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The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson
The PR Breakdown reveals the moves behind the mess. Crisis communication expert Molly McPherson dissects the viral scandals, celebrity meltdowns, and corporate disasters dominating headlines to show you the strategic mistakes and desperate moves that destroy reputations - so you never make them yourself.
The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson
The Distraction That Derailed a Re-Election Campaign: Tim Walz vs Trump
This week, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz abruptly ended his bid for a third term. This episode was recorded four days earlier during a live conversation and, in hindsight, it explains exactly why this outcome was almost inevitable.
Amid a sprawling welfare fraud crisis that Republicans and former President Donald Trump turned into a national political flashpoint, the pressure escalated, division deepened, and Walz found himself trying to govern while defending his political future at the same time. Walz ultimately said he could not justify campaigning while confronting systemic fraud and the blowback it was generating, choosing to focus on governing instead. What looks like a Walz versus Trump showdown is really a cautionary tale about how leadership falters when distraction becomes the strategy and noise replaces accountability.
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This story is everywhere right now. And like a lot of stories that blow up this quickly, it's being talked about in a way that misses the point. What's happening in Minnesota is being framed as a political fight, a race issue, a media controversy, or a content creator problem. But that framing is the distraction. The real issue underneath all of it is leadership and what happens when leaders take the bait instead of fixing the problem. In this episode of the PR Breakdown, I'm breaking down why focusing on who exposed a problem instead of what the problem actually is almost always makes a crisis work. I'll talk about the fraud, the outrage, content creators, and why attacking the messenger is usually a sign of psychological self-protection, not strength. If you've ever watched a leader spiral, a company implode, or a situation in your own life go sideways, it means the emotions took over. And that means this episode is for you. Let's break it down. Minnesota, Tim Walls, and the White House. I want to jump into this story because it really is exploding and it is a trending story, but it's an example of what happens in a crisis where I feel that it's mislabeled. And so there's a huge leadership lesson that we can see in it. But there's also a lesson, just a life lesson in there as well. This story is happening parallel to a time that I work with a bunch of clients on the same type of issue. Tim Walls is not my client, but it's the same thing. It's an organization has a leader, there is a response, and then there's content creators and other people creating social media around it. And then what happens is the focus becomes the content creator and what's being said, and all the emotion and ideological thinking that comes from it. Then that's the crisis. And what's missed is the actual crisis. Some of the basic context and the facts of what I'm talking about. So right now, some of you know that Minnesota is my home state. I moved away from there many years ago, right before I went to school. But it's very unusual for people to move out of Minnesota. So it would be no surprise that my entire family, all my friends, I really like 99% of the people who I grew up with still live in Minnesota. So I still have that tie there. And I hear a lot of the conversations. The topic of Tim Walls, really, I mean, from George Floyd 2020, where we are now with the Somalis and the fraud case and Nick Shirley, it's a major point of conversation. And there's a lot of different opinions that are coming from it and different sides of you. And not just from people I know in Minnesota, but also within my own family as well. But right now, Minnesota is home to approximately 80,000 people of Somali descent. It's the largest Somali population in the entire U.S. Most of them are U.S. citizens, and many of them were born in Minnesota. A lot of that, I think, gets lost in a lot of that conversation. The claims there are$250 million stolen from the federal child nutrition program. Then there's multiple schemes that are happening at the same time linked to autism services, food, housing. So the number, the tally is hundreds of millions to over$1 billion in fraud. That is a huge number. It is a significant number. Tim Walls, who prior to this was primarily known for being the vice president candidate of Kamala Harris, and so much of his rhetoric and why his folksy charm really spoke to a lot of people's. But now Tim Walls is being associated with this fraud case that is now bled back into the administration. We know that the Trump White House, they're labeling it as a Somali issue. It's not a Somali American issue, it's a Somali issue. That is the label because many of the defendants in these fraud cases are Somali American. This entire crisis has evolved into a national fight about race and immigration and leadership. And where this intersects with my angle is this isn't a communication crisis, it's a leadership crisis. And that's why I think this mirrors with Tim Walls. So from this, I just want to give you guys some insight, not just from