The Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment at Yale are a pair of fascinating psychological rabbit holes to explore. For very obvious reasons, those experiments would never take place today — and not just due to ethical concerns.
Money! The answer to all of your questions is almost always money!
Those experiments wouldn’t take place today because colleges have a strong aversion to lawsuits. In our ultra-litigious culture, the quickest way to lose your funding, your .edu email address, and your reputation is to expose your superiors to litigation.
Been this way in academia for decades.
As an end result, colleges have become (nauseatingly) risk-averse. Think about it: All the biggest, most important scientific breakthroughs now come from for-profit companies and mega-corporations. From artificial intelligence (the chatbot revolution) to self-driving cars to advanced rockets, the free marketplace is where innovation blossoms.
And it’s not as if these colleges are hurting for money! The opposite is true: They make Elon Musk look like a pauper.
Between 2020 and 2021 alone, U.S. colleges (re)distributed over $700 billion!
But despite all the trappings of wealth and/or the security of tenure — or, perhaps, because of it — college isn’t where the future is created. Not anymore. If you wanna change the world, you’re not gonna go to MIT, Yale, Harvard, or Stanford.
You’d go to Tesla, Apple, OpenAI, Meta, or SpaceX.
That’s because TRUE innovation comes from the free market, not quasi-government institutions — and yes, that also extends to political columns.
Including this one: You people have been the unwitting participants in a 12-month experiment.
About one year ago, I began writing for PJ Media. As far as I know, I’m the first PR pro to write daily columns about conservatism, culture, politics, and PR. (Oh, don’t give me Frank Luntz: He’s more of a pollster.) Like many of you, I’ve followed politics all my life — but never on a granular, minute-by-minute level like this before.
It’s been a humbling experience: Some of my earlier assumptions were 100% validated. Others were discredited. I’ll give you an example of both (which we discussed, by the way, more in depth during last week’s VIP “PRedictions” column; now’s a great time to sign-up for VIP membership!).
Assumption that was right: Republicans and Democrats use PR and/or media relations very differently. If you’re a Republican, the mainstream media is the enemy — a fearsome predator that must be avoided. (Or somehow defanged.)
Not so for the Democrats: There’s an institutional assumption that the media is your friend. Ideologically, y’all are simpáticos. (Heck, half the political reporters in D.C. were your ex-campaign staffers!) As such, liberals work through the media to amplify their message. Traditional PR is still a huge part of their marketing strategy. The media landscape is rapidly changing, but their PR is still very buttoned-up and by-the-books.
The DNC still parties like it’s Election Night, 2008. (Cue your Prince music.)
Which means, if you “reverse engineer” their PR process, you see their entire strategy. They’re telegraphing via the media EVERYTHING they do.
Assumption that was wrong: I’m flabbergasted by how BAD the Democrats are at PR. In the private sector, media opportunities come and go in a nano-second. There’s no concept of being off the clock in PR; if the media calls late at night or over the weekend, you better answer right away — or the media will move on to the next guy. A big part of PR is being opportunistic, grabbing as many 50%-50% “jump balls” as you can.
This creates a culture that prioritizes speed.
My error was projecting my private sector PR ethos on the lackeys, fossils, and political appointees who are steering the bobsled off the cliff at the DNC. Instead of judging the Democrats strictly on the basis of what they’re saying and doing, I was predicting that they’d do what any (marginally competent) PR pro would tell ‘em to do. I wasn’t developing intricate, clever PR plans or whiteboarding a radical shift in strategy — I was simply pointing out the lowest of the low-hanging fruit!
As a PR rule, low-hanging fruit gets gobbled up the fastest. ‘Cause everyone in our industry knows, if YOU don’t grab it, one of our competitors will.
That’s why I wrongly predicted the Democratic civil war — their long-awaited reckoning for the lies, abuses, and cover-ups of Biden’s health — would’ve already happened by now. Between all the Dems in the Senate, House, and governors’ mansions with presidential aspirations, I figured someone would claim the mantle of the disaffected left, rallying against the DNC dinosaurs who let “literally Hitler” back into the Oval Office. And I’m not just talking about the Bernie Sanders/AOC “Fighting Oligarchs” tour, either. I meant something MUCH more “on the nose.”
I still think it will happen — after all, the liberal base is so furious and unhinged, they just nominated a freaking socialist in New York City — but it’s taking longer than I anticipated. That was an important revelation: Yes, the Democrats rely on traditional PR, and yes, as a PR practitioner, I’m aware of the media bias… but when it comes to PR, the Democrats are incompetent, slow, and lazy. Just because they rely on it, it doesn’t mean they’re any good at it.
