The Art of Not Apologizing

On Feb. 22, 2022, I wrote a piece for a public relations trade on this very topic, and it generated a huge amount of backlash from the beta males and “feminazis” (thanks, Rush Limbaugh) who now dominate the PR field. The title of the piece in PR News was, “There’s No Such Thing as an Effective Apology Anymore,” and it made the points to a PR audience that I’m making here. Near the top of the piece I wrote:

It’s time to quit pretending that an effective apology is a PR tactic. Yes, apologize if you have a fight with your spouse or a family member.

In the PR world, every week we see how some public figures and organizations get bad advice from misguided PR pros. Communicators advise CEOs to apologize to win favor with, or at least appease, the very people who have absolutely no intention of accepting that apology.

The cold reality is that if critics are trying to ruin you, they don’t care how sincere your apology is. The Sincere Apology Strategy often is the fast-track to ruin.

For an apology to work, the apologist’s sincerity is half the equation. The other party must be willing to forgive.

The rest of the article details how the whole process unfolds when you apologize, thinking the public or your critics might actually forgive you, and hoping they move on. Spoiler alert: they don’t. Instead, they try to use your own mea culpa against you in the “court of public opinion.” No one reads you your Miranda rights in this scenario, but the terms are the same. Anything you say can and will be used against you — especially your apology.

Here comes the shade

Knowing the makeup of the PR field, I expected some shade—but not the kind I got. In summary, a non-PR guy who edited a different publication that served the PR field took issue with me and proved every point I made in the article. He attacked me on social media and in his own publication.

The woke editor sent me an email that was more of a personal attack on me than a counterview to what I wrote from a strategic sense. You’d have thought I told him his baby was ugly. I didn’t even know this guy—I never had any dealings with him before or after — but you’d think I slighted him personally.

He inferred that several people in the PR field had privately expressed their concerns to him about what I wrote. That seemed to prompt him to don the suit of armor of a white knight to save the day against me — who, unlike him, has actual experience in crisis work. Remember that I mentioned those critics in the field? I suspect a handful of them egged the editor into action because they didn’t have the guts to do it themselves.

My critic’s attacks were rooted in his brainwashing from the WEF

Looking back, one of the funny things about my favorite critic’s missive against me was that he told me I was not up to speed on the field’s new commitment to “stakeholder capitalism.” In 2022, this World Economic Forum (WEF) term was all the rage in the PR field. It was the linchpin philosophy behind Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) programs that for a time took control of the business and investing worlds.

The premise of it was that companies must answer to people beyond their owners, and sometimes do things that hurt actual investors, all in the name of fighting climate change, nationalism, transphobia, racism, sexism, and other isms. In the process, major companies put elitists at NGOs in control. They judged performance on political leanings, censorship and “misinformation,” “climate change,” and other things.

Even before Biden left office, ESG died a quick death because it couldn’t be measured consistently and was a major distraction from the more important work at hand, like ensuring ROI for real investors.

In the process, “stakeholder capitalism” died with it, and so when I read my critic’s words now, four years later, nothing he said at the time that felt so true to him then is even a thing in the PR field anymore. 

Even at that time, his efforts to get the publication to take my article down or publish disclaimers and retractions were to no avail. The article is still online, and I ended up getting a new client out of the publicity the brouhaha generated. 

Why you should never apologize: A case study

Chris Harrison was the host of ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. After two decades serving as the host of the shows, in 2021, he was cancelled for his sincere response to an interview question about one of the contestants who had attended an antebellum-themed party in 2018 while still in college. Antebellum is the “Old South.” 

Apparently, attending such a party in 2018 was perfectly acceptable, but by 2021 it was not acceptable; and if you ever attended such a party when it was acceptable, you deserved to be cancelled later, when some genius decided it was retroactively unacceptable.

The woke mob came after Harrison did an interview on the entertainment show called Extra, where he was asked about Bachelor contestant Rachael Kirkconnell's attendance at that party.

