Yokes for Jokes

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast – "Yokes for Jokes"

Date: April 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Commentary team dives into the controversy surrounding President Trump's public call for the firing of Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel's contentious jokes about Melania Trump—made just days before an attempt was made on the former President's life. The discussion explores free speech, the boundaries of political and comedic expression, the double standards in media and culture, the fallout of public shaming and "cancel culture," and, in the latter part, the deeper implications of recent political violence and a breaking geopolitical story about the UAE leaving OPEC.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Trump, Jimmy Kimmel, and Free Speech

The Catalyst

• Trump publicly called for Jimmy Kimmel, ABC late-night host, to be fired after Kimmel joked about Melania Trump’s supposed wish that her husband were dead—mere days before a real assassination attempt.
• The panel debates: Is this a First Amendment issue, or simply the President expressing outrage?

Constitutional Context

• Jon Podhoretz (00:48):

  “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the speech or of the press... I see no evidence in the First Amendment's language that it mentions the President or whether he can say that somebody should or should not be fired.”

• The President, as a citizen, has free speech rights, but those are amplified by his power.

Double Standards and Media Hypocrisy

• Eliana Johnson (05:57):

  “These norms have already been broken by the left. And it’s the hypocrisy that rankles us on the right.”

• Examples cited: Roseanne Barr, Gina Carano, Laura Osnes—all swiftly fired or ostracized for transgressions, while similar calls for accountability are rare when directed at left-leaning public figures.

The FCC’s Role and Overreach

• The specter of the FCC being used as a political weapon looms over the debate, with previous threats from Commissioner Brendan Carr raising concerns about government overreach.

Seth Mandel (26:12):
“The FCC to me is the key… Brendan Carr was talking like, you know, a mafia head last time, where he was like, ‘We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.’… So now I think that it looms over everything.”

Performative Outrage

• Both Trump and Kimmel are accused of leveraging controversy for their own public brands, with the cycle feeding itself.

Seth Mandel (29:01): “The best way to put yourself front and center and build your brand as a media person is to get Trump to go after you. And they know it.”

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2. Assassination Attempt on Trump: Media Focus and Social Pathologies

Changing the Narrative

• The hosts lament that public discussion has revolved more around the Trump-Kimmel spat than the attempt on Trump’s life by Cole Allen.

Jon Podhoretz (34:09): “We in fact, have just spent almost 30 minutes talking about Jimmy Kimmel and not talking about Cole Allen. So once again, Cole Allen wins.”

Cole Allen’s Profile

• The panel analyzes Allen’s background: academically gifted, Christian, socially unremarkable—defying the typical “lone assassin” stereotypes.
• His radicalization and belief in “malicious nonsense” from the internet are seen as emblematic of a broader societal issue.

Abe Greenwald (43:23): “We’ve yet to reckon with just how many mostly young Americans are walking around with their heads packed with malicious nonsense that they take for reality...when there are that many deluded people, some are going to act.”

The Role of Social Isolation and Internet Culture

• Growing social alienation, the echo chambers of the internet, and the loss of face-to-face reality checks are discussed as key ingredients in radicalization.

Christine Rosen (44:30): “We...speak to other people much, much less these days than we used to...If you spend all day in your own head and online...there’s a really grounding touch grass moment, if someone’s like, ‘Really? That sounds kind of crazy.’...We do that less and less.”

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3. Social Media, Outrage Culture, and the “Public Shaming” Trap

Toxoplasmosis as Metaphor

• Podhoretz draws a provocative parallel between the irrational rage caused by toxoplasmosis and the anger social media stokes in people.

Jon Podhoretz (59:00): “There is some quality of toxoplasmosis to social media in which...I felt this rage bubbling inside me...There’s no barrier to entry to respond, it is designed to have no barrier and to feed on those immediate and powerful emotions.”

Public Shaming and Its Costs

• They revisit Jon Ronson’s So You've Been Publicly Shamed and the lasting emotional trauma of Internet-fueled takedowns.
• The “shamers,” not just the shamed, are also psychologically affected.
• The cycle of outrage, shaming, and performative morality is seen as a major societal ill.

Cancel Culture, Self-Policing, and Journalistic Ethics

• There’s little self-policing from media figures regarding leftward excesses, but heightened scrutiny for any right-wing misstep.

Jon Podhoretz (21:46): “I just don’t know where Chris Cillizza and Jake Tapper and Brian Stelter...where are they saying that was not cricket? Crickets on Kimmel’s repugnant remark.”

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4. Security, Presidential Exposure, and the Future of Political Engagement

The Impact of Assassination Era

• String of assassination attempts reignites debate: Is enough being done to protect political figures without destroying public engagement?

