in Wisconsin, paying $5.30 for a brick of butter, to vote blue because “Kamala is Brat.” Who celebrated this so-called Brat? Oh, well, Oprah, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and many other celebs who mattered a decade ago. 

The Celebrities That Do Matter

Which isn’t to say celebrities don’t matter! They do. Trump is a celebrity. Rogan and Von are celebrities. However, the celebrities that matter came from independent media and reality TV. The age of corporate Hollywood conglomerates and their cookie-cutter LA and NYC denizens is over. Just look at the billboard charts. It’s all Gunna and Morgan Wallen.

Ironically, Trump, not Kamala, discussed policy when he sat with celebs. He talked about immigration with Rogan. Kamala had stars sing and warn about vague threats to democracy. (What exactly was her policy on Democracy besides “Trump bad”?) 

Kamala failed to use celebrities to push her message. Kamala’s celebrity rallies were the equivalent of booking an author on a #1 talk show to promote their book and the author never mentioning their bloody book on the show. Trump combined celebrity with politics. Trump had more substance than Kamala. 

Politics Is Still Downstream from Culture, But Now Republicans Own Culture

Which leads to the biggest lesson of the election. Before he died, Andrew Breitbart warned Republicans that politics was downstream from culture. As long as Democrats owned the culture, they’d rule DC. He commanded young conservatives to kidnap the culture and make conservatism cool. Only then would they win.

Well, Republicans fulfilled Breitbart’s prophecy. Republicans dominate the culture, and politics is still downstream from culture. Hence, Trump finally won the popular vote. 

The question is, will the Democrats take the culture back, or will they remain dedicated to losing? We’ll have to wait till the midterms to find out.

Vice President Kamala Harris and President Donald Trump have one thing in common: both believe they need so-called alt-media to win swing voters. This week, both candidates appeared on multiple podcasts and YouTube platforms. Both failed in their endeavors, but not for the reason politicos believe. 

DC press corps and conservative pundits think Harris avoided traditional interviews because she fears journalist inquisitions (as if Rachel Maddow will ask Harris tough questions). However, Harris and Trump are heading towards independent podcasts because they attract viewers. The top podcasts attract far more viewers than many television news shows–and it’s not like politicians ever liked journalists. They worked with reporters to reach voters; that’s it. If you define “mainstream media” as “popular media,” alt-media is the mainstream media. 

To get the most out of their podcast and YouTube hits, Trump and Harris needed to do more than just show up to a green room. They had to deliver. Both candidates succeeded but mostly failed in this endeavor. 

What worked? Harris’s Call Her Daddy segment succeeded in centering the election around abortion. It also exposed her to a younger female audience, which, although they hate Trump, may forget to vote. Likewise, Trump’s Flagrant appearance reinforced Trump’s likeability quality with his male fans. My X feed was filled with the MAGA base pumping Trump’s routine about breaking up a teenage Don Jr.’s New Year's Eve Party. If you laugh with Trump (not at him), you will surely laugh as he riffs with comedian Andrew Schultz. 

Okay, great: Trump and Kamala catered to their bases. But both candidates need swing voters to reach 270 electoral votes, and that’s where they failed. Take Harris. She attempted to cater to male voters by appearing on The Howard Stern Show. If the year was 1996, the appearance could shift the election. We live in 2024. Stern is as popular with young men as Trump is with keffiyeh-wearing socialist women. Stern is irrelevant. To reach young men, Harris needed to take a cab downtown to the Barstool Sports office and sit down with Dave Portnoy or even the company’s gay hosts, Pat and Joey. Really, anyone at Barstool could help Harris. Barstool, The Joe Rogan Experience, even Chappo Trap House–that’s where you meet dudes in 2024. Not Sirius XM Radio. 

Trump made the same mistake. He’s gravitated towards alternative spaces where he will receive only friendly comments, but Trump must peel away female suburban voters to win. He has enough Austin podcast dudes. Trump’s fans will say all female podcasters hate him, but that’s false. A slew of conservative women dominate podcasting, with one show outranking even Call Her Daddy. (Because I serve as a public relations representative for one of these podcasts, I’ll refrain from speaking about the individual shows.) The audience for these shows is suburban women. They differ from The View audience. Whereas View moms pearl clutch every time someone doesn’t wear an N-95 mask on a plane, podcast moms go to soccer practice but also oppose vaccines and abortion. These women’s beloved female podcast hosts would call out Trump on his abortion backtracking, but they are all still voting for Trump. These shows could reintroduce Trump to the suburban women he needs to win the election. 

Trump and Harris suffered from the same problem this week: They wanted to sit down with people who embrace them. Trumpers may say the president seeks conflict, but if he cared about winning new voters and the election, would he really be holding a rally in Madison Square Garden in a state and city he will surely lose? 