the Tim Walls point of view, but also on the life point of view. As someone who does this full-time, I work in crisis management. Everything I do in crisis management work applies to real life. When I give my daughter's advice or it even in my own life, I think, hmm, how should I manage this? Oh, I know. What would Molly McPherson do? It's the same stuff. At the core of this, what is happening from Tim Wall's point of view is where I see a leader, a governor in this case, taking the bait. And in my work, the people who call me who want to hire me, they do so because they're usually under attack online. Those are the people who call me. The Minneapolis Star and Tribune is running an article about us, and we don't know what to do. No, I'm not gonna get that call. I'm gonna get there is a YouTuber, content creator who's created a video, and this guy's freaking nuts. We can't stand him. They're all idiots. Help us get through it. That's who calls me. So when Nick Shirley popped up on my radar via my son, I went, well, this is just a Molly crisis. So this is what we can pull out of it. This part of this crisis, too, touches third rails. That's where so much of this comes from. That third rail being in Minneapolis, the murder of George Floyd triggered such a racial divide, not only in that state, but also around the country, actually internationally. And then we had, from a community point of view, from a business point of view, people had to decide what are we going to do? So for me, working in crisis management at that time, my clients were saying, Well, what do we do? Do we do a blackout square? Do we do our DEI or I'm not doing my DEI, whatever it is. And so much of the problem, I think, is we had a lot of performative DEI. There were a lot of companies that never gave two squats about DEI, all of a sudden said, Well, we don't want to get canceled, so we're gonna do things. People got scared. This is where we get the beginning of where we are now and what's happening. And that's honestly that heavy reaction, in my opinion, is why we have a mega, which is why I believe that Donald Trump was put back into office, is because of that whiplash. People do get afraid of getting labeled and then canceled. And people hate the term cancel culture, they can't stand it. But as someone who lives in cancel culture every single day, people may not call it cancel, but they call me and say, these people are talking about me. This is a Facebook group about me, this is all that's happening, and they're doing whatever they can to protect themselves. And it's in this protection that people react like really quickly, and they lose the problem and they get caught in the attack. And that's where we are right now for a Tim Walls. I don't work for Tim Walls, but at the end of this, if I did, this is what I would be recommending that he do. So the basic facts, Department of Justice, our federal jury found there was a mastermind and a co-defendant guilty of a$250 million scheme involving fake child nutrition meal claims. IRS DOJ documents describe sites claiming to feed thousands of children daily. Nick Shirley is a conservative YouTuber. He calls himself an independent journalist. He has 1.37 million subscribers right now. He's out of Utah. He's 22 years old. I think this generation, they are brought up in a generation of violence. They are draw shootings, they're in a generation where people just say whatever they want and people get kind of immune to it. And I think that's like a big part of what's happening here too. Generationally, because Nick Shirley is a young guy and he considers himself this indie journalist, he doesn't have journalists or news credentials. So people are criticizing him, saying, Well, we don't like the methods or the means. Because if you watch the video, and I did, and when he's knocking on the doors of these daycare centers in Minneapolis, when he does get someone, he said, Well, I want my son Joey to come here. I want to ask you about how to sign up to be in a daycare. A journalist isn't going to do that. He's getting kind of knocked on that. Nick Shirley, regardless of how you feel about Nick Shirley, what he did represents Gen Z. It's independent. Nick Shirley's like, I'm just going out on my own. I'm going to create my own YouTube channel. This kid is making so much money that is coming in from X and YouTube. He's been at the White House like a conservative commenter before. But Gen Z understands that this type of content flows. They're treating him almost on the same level as legacy media. But Nick Shirley is not held to the same journalistic standards. He just represents himself. And if you watch in the video, there's a scene where Nick Shirley goes up to one of the daycares and a woman pops out of nowhere with her phone and says, We headed over to the infamous Quality Learning Center, which actually spells Quality Learing Center on the outside of their sign.
SPEAKER_03:That's how blatant this fraud is here at this daycare.
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up!
SPEAKER_03:So this is Quality Learing Center. I meant to say Quality Learning Center.
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up!
SPEAKER_03:Instead, they spelt learning wrong.
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up!
SPEAKER_03:How do you have ice here, ma'am? I'm literally a YouTuber.
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up!
SPEAKER_03:Ma'am, what do you think about the fraud that's taking place here in Minnesota?