Harrison’s response was pure commonsense, essentially saying Kirkconnell might have been young and dumb and that, at the time (only three years earlier), those parties weren’t generally considered offensive, and that she deserved some grace.

That was enough to send the fake outrage machine into overdrive. Harrison drew all of the heat onto himself with those remarks, and if you go back and read and watch the coverage from 2021, you’d think someone discovered Harrison was a secret member of the KKK, all for calling for clearer heads to prevail.

Soon after, it looks like someone got to Harrison and convinced him to apologize or he would face the consequences. In his apology, he said, “While I do not speak for Rachael Kirkconnell, my intentions were simply to ask for grace in offering her an opportunity to speak on her own behalf…What I now realize I have done is cause harm by wrongly speaking in a manner that perpetuates racism, and for that I am so deeply sorry.” 

Here’s what that looked like when Harrison went on ABC’s Good Morning America to talk to former NFL player and TV presenter Michael Strahan.

Chris Harrison is OUT at The Bachelor. He apologized (probably too much) —-but watch Michael Strahan’s reaction. He doesn’t give the guy an inch. MICHAEL hosts 18 shows. This guy had one. And STRAHAN kicks him when he’s down. STRAHAN’S big smile is only “surface”-total JERK pic.twitter.com/8sSueyeK5b

— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) June 10, 2021

Alright, so Harrison had come to the defense of someone over silly allegations and fake outrage, and then the outrage mob turned its sights on him. Keep in mind, everyone knew what Harrison said was not racist, and he was not a racist. Still, he, and likely his producers, felt the heat and decided to play ball with the mob to try to appease it. So, the host of the ABC Bachelor franchise arranged to go on another ABC show, Good Morning America, to do what felt like some network-driven damage control.

But what it actually looked like was an ambush. Strahan’s interview felt more like a public shaming—embarrassing and humiliating Harrison, rather than bringing the situation to a more productive conclusion. When you watched this for the first time, it was hard to imagine Harrison keeping his job after this.”

Add to that, according to the New York Post, Strahan went on to put the nails in Harrison’s ABC tenure’s coffin by publicly stating he felt, according to the Post, that “Harrison gave a weak apology on ‘Good Morning America’ …for his decision to defend some racist behavior by one of the show’s contestants.”

Strahan said, “His apology is his apology, but it felt like I got nothing more than a surface response on any of this.”

See how this works? You do something inoffensive, but the mob fakes like you’ve offended someone. Then you’re pressured to apologize. So, when you do apologize to the very people who pushed you to apologize, they do what they planned to do all along. They choose not to accept your apology and destroy you. 

Harrison gave them what he thought they wanted, but they cancelled him anyway, because what they really wanted was a scalp in the woke wars on culture. They got his. After all of this, Harrison was fired anyway, and you haven’t seen much of him since.

There are many stories like Harrison’s, but they are all cautionary tales on what an apology gets you in the end. Cancel culture will cancel you once it decides to target you no matter what you say.

Think about it. If I make you do something like apologize, and I don’t accept your apology because you only did it because I made you do it, what does that say about me? That I’m being disingenuous? That my agenda is not what you think it is? That I’m a psychopath? All of the above?

The art of not apologizing is simply to not cave to the pressure. If it looks like you’re going to be cancelled “unless you apologize,” I have some bad news for you: You were already cancelled. They just want you to self-immolate for your attackers to finish the job for them. Why give them that satisfaction?

Tied to this, for Harrison, had he decided not to apologize in defiance of the mob, he would have been welcomed with open arms into the conservative media ecosystem, and he might have thrived and prospered even more. But when he groveled to the leftist mob, he alienated conservatives while being cancelled by the left. In effect, he became a man without a country.

In the end, don’t apologize. If you have something you honestly have to explain, then explain it. If you have something to fix, then fix it. If you have something you truly need to change, then change it. And sure, tell people why you’re doing what you’re doing. But don’t apologize. That’s a whole different ballgame, and it achieves nothing for anyone but the woke mob.