There’s an argument for sitting down with friendly media. Campaign rule #1: Do no harm. But if you take time during a heated election to sit down with the media, you better get something out of it. It’s unclear whether Trump or Harris got much out of their alt-media blitz this week other than serving their egos. And that’s not how you win an election. 

Some people spend their summer vacation surfing. I’ve spent my summer managing several clients’ crises. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s nothing more rewarding than helping a client walk through the fire, primarily when they’re being held to misconstrued or outright made-up fires.

When you speak to veteran media figures (people who’ve been in the game since the seventies or eighties), they share stories about how the same playbook worked in various decades. Not anymore. 

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The rules to surviving–or, in many cases now, monetizing–a crisis change weekly, if not daily. We are in a constantly evolving media industry; therefore, we’re in a constantly changing crisis communications field. Here are some of the rules we’ve seen work this year. 

1. One Scandal Means You’re Cancelled. Igniting a Bunch of Scandals Is Building a Career

The old adage was to avoid a crisis. Today, it’s more complicated. If you have one crisis, it defines you. You’re canceled. But if you have multiple scandals, you aren’t in trouble. You’re building a career. You’ll have so many controversies that nobody will keep up with them. Even better, the endless scandals will keep your name in the headlines, maintaining your ability to monetize your brand. 

2. Keep on Posting

Crisis communications firms once advised people to disappear for a bit. This strategy needs to be corrected in 2024. Vanish, and the second you resurface, you will be hit with headlines like “So and So Resurfaces After Scandal.” You will be pushing your scandal straight into Google all over again. Better approach: Keep on posting on social media. The more you post, the quicker the algorithms and search engines forget whatever got you in trouble. 

3. He Who Tells the Story First Wins

Let’s say two parties are in a public scuffle. Whoever gets out of the gate first enters the ring with an advantage. They tell the first story, which sets the foundation for the rest of the match.

You want to get out there first. Sometimes, you will get out there with embarrassing information. Take RFK Jr.’s video telling Roseanne about how he dropped a dead bear off in Central Park. There’s no good way for him to tell this story, but the video with Roseanne was so absurd that people were making jokes about Kennedy before they could attack him. He set the tone as absurdist when the tone could have been “animal abuser.”

4. Stop a Crisis Before It’s a Crisis

Similarly, you should extinguish the fire before your entire house is on fire. Too often, people seek help when it’s too late. They usually try to save money and don’t want to spend money on a comms consultant unless they know they’re in dire need. This is one of the biggest mistakes. The faster you hire someone, the quicker you can strategize and potentially even end the scandal before it breaks. 

5. Go to Alternative Media

The entire Hollywood trade press ruled Will Smith out because of the slap. Then he bounced back this summer without gracing a single old-media magazine cover or sitting down with a Gayle King type. But Smith didn’t avoid the press. He went to digital-first outlets, which his primarily black female audience watched. Smith’s team was brilliant for three reasons: 1) They avoided the “serious” journalists who would have relitigated the slap; 2) They negotiated with digital programs, which offer way more control to publicists; and 3) They went where his audience is. Who cares if Puck hates Smith? That’s not what his audience reads, anyway. 

6. Never Lose the Opportunity to Capitalize on a Crisis

Speaking of digital mediums, the Internet is filled with controversial figures. They make a fortune, many more than A-list Hollywood talent. If your public image is about to blow up, there’s a good chance it will create a debate about if you deserve to be “cancelled.” A scandal is the perfect time to go independent, launch your Substack, and make a direct connection with your fans. 

7. Build a Brand with Controversy Baked into the Cake

Monetizing a crisis is easier if controversy is factored into your brand. When creating your brand pillars, identify a way to be slightly controversial from the beginning. It will save you in the long run. Just ask Trump!

8. Do Not Give in to Your Opponents

Too often, people presume their opponents will stop critiquing them if they fold. This is wrong. If your opponent smells blood, they will continue to attack you. 

9. Do Not Give in to Reporters Who Want Your Head on a Platter

The same goes for reporters. If they are haranguing you, they want you to give them an apology. However, if you do apologize, they will keep attacking you, asking for more apologies. They want your head on a platter. Do not, under any circumstance, give in. 

10. If Your Statement Is Long, You’re Losing 

On that note, you will still have to give reporters statements. If you give them a lengthy statement, you are losing. Nobody is reading that. You must tell your story in a sentence. Brevity is your friend.

Have questions about surviving a crisis? I am happy to discuss. Email me at Mitchell@BCCcommunications.com.

A handful of swing states–Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, etc.–decide the presidential election. So, who has presumptive Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’s team copied for branding? A gaggle of homosexuals and women on the isle of Manhattan.