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up! We have ice!
SPEAKER_01:Ma'am, what do you think about this place being licensed for 99 children?
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up!
SPEAKER_01:And getting$4 million over the.$4 million in the last two years? Go away! What do you think about that? Are you in favor? Are you in favor of that?
SPEAKER_05:Go away! You're not welcome here. Shame on you!
SPEAKER_03:Are you in favor of$1.9 million going illegally fraudulently to this business that has Quality Learning Center, but can't even spell learning right on the door.
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up!
SPEAKER_03:Ma'am, we are not ICE.
SPEAKER_04:I don't care who you are, you don't belong here.
SPEAKER_03:I belong here just like you belong here.
SPEAKER_04:Don't open up! It's ice!
SPEAKER_03:You do realize that there's supposed to be 99 children here at this building, but there's no one here. This is a child daycare center.
SPEAKER_01:Paid$1.9 million this year in CCAP funding. Do you know where the children are? Were they kidnapped? They run away. Where are the children? This is state of Minnesota.
SPEAKER_02:Right here.
SPEAKER_00:And who are you?
SPEAKER_02:My name's Nick Shirley, ma'am.
SPEAKER_00:And who are you with?
SPEAKER_02:Nick Shirley.
SPEAKER_00:What we have are like these two kind of extremes going head to head there. But in the middle of that, in the Venn diagram, right in the middle, shows the problem. That's the problem, and that's the problem that I see in my work. That's where I work, is in that Venn diagram. Nick Shirley has every right to go around and knock on all those doors. He found someone. That's the other thing. There's always a person who feels a sense of betrayal. It's the one who just has to come out and get it out of their system because there is a psychological thing that's happening. And in the case of the Nick Shirley video, is this guy, David? We don't know his last name. We don't know where he comes from, but we do know that he works or lives right in that Minneapolis area. And he has all the paperwork because he lives there. And he said, I've never seen a car come from here. David, we don't know his politics, right? And one could assume that he's conservative. But when I'm watching it with my crisis eye, David to me is not like a mega who's trying to prove a point. Nick Shirley is a conservative content creator, but this David is pissed off. He's a taxpayer. And that's what's driving him. Make the spreadsheets and go like this and point to the spreadsheets. That is my job right there. Because my job as a crisis manager, the people in crisis, what they do is they look at Nick Shirley or they look at the Somalis. They blame the Nick Shirleys. He's conservative and they're out to get us and you're masking his eyes. Or they blame, or it could be the left saying everyone who's going against Somalis are racist or they're Nazis or they're all these horrible things. And how could you do this? It's the extremes. People follow, they fall on either side. And that's where they fight it. You have Trump, you have Walls, you have Nick Shirley, you have you have the Somalis, you have people supporting the Somali population, you have all those people. That's where people get lost. It's right in the middle with David and his sheets of paper. That's the crisis. It's the sense of betrayal. It's the sense where people are feeling they're duped or they're being taken advantage of. That's what you want to focus on. That person. You have to follow David's mindset. He's looking at a ripoff. And if you start thinking like that, then you too can be in crisis manager. And you can do this for work or you do it in life. You want to find what that problem is. And what people do is they get caught up in the red herrings. A red herring, for example, would be Trump. Okay. And the rhetoric that he's saying. Why is Nick, why is this 22-year-old kid from Utah the first person to go and hello? Is anybody there? I couldn't believe it. Some people have done the reporting, but the Nick Shirley video is something else that I see in my job all the time. It's the content creators who are doing the work of leadership. And when I say I'm doing this in my job, I just did it this week in my job. When leaders are complaining about content creators and they're saying, you are attacking us. How dare you attack us? instead of listening to what they're saying. It doesn't mean that you have to respect Nick Shirley or like him. You can look at it and say, okay, he's getting views, he's getting follows, there's other motives there too. But you cannot take away from the core. Like just look at 20% of what they're saying. Where is the truth? Forget that it's Nick Shirley. Forget that it's a Facebook group against you. Forget that this is like guerrilla tactic where this person is going out, they have Facebook, they have all these other things just to create bluster and get everybody all hot and bothered over it. And they blame them and say, this is just about clicks, this is just about that. Well, yeah, that's part of it, but they're not wrong. They're on to something. I also tell my clients, as much as you hate them right now, like Tim Walls, if Tim Walls could be in a room with Nick Shirley right now, you'd probably want to. But you also would have