As such, everything takes longer than it ever would in the private sector. (Probably by a factor of 10.) What would take 10 days in the private sector will take 100 in politics.
Live and learn.
See? It’s perfectly okay for a political pundit to acknowledge when a prediction goes awry. Hopefully, by examining what went wrong — and being straightforward with your audience — you build trust and credibility.
Nobody in the media, or in print, or on YouTube, is infallible. Despite the pomposity of certain hosts and “influencers,” the power of prophecy continues to elude all of us.
Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.
And that’s what was so disappointing about the trio of MAGA naysayers who fanned the flames of a MAGA civil war, i.e. Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their crime wasn’t that they were false prophets — although they absolutely were.
Their prewar predictions were spectacularly wrong. Almost everything they said turned out to be exactly incorrect! They were a firehose of hysterical, anti-American rhetoric: Any attack on mighty Iran would lead to World War III! Not hundreds — THOUSANDS — of Americans would surely die! And if you disagreed with their analysis, you’re surely an evil, disloyal neocon warmonger!
The Carlson-Bannon-Greene triumvirate weren’t the adults in the room. They were little kids throwing a temper tantrum. And some of their conduct, such as calling Republicans who supported Trump’s strikes “gay,” greatly diminished their stature in MAGA. Those kinds of Republican-on-Republican personal attacks was beneath them.
(At least, it should’ve been.)
Steve Bannon hasn’t acknowledged his false claims, either. Instead, he doubled down on the GOP attacks:
Former White House aide and commentator Steve Bannon ripped into Fox News host Mark Levin this week as the two continue to trade barbs over the U.S. military’s involvement in the war between Israel and Iran.
“Boy, Tel Aviv Levin’s big mad,” Bannon said during an episode of his popular “War Room” podcast. “He’s big mad as a spokesmodel for a foreign nation that didn’t get them what they want.”
First of all, Steve Bannon is in his 70s. NOBODY in his 70s ought to be using “big mad” in political conversation. (And frankly, you nitwits in your 20s oughta knock it off, too.)
Second, “Tel Aviv Levin” is a horrible nickname. Where’s the alliteration?! “Tel Aviv Levin” not only doesn’t flow off the tongue; it’s practically a tongue-twister. It’s easier to say “rubber baby buggy bumpers” three times fast than “Tel Aviv Levin.”
“Mossad Mark” or “Levant Levin” would’ve been way snappier.
But more importantly, why not just admit that Trump’s Middle East strategy seems to have been effective?
The Iranian mullahs were humbled; their nuclear program is in the toilet; their missile launchers destroyed; their top scientists and/or generals assassinated. And not a single American soldier or pilot was harmed!
If the litmus test of “America First” policies are “America First” results, Trump’s Middle East strategy was more “America First” than anything else over the last 40 years! God bless America!
By contrast, if we had followed YOUR advice, Steve, Iran would still have an intact nuclear program. How the hell is THAT “America First”?!
The specter or a nuclear-armed Iran has horrified every U.S. president since Bill Clinton. Donald Trump was the only one who actually solved it… and YOU were the people who tried to stop him.
You were on the wrong side of history.
Look, nobody likes to admit when he's wrong. It’s humbling. But part of being a grown-up is recognizing that only the Almighty is infallible. Everyone else is capable of sin, errors, and miscalculations.
To err, after all, is human.
There’s still a place in the MAGA movement for Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Unfortunately, when Carlson had Greene on his podcast yesterday, there was no contrition; no humanity, humility, or personal honor. Instead, Carlson constructed an “alternative reality,” where his brave voice prevented Donald Trump from being tricked by that dastardly Mark Levin. In Carlson’s retelling — and Greene’s bobble-headed agreement — guys such as Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Miriam Adelson, Ike Perlmutter, and other Republicans of “suspicious loyalty” (you know what we mean, nod-nudge-wink) were gonna bamboozle poor President Trump into a land invasion of Iran. Only their principled, pragmatic objections, you see, saved America from war.
Why, if anyone deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s them!
It’s pure hogwash, of course. Nobody in MAGA was advocating a land invasion. That simply didn’t happen. What DID happen is that President Trump ignored the antiwar hysterics of Carlson, Bannon, and Greene, did the exact opposite of what they pushed for… and the world is now a much safer place. And not a single drop of American blood was spilled!
Sorry, Carlson, Bannon, and Greene. Win some, lose some. Such is life.
Next time, try to be honest about it.
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