New York-based journalists, gay Twitter accounts, and other coastal types declared 2024 “the Brat summer” because of Charli XCX’s lime green Brat album cover. Following their lead, Kamala followed Charli XCX on Instagram and chose lime green as her campaign’s social media color. 

It’s understandable why someone in DC would mistake Brat for a hit. Millennial politicos, New York-based magazines, and others have dedicated more time to Brat than any other summer album, outside of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department. The press coverage would lead you to believe Charli dominates the charts, but excluding Chappell Roan (a denizen of Missouri), Taylor Swift (a Philly girl who started doing southern cosplay), and lone lesbian Billie Eilish, country and rap artists run Billboard in 2025. Brat’s lead single, “Von Dutch,” didn’t even crack the top 100. “360,” the second single, peaked at 73. 

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Kamala mistaking Brat for a hit points to a bigger issue with the Democrats’ endless Obama era. They mock Hulk Hogan for tearing his shirt in half at the RNC, but they forget that the most dominant show on streaming last year wasn’t Succession. It was the microwaved basic cable repeat Suits. Twisters–a sequel to, yes, Twister–is the highest-grossing movie in America, outside of the latest Marvel sequel. While low-rent TikTok videos succeeded in 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Hollywood shorts app Quibi flopped. We are a lowbrow country. 

The irony: Democrats once understood culture better than Republicans. Conservatives struggled so much with culture that after Obama won, Andrew Breitbart made it his mission to get conservatives to understand “politics is downstream from culture.” 

The even greater irony: Democrats’ problems with culture go back to Obama, the man who supposedly launched the celebrity presidency. Obama was enmeshed with mid-2000s/nineties pop culture. He’s a relic of when movies made stars, and Oprah counted as America’s biggest influencer, not Joe Rogan. 

The changes began during the Obama era. Wendy Williams took Oprah’s slot as the most important talk show host, but Obama never catered to Wendy. As Williams once quipped, she was excited for a Trump presidency because she’d finally get a White House invite. She may have been America’s top talk show host during the Obama presidency–and a black woman at that–but she was the wrong type of celebrity for Obama. She was on his permanent no-list.

There are some positive signs that the Democrats haven’t completely lost the plot when it comes to pop culture. Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo performed at Kamala’s rally, and Megan tied her performance to the abortion issue, a pivotal topic for Democrats. But then Kamala fumbled the ball and quoted Quavo lyrics in a strange accent that went viral. Trump, at least, doesn’t rap Kid Rock lyrics.

Brat summer is part of a broader problem for Democrats. Right now, Kamala is living in Kamalot, as New York magazine coined it. The energy is on fire, but the polls are not. Kamala fever may have broken out in New York and Los Angeles, but Kamala won’t win the electoral college there. Yes, it’s vital to appeal to young hipsters (they’re the base), but Midwest and Southern culture matter, too, arguably more so than Charli XCX stans. Don’t believe me? Ask Hillary. She surely remembers how she forgot to visit Wisconsin. Kamala should avoid the same mistake.

Today, gay activism may seem synonymous with incompetent nonprofit employees shutting down traffic to demand you use ze/zir pronouns because made-up pronouns, and only made-up pronouns, will fix global warming. But once upon a time, gays understood strategy better than nearly any other special-interest group in America. They were the best in the game.

Sarah Schulman’s masterful AIDS history, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT Up New York, 1987-1993, details how the HIV activist group ACT UP took a good-cop/bad-cop approach to fighting for life-saving medication. While radical homosexuals lay down pretending to die in the middle of churches, passed out mocked-up New York Crimes pamphlets outside the Times building and performed other public stunts, a group of gay, often white, corporate publicists met with the same officials ACT UP was protesting. They’d call Times reporters and give them information for their stories. They’d meet in offices with DC fame whores (see: Dr. Anthony Fauci) and negotiate with them. As Schulman writes:

ACT UP was probably the first movement of deeply oppressed people whose lives were at stake to have included such a large group of designers, advertising professionals, studio artists, marketers and publicists well versed in the visual language of branding and experienced in the selling of ideas, fresh out of art school and with relationships to institutions of cultural influence.

Gays were powerful in the anti-AIDS fight because they understood the arts and corporate branding. Who better to negotiate with the powerful than some of America’s best flacks? (After all, PR is essentially professional schmoozing, image-making and gossiping; it’s a gay man’s profession.) The backdoor manipulation was just as vital as the radical outdoor performance art.

Read more about the successful PR strategies of gay activists in my latest Spectator op-ed.

Former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith published Traffic last year, and media pundits applauded the book despite, if not because, Smith posited that conservatives won the digital media revolution. Media reporters like Smith championed BuzzFeed, Vox, Gawker, Vice, Complex, and other digital content mills, but conservative websites won the Internet. Conservatives understood the internet was a digital tabloid, not some fancy, schmancy woke New York Times knock-off.  