to thank them and say, okay, you are highlighting something that should have been highlighted in my office before. They don't have editors, they're not following ethical guidelines, they don't have advertisers or mostly that they have to worry about. Every client I have when we deal with content creators, they label them as they're all so problematic. They're all these other things. And but also, you want to know what I do say too. Kate used the word brave, but I say courageous. Like they're the ones who have the courage to say the truth. You may not like it. And maybe some of their facts might be wrong, but sometimes it's just one content creator getting information from leaks or owned by corporations. Yes, straight from the morning show as well. Exactly. Oh my gosh, look at CBS. Look at friggin' CBS, Barry Weiss. That we have a town hall with Erica Kirk, a CBS event. What should be an event over the holidays? Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer should be on CBS. That's the universal programming. But the head of Turning Point USA is now and why? We all know why. So that's exactly it. So that's why we cannot like dismiss these content creators. Now, moving on. So now Tim Walls is under a lot of pressure right now because this thing has been bubbling for years. It also ties in the other elements, like so, like Tim Walls. Why can he not come out and say that this is a Somali problem? Obviously, it's not a Somali problem, it's a fraud problem that's happening in his state on his watch. That's the problem. When you add in rhetoric and ideologies, and you have Republicans and you have Democrats and you have mega, and then you have extremism on both sides, that's what everybody gets caught in. And then when it's politicians in Minnesota, there's voting and there's candidates. So what Tim Wallace is doing is he's kind of cornered. He's cornered. Like he can't come out, my goodness, he can't come out against Somalis, can't do that. He can't come out against the fraudster, so to speak, because he needs a hook to get people in his corner, right? No one's getting excited about a politician, like, yay, they're going after fraud. That's just what's expected of a governor. But if you attack Trump for calling Somalis garbage and the xenophobic comments that he makes, now his campaign and his hook is Walls versus Trump. Remember, going back to that weird rhetoric when Tim Walls first got momentum. So Tim Walls is making it about why the words that Trump is saying, which are wrong, but Trump does it. He does it to spin people up. He wants to be extreme because he's speaking to his mega base. It's so easy to do that. And what is Tim Walls doing? He's taking the bait. What Tim Walls should be doing, it shouldn't be a Somali issue. It shouldn't. It should be a fraud issue. Somalis are just a part of it. But when that becomes a part of the conversation, then it becomes problematic because then you do get into racist undertones. And then it creates so much hate, which is what's happening in Minnesota with a lot of these Somalis. People are labeling all Somalis as the problem. And they're getting a lot of hate and they're getting a lot of abuse. And a lot of Somalis who are running daycares legitimately and other businesses and organizations, they're just receiving so much greed. Then you have the Trump blowback, the White House blowback. Now they're cutting programs. So now daycares aren't getting federal funds. Because of this issue, because the White House is using it. So that is the lesson in there. So what Walls needs to do, and what he's trying to do, so that's why I do think Tim Walls must have someone on his staff or someone on the outside that is speaking to him from a non-emotional point of view, which is what people hire me to do. You can react from an amygdala or you can react prefrontal, which is just the rational thought. So now what you're seeing from Tim Walls is he's saying, quote, if you commit fraud in Minnesota, you will face prison time. I don't care about your race and religion. There it is. That's the messaging that needs to come out. And frankly, that's the messaging that should have been out at the beginning of this. Because then it would not have allowed the mega movement, Trump, the administration to sink their teeth into it. But this gave Trump, I think, a lot of traction, a lot of traction there. He also said fraud is fraud, and we work hard. We work too hard simply just to be paying taxes and enabling fraud. That language is good language because it's focusing on the problem of fraud. It's not who's committing it or what group people assume, because it's not just Somalis or Somali Americans. There's other people in there as well. But he's focusing on the fraud. The big problem for Tim Walls, he's doing this many years too late. That's the problem. And he's still engaging in this kind of race bait that's happening. So on feeding our future and his authority. So this is the program that's under so much scrutiny right now. He's saying, I said, don't pay them. And they said, you can't do that. You don't have the authority. And I said, do not pay them. Let them sue me. They did and they won, and we paid them. And then they just got caught and went to jail after the fact. That's Tim Walls doing what many people that I notice doing in these types of