Christine Rosen (66:49): “The personal security protocols for the presidency don't seem to have had that dramatic transformation...Congress really does have to start its oversight and make sure it's getting the proper funding and training for those agents.”

• Trump is credited for his public composure and call for unity following the attempt.

Abe Greenwald (66:49): “He actually spoke somewhat uncharacteristically about unity...people from across the aisle hugged him and...there was a sense of being one.”

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5. Breaking News: UAE Leaves OPEC

Geopolitical Shifts

• The episode closes with the panel reacting to news that the United Arab Emirates is leaving OPEC—a move they deem potentially epochal for world energy and the Iran conflict.
• Possible consequences: weakening of the oil cartel, global price shifts, and strategic realignment as the Iran war and Middle East upheaval continue.

Jon Podhoretz (67:41): “This is a gigantic geopolitical event, potentially, because...one of the four major oil producing nations leaves the cartel, the cartel effectively stops being a cartel. And this is...an epic changing moment.”

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• [00:48] Jon Podhoretz on the First Amendment and presidential free speech
• [05:57] Eliana Johnson on hypocrisy and norm-breaking on both sides
• [14:15] Jon Podhoretz on presidential use of power (Obama’s hardball politics vs. Trump)
• [26:12] Seth Mandel on the FCC: “Brendan Carr was talking like a mafia head...”
• [29:01] Seth Mandel on media self-theatrics: “The best way to put yourself front and center and build your brand as a media person is to get Trump to go after you. And they know it.”
• [34:09] Jon Podhoretz: “Cole Allen wins...because we're not talking about him, we're talking about the press.”
• [43:23] Abe Greenwald on a generation lost in delusions: “...when there are that many deluded people in a society, some of them are going to act.”
• [44:30] Christine Rosen on social isolation and lost reality checks
• [59:00] Jon Podhoretz’s toxoplasmosis metaphor for social media outrage
• [66:49] Abe Greenwald and Christine Rosen giving Trump credit for unity post-assassination attempt
• [67:41] Jon Podhoretz on the UAE/OPEC story: “This is a gigantic geopolitical event, potentially...an epic changing moment.”

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Important Segments and Timestamps

• 00:48 – 08:32: The Trump-Kimmel controversy and its First Amendment implications
• 11:05 – 18:58: Biden/Obama precedents, FCC precedent, and the threat of government intervention
• 34:09 – 41:28: Media missing the real story: the assassin's background, not the Kimmel flap
• 43:23 – 54:25: Social pathology, isolation, and internet culture’s impact on young Americans
• 54:25 – 58:43: Public shaming, cancel culture, and the stress of life online
• 59:00 – 64:43: Social media rage as a psychological contagion; security questions post-assassination attempt
• 67:41 – 71:19: Breaking news: UAE leaves OPEC and its implications

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Tone and Dynamic

The conversation is brisk, wry, and frank, mixing cultural observation, political analysis, and self-aware social criticism. The hosts’ tone is at turns exasperated, bemused, occasionally sarcastic, and intellectually engaged, with a distinct flair for referencing both high and pop cultural touchstones.

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Conclusion

This episode isn’t just a roundtable about one week’s controversies—it's a diagnosis of American public life and media pathologies in the digital age. The interplay of outrage, double standards, and the collapse of trusted norms dominate the first half; the latter transitions to the psychology of modern violence, loneliness, and digital radicalization, before finishing with a potentially world-changing news break. Whether you’re following the Kimmel drama or global oil markets, this episode delivers a thought-provoking lens on the fraught spirit of 2026.

Transcript

[A]

Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drinks and pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, April 28, 2026. I am Jon Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[B]

Hi, Jon.

[A]

Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.

[C]

Hi, John.

[A]

Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[D]

Hi, John.

[A]

And Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.

[E]

Hi, John.

[A]