Smith wrote a great book. Most agreed with his premise last year, so I was puzzled to see journalists trolling Vivek Ramaswamy for his activist shareholder attack on BuzzFeed.

Vivek gave BuzzFeed several pieces of advice in his letter to the company. His chief complaint is that BuzzFeed employs too many people. He’s right. When I wrote freelance for various digital media outfits during college and into the mid-2010s, I watched once profitable entities take on hundreds of millions–and in one case, billions–of investment dollars. They hired way too many people, and profits vanished. 

Unless you’re a cable news giant or one of the two remaining successful national newspapers, your media companies should maintain a handful of employees. You may make a profit as a mid-size company. You’ll burn cash if you try to act like a giant.

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Sizes may vary. A Substack newsletter might stay profitable with nine employees, while another blog may earn profits and employ 50 people. But the 2010s digital media companies could shed workers. I hate layoffs, but the companies need actual restructuring—not a death-by-a-thousand cuts every few months but radical, literal restructuring of their operations. It’s the only path to profitability and survival. 

Furthermore, they need to deal with the political times. Maybe there was a brief moment where far-left politics performed–emphasis on the word “maybe”; I’m old enough to remember when every men’s media outfit, except Barstool, pivoted to woke and lost their audiences–but the country is much more centrist. Americans like freedom of speech. Audiences are devouring tons of supposedly “problematic” YouTubers’ video podcasts as 2010s digital media dies. Diversity of viewpoints is good for business, so BuzzFeed should offer a diversity of viewpoints. Beyond good business, it’s the right thing to do. Diversity of viewpoints is as American as Elvis.

BuzzFeed would be lucky if Vivek took over the company. Maybe then readers would flock to the site, and the stock would pop.

The author as a child

I had the pleasure — my therapist says the misfortune — of growing up in a doggy dynasty. My grandpa showed dogs at Westminster, my father’s a dog breeder, my mom owned the Miami area’s biggest puppy shop — the list of dog industry relatives goes on and on. My heritage didn’t traumatize me because of the way my parents cared for animals (my mom loves dogs so much that she keeps all her dead pets’ ashes in marble urns; until recently, she kept my grandpa’s ashes in a cardboard box), but because extremists targeted us. PETA protested my mom’s puppy store on the weekends. When I was a teenager, Animal Liberation Front member Camille Marino, who later served prison time for tying herself to a medical researcher’s door, threatened to kill my mother and chanted that I was a “blood baby.” Last year, I called Marino to ask what a blood baby was; she didn’t remember, but she maintained my mother should die. 

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Animal activists meant drama, but the benefit was that I knew from a young age to check the fine print before I donated to charity. I didn’t need Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest to know that do-gooders are complicated. Not to sound miserly, but you must ensure you approve of how animal charities spend their money before cutting them a check.  

Many Americans presume, for example, that the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) are umbrella groups for local shelters and rescues — but in fact they aren’t affiliated with local SPCAs and Humane Societies. (Both ASPCA and HSUS say they are upfront about this fact and that their donors know.)  

Read more of my latest column in The Spectator.

I thought cancel culture ended when the Johnny Depp trial ended—a 2010s relic, like the singer Kiesza, faded in relevancy. Then, a few weeks ago, I opened up my browser, checked the news, and found out an old professional colleague was dead. 

I spent my early twenties in the digital media content mills, editing and writing dozens of edgy articles weekly. We ran comics on Sunday, and since I manned the website on Sundays, I would publish the comic editor’s selections. One of his favorite writers was Ed Piskor. Piskor was a cult comic book writer who had published a few graphic novels with indie publishers. He drew a cute comic about his childhood X-Men fantasies for our magazine, which stuck with me. The drawing was rudimentary but perfectly captured a little boy’s imaginary stories about his favorite cartoons. It was simple but, in its nostalgia for childhood, complex. The definition of a picture says a thousand words. It lingered in my mind because Piskor was so talented. I never met Piskor in person. We may have emailed a few times. I don’t recall if we corresponded–I emailed so many people a week that it’s impossible to know–but I remember publishing Piskor because he became one of my favorite writers I published. 

Piskor became one of the rest of the Internet’s favorite comic book writers, too. He moved over to Marvel–yes, Disney’s Marvel–where he penned a trilogy of X-Men books called X-Men Grand Design. His hip-hop history series, Hip-Hop Family Tree, climbed the New York Times bestseller list. He was one of those rare writers, especially in the niche comic book world: a bankable star.

