X

— 02.21.2018 08:47 AM



On this day in 1965, Malcolm X was murdered, slain in front of his wife and children by the racist and anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.

X is, as friends and family will tell you, a rather big deal to me, on many levels. Among other things, X is the name of the three books I am writing/have written. X is in every room where I work and live. And X is on my arm, literally.

He was truly a giant of a man, and he would have never hesitated to stand up against the racist, criminal Donald Trump. His voice is acutely missing, in these profoundly dark days.

Worth remembering, then:

People who stand for nothing – will fall for anything.


Comments (1)

Ten rules about #MeToo and crisis communications

— 02.19.2018 10:36 AM

There are lots of rules to remember about politics and public relations and the law. Here are ten.

  1.  Don’t brag about hiring private investigators. For example, in the middle of a #MeToo-type full-blown crisis, don’t have one of your people go on a radio program, and say you’ve hired private detectives to do a “forensic” investigation. Because that means you are admitting you are digging through the private lives of various people – your alleged victims, your caucus colleagues, your former staff who had the good sense to dump you – to dig up dirt. It means your strategy, basically, is to try and pull everyone down into muck with you.
  2. Don’t attack your alleged victims. In the #MeToo era, even Harvey Weinstein – the rutting pig who essentially started the movement – understood that you don’t victimize the victims twice. That is one the best things that have happened, post-Weinstein, in fact: in the court of public opinion, the balance of proof has shifted. More and more of us have a tendency to give women alleging sexual abuse the benefit of the doubt. You needed to remember that. You didn’t.
  3. After paying tribute to victims everywhere, don’t attack them. For instance, after reading off some talking points your lawyers prepared for you – like: “A safe and respectful society is what we expect and deserve. We need to move forward to eradicate sexual violence and harassment across the province – across the country. Everywhere.” – you shouldn’t then turn around, three weeks later, and disrespect your alleged victims. You shouldn’t do the polar opposite of what you exhorted everyone, “everywhere,” to do. Among other things, it makes you look like a liar.
  4. Don’t forget the reflection you see in the mirror. That is, guy whose face you shave every morning. In your essence, in your soul, you know who you are, and you know what people have been saying about you in the riding and elsewhere, for years – namely, that you have a zipper problem, and that you follow your little soldier into battle way too often. That you have been too reckless with too many young women. It’s public relations 101: don’t try and change, in 40 days, a perception that has built up over 40 years. It won’t work.
  5. Don’t attack the media who have told nothing but the truth. For instance, when the country’s biggest media organization has broadcast a story about you – and when you know they’ve been working on it for weeks, and when every word in it has been carefully lawyered, and when they have given you an opportunity to respond – it’s pretty dumb to come out, a full three weeks after you resigned, and call them names. One, they gave you a chance to respond. Two, if they were are as wrong as you claim, then why resign? If it was all a lie, like you say, why quit?
  6. Don’t be obvious. For example, don’t start bragging about how you are going to launch a public relations campaign with only select media – the ones you have been friendly with, say – and use it as a pretext to attack other media. At the end of the day, media folks will almost always stick together: when you unfairly attack one, they will see it as an unfair attack on all of them.
  7. Don’t treat a minor misstep like a major war crime. Are the media human? Yes, they are. Do they make mistakes? Yes, like all humans, they make mistakes. So, say, if one of your alleged victims gets wrong her age at the time of an alleged incident – and if that does absolutely nothing to alter the main allegation against you (to wit, acting inappropriately with a young woman) – don’t treat that like the P.R. equivalent of V Day. People understand that sexual harassment and sexual abuse are, for the victims, profoundly traumatic events: they don’t expect “forensic” clarity. When you do, you look even more like an asshole.
  8. Take advice; listen to others. Your staff and your colleagues defended you, day after day after day. They worked their tails off for you, and defended you against every criticism – including persistent allegations of inappropriate personal behaviour. When your staff all resign on you (on a matter of principle) or your caucus colleagues insist that you resign (ditto), it is bad, bad strategy to start attacking them post facto. Among other things, it’s unfair. And it says a lot more about you than it does about them.
  9. Pop culture has lessons to give, sometimes. Remember “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to?” Remember that, the big hit by Lesley Gore, way back in the Sixties? That’s what you are doing now, essentially. You are essentially saying that it was my party, and I’ll destroy it if I want to. That is your strategy: if you can’t raise yourself up, you will pull everyone else down. If you can’t be the winner, you’ll make sure no one else wins, either.
  10. Put up or shut up. It’s been more than three weeks. You’ve called the allegations against you “defamatory,” over and over and over. Well, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, big little man. Either issue a Libel Notice, or don’t. But if you don’t – and, so far, you haven’t – you are reminding everyone that, mostly, what was said about you was true.

There you go: ten PR tips, free of charge. Haven’t even mentioned your name.

Don’t have to.


Comments (13)

The gun lobby are terrorists

— 02.17.2018 10:18 AM

Good morning, Your Honour. We appear before you this morning to argue for the proposition that the defendant, the National Rifle Association of America, hereafter referred to as the NRA, is properly classified as a terrorist organization. And, accordingly, that the NRA’s directors and officers have been engaged in a campaign of terror against civilian populations.

