In a world in which difficult feedback seems increasingly hard for people to give (and receive), I was pleasantly surprised on June 11 on my drive into work. With the team a season-worst 12 games under .500, Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy appeared on WEEI and stated a painfully obvious truth—the season was “embarrassing and unacceptable.” And he kept coming back to it throughout the interview: the team had to do better.
Not for nothing, but the team started playing well not long after. And look at us now. The playoffs start next week, and the Sox are in.
How refreshing.
Sometimes something is bad, and the first step toward making it better is having the courage to say that it is bad. The truth hurts…but it can also set you free.
Kennedy understood this in June. Bob Kraft followed up a few months later.
I was delighted that after a decade-plus of dabbling in 9/11 truthing, antisemitism, and selective moral outrage about Jews and Israel only, Bob Kraft and other NFL owners shuffled Macklemore off the stage and back onto the internet by getting him removed from the Ed Sheeran Loop Tour.
Desperate for some of their own performative solidarity, the other opening acts quit the tour. I certainly hope they enjoy their 15 minutes as well. After all, nothing says courage quite like Gen Z(ero) virtue-signaling.
The aftermath of TourGate was devastatingly predictable. It was red meat for The Globe and The New York Times, who couldn’t help but contextualize the events as if the only thing Macklemore ever did was say “Free Palestine.” It was the laziest possible reporting.
The internet reaction was also laughably easy to foresee. At the drop of a hat, the bots, troll farms, Free Speechers, and globalize-the-intifada brigades jumped into action. The ratios exploded, the TikTokers chimed in, and the algorithms did what they always do to the Jews.
And really, here’s something that should be clear to us all, and is worth saying in every ridiculous situation we find ourselves in:
Israel and The Jewish People are never, ever going to win the internet. Like ever.
There are 16 million Jews and orders of magnitude more people than that who actively hate us, seek to aid and abet our persecution and destruction, and are ready to mobilize and deploy at a moment’s notice. They can overwhelm a comment section at the drop of a hat, make fringe opinions look mainstream, and make mainstream opinions look fringe.
But the internet is not the real world.
Friends: If we are waiting for the internet to tell us whether we have done the right thing, we are going to be waiting for a very long time. You have to be willing to say what is true, do what is right, and let the internet be wrong about you.
Leadership is not making a decision and then nervously refreshing your feed to see whether everyone agrees with you. Leadership is making the right decision and knowing full well that everyone might not. If your positions are dictated by what the internet mob says about them, you have already failed.
Lead fearlessly. Believe fearlessly. Speak truth to crazy. And abide no antisemitism.
Sometimes leadership is complicated.
And sometimes it is just stating the obvious.
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