When you become a bankable star, you are subject to more scrutiny. As a publicist, I interact with many famous people, and the things they deal with don’t seem worth the notoriety. Many of them can handle the pressure. Some cannot. If you weren’t crazy before you were famous, you likely will become crazy after you hit the big time. It sucks. It’s an insane way to live. 

The worst type of fame is the kind Piskor had. He was famous in comic book circles but not a household name. He would get mobbed, maybe, at a convention, but he wasn’t rolling in Madonna-level cash. He was still a writer. But to struggling writers, he was enviable. They disliked him. Piskor was known, but he didn’t have millions of dollars. People with his level of fame can’t afford the security, management, and public relations teams that make fame manageable. 

So, when a woman made #MeToo allegations against Piskor a few weeks ago, the writer community went wild. Twitter feeds filled with comic writers demanding he lose his career. 

We never learned if Piskor would lose it all. We never even knew if the mainstream media would investigate the allegations because Piskor took his life. He committed suicide and perished from the physical and digital world. 

I won’t comment on the allegations. I don’t know if Piskor did what he was accused of. But I do know, either way, a public witch trial, what we now call “cancel culture,” wasn’t the way to go. Piskor won’t get his due process, and neither will his accusers. Few people are covering this story now. It’s too complicated for reporters to touch, and since he’s dead, prosecutors won’t look into it. Everyone loses. 

The Piskor story contradicts the supposed purpose of cancel culture. Activists have long argued they’re creating accountability. Every canceled scalp is progress towards social change. 

Having seen all of these movements up close–and having read recent polls–I’m dubious that cancel culture has helped any activist group. Polling shows transphobia has grown since trans activists’ war on microaggressions, with the non-profit PRRI finding support for progressive LGBTQ policies falling to 76% of adults in 2023 from 80% in 2022. Everyone has a memory holed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Now, people want cops more than ever.

When it comes to Me Too, I’ve known many accusers. I’ve also known people who’ve been canceled for everything from serious sexual assault allegations to a date gone wrong. How has this impacted society? Well, Me Too has vanished from conversation. The world moved on. Nothing changed. 

Many of the accused lost their jobs. So did the accusers. Most of the accusers I know have struggled to land work. What HR department wants to approve an employee who previously accused an employer in public? On top of this, their social movement failed. Most of them tell me they regret it.

For the past few years, I have felt this retreating. Wokeness was dying, so surely cancel culture would, too. But it’s still here. If it weren’t, Piskor would be publishing comics instead of being the subject of obituaries. 

Neither Piskor nor his accusers will receive due process. The Me Too movement won’t continue to gain steam. Nothing will change other than people’s reputations. If anything, public support for Me Too could just further decline, given that Piskor committed suicide because he believed he was wrongfully accused. It’s a tragedy, and it’s pointless. 

I don’t believe people who cancel people are bad. I believe they think they are making society progress. But Cancel culture fails both the cancellers and the canceled. It’s time people consider more effective ways to create change.

Bitches get a bad rap. In his new book, Ferocious Ambition, film historian Robert Dance recontextualizes the life, career and artistry of the most notorious bitch of them all, Joan Crawford.

Crawford’s early twentieth-century rivals have faded into history (outside of the gayest of gay kids, does any Gen Z-er know the name Norma Shearer?), but Crawford is omnipresent for all the wrong reasons. Ryan Murphy reenacts her feuds on FX’s Feud. Drag queens imitate Crawford running around with an ax. And, every Mother’s Day, bloggers roll out posts and memes about her legacy as the worst mom of all time; the titular Mommie Dearest of Faye Dunaway’s campy, classic, child-abuse shlockfest.

Much of Crawford’s bad reputation goes back to 1978, when her adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, published a memoir, Mommie Dearest, portraying her as the mother from hell. When she wasn’t abusing MGM studio staff, Crawford tossed wire hangers, slapped children and became so driven to perfect cleanliness she got on her hands and knees and screamed. The film adaptation was so over the top that it nearly ruined Dunaway’s career, and the public forgot everything else about Crawford. Her daughter had successfully mummified her as America’s bitch goddess from hell.

Ferocious Ambition turns that narrative on its head. Yes, it admits Crawford was a child abuser. But she also is Hollywood’s longest-lasting star, an anomaly who began as a background dancer in Twenties silent films, evolved into a working-class Thirties icon, survived middle age to win an Oscar as Warner Bros.’ ultimate noir siren, and evolved with the times to act in Sixties and Seventies grindhouse films and sit on the board of Pepsi-Cola. Madonna has lasted five decades as a pop star, but Crawford worked in six different decades — all thanks to her work ethic and canny manipulation of the Hollywood system. Or, as a 1949 critic put it, according to Dance’s research: “Unlike most movie stars, she owes practically nothing to luck. The determining factor of her career has been her own unflagging resoluteness.”