conversations. There's blaming, there's deflecting. Don't come on me. I'm the one who said, sue them, arrest them, attack them. He's saying that now, but the problem is all of this happened on his watch. Now, I don't have the name here, but I listened to a terrific interview from the New York Times. It's the national correspondent from the New York Times based out of Minneapolis. He's their national correspondent based in Minneapolis. And he was on uh the New York Times, the daily, and they interviewed him about this whole case. And I was listening to it maybe two months ago, back in November. And one of the things he said from his reporting that he found in the state of Minnesota from people who work at the state, one of the reasons why they did not want to go out and arrest, condemn, or shut down was because of the racial issue, which is understandable in the context, which is another big part. If you want to come in and wear my hat or you have to be a crisis manager, you do want to look at the context and the environment that it's in. How hot is it? What's inflamed here? This is not happening in Kansas City. This is happening where George Floyd was murdered. This is also a town where Minneapolis was so much of it was destroyed. Even in St. Paul, so much of it was destroyed. So you have opinions, you have strong opinions on extreme sides. So a reasonable person can understand why someone in that environment, in that state, in the Twin Cities, in that community, doesn't immediately want to go out and round up a bunch of people with a certain color skin. It's reasonable. Does it make it right or wrong? That's kind of different. That's beside the point. But you have to understand why it's reasonable that people would act that way. But what you need to do to kind of lead through that, it's you need that courageous leadership. And you need the rhetoric and the language that we hear now, which is fraud is fraud. The reason why it's still a classic crisis, exactly what I deal with in my job constantly. The easy way out is always a hard way out. The right answer is always the hardest choice. That's always the right answer. Leadership, how to lead, you have to lead courageously. That's how you get through it. And the consequence that might come from it is it might be harder. And how that will look, it might be more work, it might be more stressful, you may lose things, you may lose an election, you may lose your position, you may lose your seat, you may lose your job. And I said that to kind of adjacent client. I said, technically, if this should play out how it should play out, they're gonna lose their job. That is the hard facts. And that's why people deflect, and that's why people just try to cover and get through it. That's what happens. And I think that's what happened with Tim Walls. And I see that in my job all the time. People want to play it safe. So now Walls does have a new fraud prevention program that's out. He hired someone or appointed someone, former Department of Justice coming in. And when I was reading about it, it said, Oh, I also did work with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Archdiocese. And I was like, I don't know if that's like a bona fide that you want to necessarily put on someone. But so this happened, this new program rolled out like December 13th, is when I saw uh the news stories. But what Walls continues to do, what he continues to do is take the Trump bait because he wants to rally the No Kings people. He wants to get those people who absolutely despise everything about Trump, and he wants to speak to them from an emotional point of view. It's just anti-Trump. He's trying to get those people. Trump is exploiting a topic that he does not care about. And he doesn't, and Trump doesn't care about Minnesotans. He cares about Minnesota voters. So during the election, he cared about Minnesota, but he doesn't care. Trump is using it and he is exploiting it. And that's why Tim Walls in his messaging is showing he's taking the bait. 100% of them. He has condemned Trump's rhetoric as demonizing the Somali community and framed the issue as Trump punishing families and legitimate providers, which is true. That is exactly what Trump is doing. He used the term garb like when people think of Somalis, what is the word that immediately comes to it? Garbage. And that's thanks to President Trump. That's the xenophobic rhetoric that he's attaching. And it's wrong, but it's getting the No Kings crowd the smartest thing in the situation because it sounds chaotic, but this is why it's a problem. Okay. This is where Molly McPherson, crisis manager, comes in. And this is talking to my clients as well. You cannot feed two audiences at once, you cannot rally two audiences at once. You have to only focus on one audience. And it's the audience that is looking at the real problem. And the real problem is fraud. That's the audience. Because Minnesotans, the Twin Cities, heavy blue, Democratic. Minnesota, it's a DFL state, Democratic farmer, and labor state. Primarily has been a Democratic state, but it is increasingly red, particularly in rural communities. So it feels like a 50-50 state now. You have people in a state who see a culture, not a race, but a culture that is possibly taking advantage of them as taxpayers. That rubs up against that feeling of betrayal, duped, like, wait