What happened to you? Wall Street Journal columnist Jerry Baker tweeted at me last night or early this morning because I made the point after the very impressive Greg Lukianoff, who has been the head of fire and is a free speech advocate in the United States, said that Trump saying that Jimmy Kimmel of ABC should be fired, ran afoul of the First Amendment. My response to this was the First Amendment's passages on free speech read as follows. Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the speech or of the press. I see no evidence in the First Amendment's language that it mentions the President or whether he can say that somebody should or should not be fired. I understand the implication that government is to respect the freedom of the press. The press's freedom does not necessarily extend to or the President himself is an American citizen with free speech rights. Yes, I understand that his words can have greater impact than other people and that maybe he can use the levers of government to punish Disney, the owner of abc, in some way or other. So his words have greater weight. But my saying this by saying, okay, you guys are all going insane. Jimmy Kimmel went on the air and made a joke about how Melania Trump wished her husband dead, and then four days later there was an assault assassination attempt on him. Nobody paid attention to the joke when it was first aired. And in the aftermath of it, people got very rattled and angry and upset, Melania herself foremost. And for this to then be flipped on Trump saying he's a disgrace, he should be fired, Melania saying he should be fired, Steven Chung saying he should be fired, and then saying that Trump is the monster because he's violating the First Amendment, which does not mention the President of the United States, but merely mentions Congress, I thought was a that's a mischaracterization of what might be wrong with what Trump said. And in response, Gerry Baker asked and various other people, Connor Friedersdorf and others have asked, what monstrous demon has overtaken my body and my moral frame that I do not understand the incredible threat posed to our civilization by Donald Trump saying that Jimmy Kimmel ought to be fired. I want to ask you guys about this, but I want to point out that Roseanne Barr pointed out last year when there was another controversy, I don't remember which one. And Barack Obama said the president should play no role in saying that people should be fired for expressing their views. And Roseanne Barr said, hey, remember when you and Michelle Obama called Bob Iger, the owner of the or the head of Disney abc, demanding that I be fired for what I said about Valerie Jarrett on the at the time of the RoseAnne reboot in 2017, 2018. And I thought that was an interesting point to make, which is that somehow all sorts of efforts made by presidents to influence public opinion through the back door and talk to people about what they should and shouldn't publish. People being fired for making jokes about the Obama kids and the like, all of which nobody said, well, this is terrible. Nobody should be fired for simply making a joke about Obama's kids. Nobody thought that at the time. But apparent. But of course, it is open season on Trump and on Melania. And in the wake of the assassination attempt, you would think that maybe people would say all they had to say was, Jimmy went too far. That's really not, you know, leave Melania out saying that, using the joke. Essentially, it's Oscar Wilde's joke from the Importance of Being Earnest that Lady Bracknell sees her friend Lady Greenwillow or something like that, and she says, since her widowhood, she has been much altered. Or somebody says, since her widowhood, she's much altered. And Lady Bracknell says, yes, her hair has turned positively gold from grief, which is one of the great witticisms in the wittiest play ever written. But is not a joke to be would not be a joke to be made about Lady Green Willow the day after her husband died. Let's just say. And so that's where I fall on this. But apparently, according to Jerry Baker and Connor Fries or others, I am a enemy of free speech, a monster, and I have now joined the storm troops of the Trumpian Nazi Brigade.

[E]

John, I think you make an important point and Gerry Baker's trying to say, what happened to you? You're joining in with the norm breakers. And Matt, when he did the podcast regularly, used to make this point a lot, that these norms have already been broken by the left. And it's the hypocrisy that rankles us on the right. You note Roseanne Barr. And there was also Gina Carano, who was cashiered in short order from the Mandalorian on Disney. This is not the first.

[A]

Oh, there's way more than that. Laura Osnes, a Broadway actress who was basically drummed out of show business because she did not want to get vaccinated, which was, I think, also so Gina Carano, Laura Osnis, a whole bunch of people who were unpersoned. Yeah.

[E]

And Roseanne had compared Valerie Jarrett to an ape, which hit close to home to the Obamas. And this is not Jimmy Kimmel's first offense. He stepped in it when he said that Tyler Robinson, the Kirk Assassin, was maga. And Kimmel is a Democratic activist who attends no Kings protests, who's very close to Bob Iger and Dana Walden, who are major Hollywood power players and very close to Kamala Harris and Democratic politicians. What's interesting about this is that Disney now has a new CEO who's not part of this crew, Josh d'. Amaro. And Disney has spent a lot of time trying to unwoke itself. It knew that it went too far in wokeifying its cartoons and all that. So I think it's. This is an interesting new test with regard to how Disney will handle this scandal and what it wants its brand to be. Does it want to be defined by Jimmy Kimmel and his refusal to back down, you know, his offensive jokes and his refusal to back down from them. And I'm quite interested to see how it plays out. But I think it is important to note that what really, really gets under our skin is, is the fact that this stuff has already happened to folks on our side. We are cashiered in short order. They are not.

[A]

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[B]

It's funny because what I got from his joke, which, I don't know, I think is worse, is that he was saying he was sort of making a joke about how Trump's being killed is inevitable. That's, that's, that's kind of what I.

[A]

Impending widowhood, right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Right.

[D]

Okay. But I will Widow. Yeah.