Read more in The Spectator.

My favorite grifters are the tech executives who pivoted from digital media to the metaverse to crypto. Now, many of these failures work at AI companies, and they email me constantly, offering allegedly innovative AI software that will “revolutionize” the communications industry.

The problem with all these pitches: Their software misunderstands the basics of communications, crisis consulting, and public relations. Software should solve problems, not increase them. In many circumstances, their technology would create issues for my business.

Take one company’s “AI media training offerings.” A sales rep promised me his new AI would analyze clients’ speaking and then offer second-by-second feedback on how the clients could improve their skills. For instance, at which minute they should talk louder. 

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The technology contradicts the central goal of media training, which is to make clients sound natural and charismatic when speaking to reporters. Often, tech executives hire our firm for media training because they talk like Wall-E and want to sound like humans. This software would cause our tech clients to sound more robotic than they already do. 

These problems increase with the AI companies offering to automate pitching. Each of these startups suggests we pay them to scan reporters’ X accounts, then automate pitches based on their posts on X. Of course, this means if a politics reporter tweets about an ABC sitcom, they could get inundated with pitches about comedians even though they don’t write about actors. 

Many companies believe they’ve reinvented the wheel, but start-ups have offered these “services” for years. Earlier companies all failed because guess what? A robot just creates spam. Few reporters respond to spam. They reply to interesting, unique, carefully targeted pitches. 

The worst AI offering of them all is the new software that generates text. These should be helpful. They should predict the next word in pitches, but they automate with so many biases that they are useless. 

Often, the AI text generation outright hates my clients. As a comm specialist, I represent many controversial figures. Multiple times when writing pitches for clients, the generative text has suggested my client is “problematic,” “sexist,” “racist,” etc. Why would I pay for software that critiques my clients in pitches? 

Of course, writing pitches is a small percentage of my job. The magic happens when I’m on the phone with reporters and meeting them in person. There’s no way AI can assist me in this regard, but how can I use AI for my job when it doesn’t even cover the basics, let alone know what a comms specialist does? For now, Microsoft Word is much more beneficial to my business than any of these AI companies’ “revolutionary software offerings.”

Gay icon Judy Garland. Folk queen Judy Collins. Now, we have the lesbian saint Judith Butler (as of 2020, they/them saint Judith Butler.)

Once resigned to recognition on college campuses for their unreadable 1990 tome Gender Trouble, which posited that gender is a performance, the queer theorist and Berkeley professor took off as a mainstream hero in the past decade. Tumblr kids reposted quotes from their lengthy, poorly written academic work. New York magazine declared Butler a “pop celebrity.” In March, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Butler’s first commercial book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Its prolonged roll-out aims to credit Butler for “birthing” the nonbinary and trans identities of the twenty-first century. It’s as much a publicity stunt as a book. But a closer reading of Butler’s new book Who’s Afraid of Gender? and the endless press campaigns reveals Butler isn’t as daring as they — or their PR team — suggest.

Read more of my review of Judith Butler’s new book and public relations campaign in the Spectator.

Three-quarters of my firm’s clients are crisis clients, ranging from celebrities in scandals to companies facing activists. If I have learned anything working in crisis communications, it’s that every scandal differs–there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to a problem; however, I have found several guiding …

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This week, I’m breaking down my thoughts on several media trends. 

Before that, I want to clarify a mistake in last week’s column. I wrote that the Catholic Church knew Cecilia Gentili was trans. It ends up reports contradict this statement, and some say the church didn’t know. I apologize for the error. 

Either way, the activist’s behavior blew a chance to build inroads with the church. Catholic transphobia and homophobia will remain just as high–if not higher–than it’s been in recent years, and activists would be wise to think about long-term strategy over public spectacle. There’s a time and place for controversy, but it should be strategic. 

But that was last week! Now, onto thoughts on the state of media and other trending topics… 

Interest Rates Impacting Media

Wall Street expected the Fed to lower interest rates, but that isn’t happening soon. The high rates mean media companies need to rake in profits now more than ever. The days of growth over profits are over. So, we’re seeing reporters demand different stories from comms specialists. They need stories that either drive subscriptions or traffic. 

Here’s what reporters now reject:

• Celebrities who repeat press releases blabber 

• Philosophically driven tech companies that lack business cases

• Lifestyle-oriented influencers who won’t move the Chartbeat needle or subscription numbers

• Founders without a track record

• Cancelling people

What reporters are looking for:

• Celebrities who give salacious sound bites (Who is Reneé Rapp without her tendency to go off script?) 

• Tech companies with revenue and customers

• Influencers who deliver salacious plotlines

• Founders who discuss the bottom line

• Heterodox thinkers

In other words, the Obama era, high-interest rates pretentiousness and Trump era pearl-clutching are over. Tabloid-style content is all the rage again. Welcome to high-interest rate culture. 