a minute, those are my tax dollars. Like, what's going on? And there's reasonable people that don't immediately go racist and say it's a Somali problem. There's reasonable people that say, this may be a cultural thing that takes advantage of the problem, but this isn't culture to me. It's not about the Somalis. It's about that a group was allowed to do it. I don't care which group it is. It could be the Swedish coffee and tea clutch of Minneapolis. It doesn't matter the group. It matters that a group was allowed to take advantage of a system and use taxpayer dollars. So they're looking at it reasonably. So they can see both sides of it. They see both extremes and they look in the middle. That's who you communicate to. It doesn't feel good when you're in the center of attack. And I know this firsthand. I tell them, I say, message the reasonable people. Right now you are messaging a Facebook group. Right now you are messaging Nick Shirley. Right now you're messaging MAGA. You're messaging people who think that way. Don't. Because half of that, too, is algorithm. You're fighting against technology and an algorithm. You're not looking at that. Both sides of the extreme take advantage of it. Both sides. MAGA, Trump, definitely. The whole administration is about whipping up xenophobic, racist commentary, right? And then you have the extreme radical left piece of it, where they're just looking at anything that's anti-mega. Anti-mega, like, don't say this about Somalis. Don't say this about people. So they're both on the extremes, but what they're missing are the people in the middle going, well, I see that a lot of them are Somali and I see it's fraud, but I don't care that it's Somali. I don't care of the group that it is. It just happens to be that's who we're hearing about. What I care about is the fraud. And you, Tim Walls, what are you doing about it? Think about like Tim Walls and Minnesota in this fraudulent case. It's actually taken over the news cycle over ice. Think about the ice video and content that we see when they go into a community and do these massive arrests. It is a really, really hard place to be a reasonable person watching those videos and going, oh my gosh, this is awful. This is awful. You know, what's happening with ice? The White House was losing the ice fight. Like they were losing that ice fight. And in fact, I saw an article about that. They're trying to fill jobs. It's to me, it's straight out of South Park. Oh my gosh. But they're going to gun shows, they're targeting gun activists, just any enthusiasts, I mean, just to fill the ice because that they want that type of mentality to come in to be able to arrest these people because so much of what ICE is doing is so inhumane. It is so inhumane. So that's why this whole Minnesota piece is giving the administration this great path. Like, oh, okay. Now people could stop paying attention about the ICE stuff, and we can just focus on actual fraud, which a number of people in Minnesota are probably annoyed about. So let me tell you how I look at it when I approach this. It is a distraction. That's it. It is old information. Remember, these aren't just people. You're also getting algorithms and whatever clicks are there that are feeding the algorithms right now. So now, the walls problem, and this applies to if you want to be a parent or deal with this in a real world scenario or crisis management scenario. I always, like I said, I tell my clients, look for the reasonable stakeholders. Okay, look for reasonable people that are going, they're right in the middle. And you need a narrative to shift away from the extremes. So right now, the media and political coverage is Trump versus Waltz. And it's also Somali fraud versus anti-Somali rhetoric. That's it. That's the story. That's it. Look at your news feeds right now. That's 100% what it's about. But what gets less oxygen from a content and from a news media point of view is the oversight failures. There were plenty of oversight failures, many that fell under walls. But many reasonable people understand that a governor is not sitting and looking at every single file. A governor is not doing every single thing that they're there. It's the buck stops with the governor. It's the governor's administration. It's what's happening in Minnesota. And system fixes, that's the story. It's the fix. But it's not sexy and it's not exciting. And Nick Shirley doesn't care about fixes. He doesn't care about it at all. That's not exciting. Nick Shirley's not going to walk into the Capitol or walk into offices and open up a file cabinet and go through it. That's not exciting. You're not going to get clicks over that. You're going to do it, you know, knocking on empty doors. But from a response point of view, you don't respond to content creators and what the news media wants. I mean, yeah, you have to, but you still have to put out your messaging. And the messaging is the fix. Because then reasonable people, and in this case, people in Minnesota, taxpayers are going to say, all right, well, at least this thing's being cleared up. At least this is being fixed as well. So from if you look at it from a crisis manager point of view or a leadership lens, leaders, it's funny, I had a leader say this to me this week. And we were talking about a news story that came out that affected