[A]

Expect him. Widowhood. Yeah.

[D]

It's important to note the timeline here for anyone who isn't following this closely. The joke was made several days before the most recent assassination attempt. I actually think what might have gotten Melania so angry about it wasn't just the widowhood remark, but that he also made a joke about her being introduced to Trump by Epstein, and she has recently come out very aggressively for her, saying that that's not true and that's not appropriate. I will push back a little on this point, though. It's. I absolutely loathed what Obama did, mainly behind the scenes, not just in strong arming executives to fire individual actors who said things that the Obamas didn't like, but in actively unleashing surveillance on reporters like James Rosen, who was at Fox News at the time. He did a lot of Terrible things. So did Joe Biden. And strong arming social media platform companies to de platform individual American citizens. I don't think that justifies the President of the United States trying to use his social media platform to strong arm executives to fire people whose jokes he doesn't like either. I understanding that we have been on a different side of this equation for years doesn't make it right for him to do it. And I don't think we should excuse it. He has the power to use the levers of federal government to. To punish people. He is the President of the United States. I give a little more grace to Melania, who is in the impossible position of being a private citizen with a very public role. And I think she's tried very hard to navigate that. And in this case, she was angry about this. And I think she has every right to speak. And her. I would defend her right to do that night and day. I would defend the President's right to say what he said. But I think we have to judge him in the context of the power he wields as the head of the federal government. He has threatened to sic the FCC on executives and on networks before. And we can argue about whether that's legitimate power, use of power or not. But I think the context here with him joining in on her tweet is what bothered me. I didn't mind her saying that she has every right to say that. I'm not a particular fan of Jimmy Kimmel, but I absolutely do think we should have comedians who push the envelope and attack our leaders with comedy, with satire, with everything they can bring to bear. And. And we need more of those people on the right doing that both to ourselves and to leaders on the left. So given that we know the culture is skewed in one direction and has been for a long time, I don't think we want to get in the position of saying, well, it's okay then if we do it because it was done to us. I don't like that because I do still care about the norms. I do still care about the President of the United States not threatening people, not threatening individual American citizens. I don't think that's a good idea.

[A]

Okay, but two things. One, we live in the real world. And presidents of the United States have been threatening people behind the scenes since the beginning of the Republic. Barack Obama, again in 2009, threatened the people who had mezzanine financing on Chrysler and a couple of the firms that were going bankrupt when he did the auto bailout and informed them that in contravention of 800 years of British common law, he was restructuring how the money that the federal government was using as a bailout and how Chrysler, in particular, was going to pay the money back. He was going to make sure that the unions got it first. And even if they had contracts that said that they were, that this is, you know, if they were going to do this for Chrysler, they got them. You know, there was an order, a legal order in how money gets paid back, and that was going out the window. And his method of making sure that that happened was to say, do you really want me to go out in public and tell people that you are demanding that money before workers? Because I'm gonna do that, so you better keep quiet. I'm only bringing that up to say that that is hardball politics by a president. That's him. We've already talked about Obama, Nixon did it, Reagan. Everybody has played games with the presidency to push back to our agendas. Two things about Trump that are different, one of which is, and I agree with you, that this is, like, outrageous. He has actually sued. He sued Disney, he sued 60 Minutes, he sued people for doing X, Y and Z, and then manipulating the levers of power to push and threaten them and then get settlements. He got a $15 million settlement from ABC on something relating to George Stephanopoulos. All of that. That's outrageous. If the FCC gets involved in what's happened with Melania and Jimmy Kimmel, that would be outrageous. Trump saying Kimmel should be for abusing my wife does not rise to the same standard. Just because he is president doesn't mean that he is not allowed to express outrage at something like this 24 hours after somebody tried to kill him.

[D]

I completely agree with his right to express it. As I said, what I'm saying is that those remarks should be judged in a different context than from an ordinary citizen on X, you know, mouthing off to another ordinary citizen. He is not an ordinary citizen. He has a vast amount of power, so we should judge him accordingly.

[E]

John. I also think, to both of you guys, I also think the other thing that's different about Trump is that he does things publicly that others have done privately, and he very much wants people to see them. They are part of his political appeal. He brings lawsuits publicly. He takes the money from those lawsuits publicly. And, uh, he likes to campaign. You know, they're. They're part of his appeal. Yeah, I got those suckers for $16 million here and $21 million there. And I think part of his appeal to voters is that they feel so much animosity towards these news networks. I mean, that goes back to 20, 20, 16, the fake news media, and towards getting Jimmy Kimmel and his crass jokes shoved down their throats. That things that people have felt the need done in private and the strong arming in private and pen and phone and this and that Trump wants to do publicly to show his people, like, I'm pushing back. And that's so much of how he's garnered support from, you know, regular Americans.