The Need for Scooter Braun

I’ve been critical of celebrity manager Scooter Braun because his handling of reporters earlier in his career backfired. (I am, after all, a communications strategist viewing the world from a public relations perspective.) However, Taylor Swift wrongfully targeted him, and Braun knows how to manage celebrities. New singers could use his expertise. 

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Don’t believe me? Look at the current crop of pop stars. Tate McRae, Troye Sivan, etc., aren’t taking off like their predecessors: Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and other Braun proteges. New singers’ songs are plateauing, and their fame remains more Who Weekly than Us Weekly. They could all use a manager like Braun.

The media could use a manager like Braun, too. For one, he delivered much better media arcs for his clients. (The press’s business is only as good as the stories they have to tell and sell.) Secondly, we’re short on new, engaging, and influential backroom players. Where have all the charismatic behind-the-scenes operators in music gone? Scooter, come back!

Will Old Media Ever Realize YouTubers Exist?

These Scooter thoughts lingered as I watched the Oscars. The same celebrities from the past forty years lined the stage, and there were only a few new entries. Most young actors could walk into a Florida grocery store, and nobody would recognize them. 

The same can’t be said for YouTubers. Look at the viewership for many popular YouTube channels, and even mid-tier YouTubers are crushing cable, network, and streaming TV in the ratings. The “industry,” as they say in LA, isn’t dead. It’s just moved to YouTube.

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Yet talk to any legacy media editor or old-school Hollywood operator, and they’re unaware. They still see YouTube as beneath them even as it eats their lunch. 

It’s a tragedy because YouTubers are so much more down to clown than actors–and being shameless is a crucial ingredient for success in a high-interest rate media environment. Now is the time to place Timothee Chalamet on Trisha Paytas’s lap on a magazine cover, yet old media refuses to engage with these supposedly low-brow celebrities. Where is Tina Brown when you need her? 

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Photo via Flickr user History at NIH

When the famed Saint Patrick’s Cathedral granted trans activists the right to hold LGBTQ legend Cecilia Gentili’s funeral at the Catholic church on Fifth Avenue, I smiled. I grew up Catholic, and just a few decades ago, gay activists were hosting die-ins in this same cathedral, protesting the church’s handling of the AIDS crisis. Now a priest would eulogize a trans mother at the cathedral in the heart of Manhattan.

My smile would not last. Catholics cried blasphemy after the funeral and demanded an apology. And to my surprise, I wasn’t blaming the Catholics. The fault lay with the LGBTQ activists.

I won’t name names–I’m not interested in shaming anyone mourning the loss of a friend or chosen family member–but many mourners yelled about “whores,” sex, and other sacrilegious activities during the funeral. Many queers pointed to how, at the height of the AIDS crisis, the AIDS activist group ACT-UP’s members invaded the church and pretended to die in the aisles. It prompted media attention, and the Ryan Murphy show Pose later reenacted it. Fittingly, Gentilli acted in Pose. Now, her chosen family was performing ACT-UP drag at her funeral and bragging about it on social media, taking credit as the dead woman’s “publicists.”

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A decade ago, I could have seen myself joining in the chaos. I’ve always loved shock value; as a twenty-something, I was outrageous for outrageous sake. But reading about the funeral as a thirty-something, I recognized the shock value would backfire on LGBTQ people and LGBTQ people only. The Catholic Church offered the LGBTQ community an olive branch; in return, the activists pissed all over that olive branch. They acted like a cliche of what Catholics imagine LGBTQ people are. 

Young queers argue they are carrying on the tradition of ACT-UP, but their comparison lacks historical understanding. For one, AIDS activists were fighting against a government that refused to address the gay community’s medical crisis. What were Gentili’s friends protesting when they screamed about whores? LGBTQ Americans have the best lives of any group of LGBTQ people in history. When they compare screaming about whores in church to ACT-UP, the young LGBTQ people are larping as AIDS activists. 

ACT-UP was also a lot more than shock value performance art. It was a highly strategic operation. As Sarah Schulman wrote in Let the Record Show, her history of the movement, ACT-UP often operated in two fractions. While the shock value crew protested outrageously outside government buildings, a group of suit-wearing male publicists would meet with government officials, such as Anthony Fauci, behind closed doors. The two teams presented a compelling argument to PR-wary government officials: Side with the publicists, and the outrageous protests will cease. Continue to fuck over the gays, and your press will only get worse. The gambit worked: Fauci reversed course.

Gentilli’s funeral offers nothing except stunts for social media. As someone who grew up Catholic and is also married to a man, it makes me sad. Here was an opportunity to meet the Catholic church in the middle.

