Another writer once<\/span> told me that she never, ever apologizes. How unenlightened and abrasive, I thought at the time. This was circa 2019, when the specter of cancellation loomed large, where old tweets were being dug up, and public apologies abounded.<\/p>\n I like to think we\u2019ve come out on the other side a bit more canny. The era of overcorrection converted me to the idea that, with few exceptions, you should not publicly apologize, and you should not retreat.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking about this again in the wake of former FBI Director James Comey\u2019s second indictment stemming from a dumb joke he literally wrote in the sand. While on a beach vacation last year, Comey spelled out the words \u201c86 47\u201d and posted the photo online. For this limp act of resistance, he\u2019s been charged<\/a> with threatening to kill the president and transmitting the message via interstate commerce, i.e., Instagram.<\/p>\n For those who\u2019ve never worked a service industry job and are not unruly, public drunks \u2014 which would make for an interesting Venn Diagram for members of this administration \u2014 \u201c86\u201d is slang for removing someone from an establishment. It\u2019s ludicrous to imagine this being read as a threat on Donald Trump\u2019s life, but that was hardly the point.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n What matters is that Comey made a critical misstep: He deleted the post<\/a> and retreated, giving his detractors exactly what they so richly desired. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,\u201d he said at the time.<\/p>\n Now, some necessary caveats: There is great value in addressing specific wrongs to the specific people you\u2019ve wronged. This is best done in private. If you find yourself apologizing to a large group of unspecified people for hard-to-pin-down or ever-evolving wrongs, it should give you pause, ditto if you start by opening up your Notes app. Consider who is asking you to apologize and their motivations for doing so. Are they trying to exert control over you? Do they want to gain leverage for future use?<\/p>\n Comey\u2019s de facto apology not only didn\u2019t matter to its intended audience, but it also telegraphed the former FBI director as weak. Announcing himself as willing to capitulate only chummed the water further, the sharks circled, and he bent the knee to the worst actors rather than stand his ground. Deleting the post, in the modern era, ends up looking like an admission of guilt \u2014 or, at least, an admission that the bad guys got under your skin, which means they can do so again, at will, in the future.<\/p>\n Once you start apologizing to appease the nameless, faceless ombudsmen looking to catch you out, you might find it\u2019s impossible to stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is experiencing this firsthand. Early in March, the right-wing website Jewish Insider thought they were onto the scoop of the century when they published a story blaring: \u201cZohran Mamdani\u2019s wife liked social media posts celebrating Oct. 7 attacks.\u201d That premise was hardly borne out by the posts that Rama Duwaji, an interdisciplinary artist, had \u201cliked\u201d \u2014 which included such incendiary phrases as \u201cSystemic change for collective liberation\u201d \u2014 but the damage was done. A Mamdani spokesperson responded to the report with a conciliatory statement<\/a>: \u201cMayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s safe to say this apology was not accepted, and bad actors in the media doubled down on attacking Duwaji. One week later, a gotcha reporter manufactured outrage with a story for the conservative Washington Free Beacon about one of Duwaji\u2019s illustrations running<\/a> alongside a collection of essays edited by Susan Abulhawa about the indignities of living under Israeli occupation \u2014 in this case, a Gazan woman\u2019s search for something as simple as a bathroom. The publication attempted to hold Duwaji accountable for everything the editor has ever said, none of which was contained in the piece itself, which was actually written by Diana Islayih.<\/p>\n Mamdani apologized<\/a> for the editor, saying, \u201cI think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it\u2019s reprehensible.\u201d But the mayor\u2019s critics were quick to seize on what was left unsaid, with an Anti-Defamation League<\/a> leader crediting his apology with one hand while offering with the other: \u201cHowever, we have not heard from [Duwaji]. Does she have a problem with the author and her statements? We just don\u2019t know.\u201d (Abulhawa, for her part, nailed it in a withering response<\/a> to Mamdani\u2019s apology: \u201cYou succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife, and at your work, clawing harder with each apology or concession you make.\u201d)<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t over, and we likely haven\u2019t heard the end of it. The Free Beacon doubled down on its intrepid reporting by advanced-searching up some of Duwaji\u2019s off-color tweets from when she was a teenager. This seemed to break the dam, and New York\u2019s first lady publicly apologized earlier this month in an interview on the art site Hyperallergic<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn\u2019t excuse it,\u201d she told the site. \u201cI\u2019ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This all comes after Mamdani was only a few months off his historic win in an election<\/a> where the most votes were tallied since 1969 \u2014 one in which he overcame wave after wave of Islamophobic fearmongering and political opponents smearing him<\/a> as \u201cantisemtic\u201d for refusing to roll over<\/a> on supporting Palestinian liberation. He stood up for something people believe in and was rewarded for not backing down, which makes it all the more mystifying that he would start apologizing now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"NEW](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2253717594.jpg?fit=3436%2C2291\")