this leader. And I predicted it. I'm like a Google predictive text. I knew exactly what they were going to say, that they were going to blame the newscast. They were going to blame the reporter. The spokesperson said XYZ, but the reporter said ABC. And in my mind, I said to someone else, and I said it gingerly to the leader, it's not the news station's job to do your job to communicate. If you want to communicate that message, that's your job. If they don't include it, you can't blame them. You have all your other channels to include it. And if you didn't include it before, it's not the reporter's job or the reporter's fault for noticing it. What you have to do as a leader, you got to be courageous and say, ugh, yeah, that's not great. That reporter did their job. And what that reporter is doing is highlighting a gap in our communication. In other words, you got to take your lumps. Got to take your lumps. And then you got to fix your problem. So instead of blaming everything, everything else, everyone else. So in Wall's case, blaming Trump, blaming the administration, everybody's blaming Nick Shirley. We're picking apart Nick Shirley. We're making this a racial issue. And Wall's like having to defend Somalis and Somali Americans, yet a lot of the people involved in this fraud are Somali Americans. So it makes it a difficult argument for the masses, right? So that's why I said don't focus on that. You can absolutely comment on why hate speech is wrong. You can comment about and be very strong about the bad piece of it, the inhumane. Don't paint it as a Trump problem because then you're just taking the bait. Always look for the humanity. Message around the humanity. Highlight the inhumanity. What's wrong? What's like golden rule stuff that people just aren't doing? What's just the decent thing to do? That's how you message it. The indestructible PR framework. Own it, explain it, promise it. Thank you. Criticism always feels like attack on the self-image. People, leaders, people under attack, they take it personally. And you can understand it. Reasonable people can understand why they take it personally. There's like me as a client, as a crisis manager, I understand why people feel that way. I 100% understand it. And I understand that it triggers defensiveness, it triggers blame. It triggers denial. But a leader, and I've said this to clients, you're getting paid the big bucks to not be triggered, to not blame someone else, to not be so defensive. That's why you're in your role. That's why you're in your role. When I'm saying it to my 21-year-old, to my kids, I don't say you should know better. I say to them, this is a part of maturing. This is adulting. You got to learn. Another word that I use is you have to regulate. You want to emotionally regulate. I understand it. We all want to do that. But maturity and regulation, and especially if you're a leader and you've been elected or you've been appointed or you've been hired to make a lot of money, your job is not to do that. Yeah, and you're highlighting a White House right now. Absolutely. We have a commander-in-chief who all he does is blame. Because I know in my role, what is blame? When I see blame, when it's from a client, whoever I see, life, personal, when I'm talking to someone, a family member, and I hear why it's my fault, I go, tell me why it's my fault again. Blame always masks weakness. Always. It masks an insecurity, a weakness. Always, always, always. That's why you don't want to take the bait because you already know they're weak. They're already telegraphing that you're weak. You don't take the bait. What true leaders do and what courageous people do and honest people do and human people do, they redirect away from the emotion and from the chaos, and they redirect it to the underlying issue. It's not sexy, it's not exciting, it doesn't get clicks, but what? It gets respect. That's what it gets because it's the right thing to do. That's how I counsel people. You're getting paid the big bucks not to be triggered or reactive. That could be that's your staff, that's the press, that's your voters, your constituents, it's local leaders, it's people in your community. In Tim Wall's case, it's smallies. Like the Somali Americans in the Twin Cities. Yes, you can defend them with rhetoric against Trump and do all that other stuff. But also, what they probably really want is the more heightened you go with Trump, the more grief they're gonna get, the more hate they're gonna get, the more pain. It's not just smallies, it's every minority group, it's every underrepresented group. It all crap flows downhill. It always comes and hits them. Attack the underlying problem, and then it's gonna ease up on them. Reasonable stakeholders don't make noise. I also heard this recently. The people on social media, the people on Facebook, they don't know anything. They need to be educated. Nobody else is complaining about it. It's only this small group online. Not so. There's a lot of reasonable people on there who are watching this. People, majority Somali community voted right. Can I tell you something? I was just reading that. I was reading an MPR, a Minneapolis Public Radio story about that, that they were interviewing all these Somalis who voted for Trump. That was interesting. I didn't know that. I found that very interesting, which