The lost opportunity lingers in my mind. When I attended the Doubt revival on Broadway last week, I presumed I’d be thinking about the sex scandal that roiled the church when I was a child. Instead, I kept thinking about the failure of LGBTQ activists.

The mass for Gentilli could have served as the start of a new dialogue between the Catholic Church and LGBTQ activists. Instead, the activists set back Catholic/queer relations for many years. And for once, the setback isn’t the Catholic Church’s fault. Like the nun in doubt, I have doubts. I doubt LGBTQ activists can think beyond social media in a complex manner that could help sway the Catholic church, and I doubt another opportunity will come to gays anytime soon. It’s a tragedy.

Tom Sandoval posed for the New York Times Magazine’s Hollywood issue. The accompanying profile went viral for all the reasons (i.e. Sanvodal comparing his cheating scandal to the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson). But he wasn’t the only one in internet hot water: His crisis agency sent a junior account manager to the profile, she spoke to the Times on record, and her quotes went viral as a huge PR flub.

This account manager messed up big time, speaking to the Times as if she were Sandoval’s fan. She failed even to tell the reporter her statements were off-record, and she let Sandoval make the Simpson comparison. But she doesn’t deserve the blame. Her bosses do, which points to a major problem with big Hollywood public relations firms.

Many presume a PR firm performs well because it’s large, rents a fancy office, and staffs an army of young employees. However, these agencies often fail their famous clients because they pass stars on to young, inexperienced staff.

Established publicists run major PR firms. They lure in the clients, then let recent college graduates manage the accounts and perform day-to-day work.

It’s evident in the Sandoval case his account manager was pushed into a situation above her experience. The firm should have sent a senior publicist, with a younger staffer tagging along to learn on the job. 

This young staffer is now facing a social media mob, but the criticism should go towards her bosses. It’s wrong to put a young employee in this situation. 

Sadly, this scenario will likely happen again. Public relations doesn’t work at scale. Until AI can wine and dine reporters, robots won’t replace publicists. Size brings no added benefits. But celebrities continue to trust big firms that hand them off to young, inexperienced flacks. 

The good news is the tide is turning. Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities are shifting to working with boutique agencies that charge more but supply better services. When you’re a celebrity looking for public relations, small and experienced is the way to go. Otherwise, you can end up like Sandoval. Who wants to end up like that?

Cheerleaders save the world. Vampires gain souls. Ellen Ripley comes back to life as a half-alien. In the case of Willow Rosenberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s geeky, lesbian BFF, she’s a good witch one year, Southern California’s equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West the next, and only a year later, the key to stopping an apocalypse. One season, you’re good; the next, you’re bad; then, finally, you’re the savior.

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This is the world Joss Whedon envisions across six television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Nevers), dozens of comics (Buffy spin-offs, The Runaways and an acclaimed run on the Astonishing X-Men), and numerous films: Toy Story, Alien: Resurrection, Serenity, The Cabin in the Woods, Much Ado About Nothing, a bunch of uncredited rewrites of hits like Speed and, love it or hate it, the most influential blockbuster of this century, the movie that spawned dozens of superhero flicks: The Avengers. Whedon’s work varies from Disney cartoons to a supernatural teen soap opera to a Shakespeare adaptation, but across genres, he teaches audiences that a hero can become a villain, a villain can turn into a hero, and often, humans (or their vampire counterparts) are both good and bad.

So it was strange to see fans abandon the man-boy wonder when Whedon was accused of cheating on his wife with actors and verbally abusing his casts. The accusations were awful. Ray Fisher claimed Whedon altered his skin color in post-production for Justice League, and Charisma Carpenter alleged Whedon encouraged her to get an abortion when she got pregnant. When she refused, Whedon allegedly killed off her character, Cordelia, on Angel. Whedon acknowledged he’d slept with some of his actresses and was a dick, but denied Carpenter’s and Fisher’s specific allegations. He even half-apologized in a New York magazine profile.

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Of course, no apology was ever enough for the nerd herd. “Off with his head,” his former fans declared. Their disavowal is tragic because Whedon not only created some of the most influential pop art of the past twenty-five years, but his work teaches nuance, which we could use more of in our polarized world.

Part of Whedon’s problems go back to his career-long public relations strategy. Whedon broke out in Hollywood as a script doctor, rewriting hits like Twister, then attempted to recreate his flop 1992 movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as a TV show on the struggling WB network. The show departed from teen fluff in numerous ways: its premise inverted the horror trope of the dead teen girl, with Buffy slaying the vampires — as Whedon put it, a metaphor for “high school as a horror movie.” And, at least in public, a very feminist metaphor at that.

Read more of my analysis of Whedon’s public relations mistakes (and the public’s misunderstanding of his art) in The Spectator.