Our indictment of the NRA, as you know, arises out of section 802 of the USA Patriot Act, No. 107-52, which has expanded the definition of terrorism to cover “domestic,” as opposed to international, terrorism.

Therein, the Patriot Act, which was overwhelmingly supported and passed by all parties in Congress, sets out that a person has engaged in domestic terrorism if they do something that is “dangerous to human life,” which the NRA has in fact done since the earliest days of its 1871 charter in New York State.

To be successful in prosecuting a crime under the Patriot Act, it must be shown that the NRA, one, intimidated or coerced the civilian population — which they have done, ceaselessly, for generations.

Two, that they have influenced the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion — which they have done, with armies of millionaire gun lobbyists threatening elected representatives with defeat and disgrace if they do not do the NRA’s bidding.

And, three, most crucially, we must show the NRA has attempted to affect the conduct of our government by “mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”

We cannot state for a fact, Your Honour, that the NRA has actively engaged in assassinations or kidnappings. We can state, however, that the NRA will be shown to have energetically advocated measures that are bound to lead to mass destruction, even in the wake of the killings of 20 children in Newtown.

One of their recent advertising campaigns even offers up the former president’s own children as rhetorical fodder, and is ample evidence of the NRA’s willingness — like any terrorist organization — to terrorize children and parents to achieve its political goals.

We also take the view that at the time Thomas Jefferson and other founders ratified the Second Amendment, they did not intend it to be applied to the mass murder of six-year-olds using assault weapons. It was to be applied to flintlocks, which were what existed at the time of the amendment’s promulgation.

We are aware that the definition of terrorism is broad, Your Honour, and there is a robust debate about when it applies.

But under section 802 of the Patriot Act, we remind you that this court need only find the NRA has — within the territorial confines of the United States — engaged in a campaign of intimidation or coercion of our government, and our citizens.

You need only find that the NRA seeks to affect the conduct of government by advocating “mass destruction.”

Lobbying for guns in schools is that, Your Honour. So is openly threatening members of Congress so that they will lift bans on assault weapons. So is helping teenagers to purchase AK-47 assault weapons at gun shows. So is calling law enforcement “jack-booted government thugs.”

So is suggesting the last same president of the United States facilitates murder. So, most of all, is assassinating minimal efforts to prevent something like Newtown from ever happening again.

All these things the NRA has done, Your Honour. All of these acts of intimidation and coercion are not dissimilar to the campaigns of the Taliban or al-Qaida.

They may wear expensive suits, Your Honour, but the NRA is not much different from the terrorists. They deserve to be treated as such by this court.


Comments (31)

It’s all over before it’s started (updated)

— 02.16.2018 03:17 PM

As predicted: his strategy is to destroy his former political home.

He’s doing that.

This turns the PC Party of Ontario into a running joke. Their leadership race becomes a farce.

All that can save them now is another young woman coming forward to tell her story.

Will she?

UPDATE:


Comments (21)

From next week’s column: PR tips in the #MeToo era

— 02.15.2018 10:58 AM

There’s a couple of them that seem particularly germane this morning.

I wonder who I am referring to?

• Don’t attack your alleged victims. In the #MeToo era, even Harvey Weinstein – the rutting pig who essentially started the movement – understood that you don’t victimize the victims twice. That is one the best things that have happened, post-Weinstein, in fact: in the court of public opinion, the balance of proof has shifted. More and more of us have a tendency to give women alleging sexual abuse the benefit of the doubt. You needed to remember that. You didn’t.

• Put up or shut up. It’s been more than three weeks. You’ve called the allegations against you “defamatory,” over and over and over. Well, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, big little man. Either issue a Libel Notice, or don’t. But if you don’t – and, so far, you haven’t – you are reminding everyone that, mostly, what was said about you was true.


Comments (7)

Happy birthday

— 02.15.2018 09:42 AM


Many guys will understand what I mean when I say this: your father is both a bit of light, and a bit of shadow, over your path through life.

Mine, T. Douglas Kinsella, MD, OC, would have been 86 years old today. So many years after we lost him, he remains a constant in our lives. He still illuminates some of the path. Without even being here, he still quietly persuades me to examine the choices I have made.

Me? I have made bad choices. I have been reckless and cruel with the hearts of too many. I have not lived by the single rule he left us.

“Love people, and be honest,” he said to us, and I often feel I have done neither.

He saved many lives as a physician, and he won accolades, and he was a member of the Order of Canada. But for us – my brothers, my nephew he raised, my closest friends – he was the man we aspired to be. Not for the distinctions he received, but for how he was, in his soul.

He was unfailingly honest; he was kind to everyone he met. He married his high school sweetheart, and was with her every single day for 50 years, and my God how they loved each other. We would sit there at the kitchen table in Calgary or Kingston or Montreal, and we would listen to him. He’d listen to us, too, and persuade us to try and figure things out. There were some great times, around that table.

The best thing is having a father like that. The harder thing is knowing that you will never be like him.

I had a dream that he died in 9/11; I don’t know why, but I did. I woke up weeping, and remembered that I wasn’t a boy anymore, and that he has been gone for more than a decade. I don’t think he would like what his son has become. I know I don’t.

So I put on my pants and shoes, and went out into the day, looking for what’s left of the path.

Happy birthday. I miss you.


Comments (3)