becomes a messaging problem for Trump, right? And for Republicans in Minnesota, it just gets messy. But you just don't want to respond to the noise. You want to respond to the structure. That's that's essentially what it comes down to. So whether it's in business or in life, you have to look for the traps. And the traps usually involve a weakness, a cover, there's blame, there's finger pointing, there's just anything that's tied into inhumanity and just treating people poorly. Like the lowest common denominator of actions. That's not where you want to wage battle. And they're under attack. And there is this understanding that content creators are content creators for a reason. Sometimes they're not just there for the greater good. I mean, many times you can see the ethos. Like if you know me well, for instance, I love sharing information to help people. So I do it from a crisis management point of view, a strategic communication point of view. But also I just like to send out like things that work for me. I just like to share, right? It's no one goes this way alone. Everything we put into each other comes back into our own. That's what my grandmother said to me my entire life. And that's how I feel. But content creators are reality. You get compensated for it. You get publicity for it, you get influence for it, you get money, you get collabs. There's a benefit to it. And so that is true, without a doubt. That is true. You have to look at, well, what's the agenda of the content creator? Like what's really driving it. And so often with clients under attack, I agree with them. Like, yeah, they want this, they want clicks, they're getting money, they're getting all these things. But in order to be a content creator who believes a certain thing and puts out all that content, you kind of have to believe what you're saying too. You have to kind of live it. That's why people who become successful content creators are usually putting out their own stuff because they're pulling it from what they think or what they believe. So a content creator is going to be conservative or progressive, or they might just try and be down the middle politically, but maybe they have an angle. Maybe it's teaching, maybe it's this or whatever. And some people are out there, yeah, purely just for clicks. But what I tell leaders under attack, it's just try and skim off 80% of the top of all the things that bug you about that content creator. And in my job, like I have to go deep on a lot of these content creators. I'm like, ugh, I hate this person. I do not like this person. I get why this person makes you crazy. Because sometimes I'm just as annoyed as my client. But my job, they've hired me to not get caught up in the emotion of it. My job is to look at the core of what that content creator is saying. I look at the 20%. And that 20% is truth. Did Nick everything Nick Shirley say in that video, is it true? Is it 100% true? No. And now they're going out and people are debunking it, like local affiliates in Minnesota. They're trying to cover their tracks, saying, no, no, no, we did this, we did this, we did the same thing, we knocked on the same doors. Everybody else, I know CBS, Barry Weiss got into it, everybody's talking about it now. But we can't compare Nick Shirley to news organizations. He's 22 years old. He spent the last two years on a Mormon missionary. He wasn't at the Columbia School Journalism, right? He wasn't in journalism school. The kid's a YouTuber. But to attack Nick Shirley and how he did it, you're missing the point. Nick Shirley's Gen Z and he understands how it works. That's why he has all these views. All these local station networks, they would have the viewers that Nick Shirley has. He doesn't have to act under the same guidelines and the ethical guidelines. He's not doing that. But you cannot dismiss that what Nick Shirley did was damn effective. It was incredibly effective. And it got out to a lot of people. My God, to the White House's responding to it. JD Vance, like all these people are coming out, all these changes, health and human services now, cutting all this funding. And now these daycare owners, these legitimate daycare owners, Somali American and otherwise, are saying, Oh, now we can't operate. Now we can't operate. Now it's going to affect families. Did you hear about the daycare center that was broken into 75 kids family info stolen? Oh. Yeah. And it kind of creates this environment, which comes down to another tool that so many politicians, content creators, whatever. I mean, actually, it's just marketing and sales one-on-one. It's fear. If you want to pull out your own life skill, there are people in your life who are going to trigger you. There's no doubt about it. There are people in your life who will intentionally trigger you. And many times they'll do it because of their own weakness. Sometimes it's malicious, sometimes they can't help it. But you are being triggered and you are being blamed, and you are being gaslit, and you are being all these things. So you will emotionally deregulate. Your job is to spot that and detach yourself from it and focus on the issue. It's a sticky one, it's a hard one, but it's the big one right now. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for listening. Bye for now.
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