[A]

I just want to express myself.

[D]

You can't sue Kimmel telling a bad joke. This is what I'm saying. Like, there's a distinction between the lawsuits, which I agree as every right to file, because those are defamation lawsuits. He just, A judge just threw out, the one he filed against the Wall Street Journal. Members of his cabinet can file defamation lawsuits till they're blue in the face. I have no problem with that. It's different when he's, when he's, It's a different thing to say. I didn't like this joke. It offended me. And if he'd left it at that, I would be like, great. Yeah, he's totally, it's totally understandable that he was angry about this. The distinction is he should be fired. If they, if it stops there, as you say, John, fine, maybe a little, you know, I don't think it's great, but it's not a big deal. If there is any follow through by using the federal government to bring pressure to bear on a network to fire that individual, I will have a problem with that. Even though I agree.

[A]

Not a fan of Kimmel, by the way. So would I. And then it gets to the question of corporate responsibility in both directions, which is when Disney made the decision to settle with Trump to quiet the Stephanopoulos matter, did it do the right thing or the wrong thing? I mean, there are arguments on both sides, one of which is you need to not be in, you know, brogue with the President of the United States because you have regulatory issues and your stockholders need you to run your company with an eye toward proper management, brand management, and you take a loss in order to have future gains. And the other is, no, they shouldn't have settled. They should have let this go all the way because they needed to uphold a different kind of standard or principle. I don't have an answer to that question. I think that the Trump lawsuits that you said they have, does he have a right to file them? Yeah, I suppose he does. Should the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr threaten people with the removal of their licenses when they say impolitic or wrong things or things that he hates. No, he absolutely should not. It's a disgrace. And if the Congress were working properly, he would have been impeached and removed from office for that behavior. But it doesn't. And right now, all Trump did was say Jimmy Kimmel should be fired. He did not say, I am activating the FCC to go at Disney. He didn't say, I'm doing X, Y, none of that in this case. And I just, I want to just finish and then ask Abe and Seth, but where is like, hey, Jimmy, don't do that now. You know, the guy was, I understand that it happened before. And the whole thing was he was doing the roast. He would have given Trump had he. That was the whole setup was Jimmy Kimmel at the White House correspondence dinner. If he had been invited, what would his routine have been?

[D]

It was kind of a pathetic setup for a joke anyway.

[E]

So, yeah, can I just add one thing to this for Abe and Seth to comment on the reason that cbs, okay, cbs, had more regulatory issues, but another reason that CBS and ABC settled with Trump was that they didn't want to go through discovery and have George Stepanopoulos's damning text messages about this exposed. And same with cbs, which Sherry Redstone, who was then the majority CBS stakeholder, said on the record that it would have been humiliating to them because the political biases of their reporters and correspondents would be exposed. And I think President Trump is acutely aware of that.

[A]

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[B]

One of the many dumb things about siccing the FCC on Kimmel the first time around for that false victory of his week long suspension or whatever it was is that when he came back Kimmel he was now a hero, a resistance hero of a different order. So self policing is not the direction that he is heading in or would be heading in after that. They didn't get my scalp and we're gonna make sure that they don't. And we all have to be as brazen and in their face as possible so every there's no any pushback on him or other figures like him is an instigation as far as they're concerned, it means they need to keep going and do more.

[A]

I mean, one thing, I think the

[C]

key is the, I mean, the FCC to me is the key, but the fact that Brendan Carr said what he said last time to me colors everything. It's very hard to look at this, you know, as if it's in a vacuum. And I think the reason people are upset is because, you know, Brendan Carr was talking like, you know, a mafia head last time, where he was like, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.

[A]

And it's like whoever the fcc, chairman

[C]

of FCC and was like, but he said explicitly, he said, we can do this the easy way, we do this the hard way. Either they will crack down on Kimmel and get him under control, or we will, is essentially what he said, or the FCC will have more work to do or something. You know, was what he said. It was, it was very plain. So now I think that it's, it's that looms over everything. And any complaint, you know, the FCC has received a complaint from one of the, you know, right wing broadcasters groups over Jimmy Kimmel. So they, somebody has initiated the, you know, the, the request for an investigation process. And so I think that, you know, it's, it's highly likely that the fcc, you know, will make another statement, will get involved somehow, whatever. I think people see the wheels moving. And so it's hard to, you know, sort of disconnect the President's rhetoric from that. I think had that not happened with Kimmel last time, we, the conversation would be different. And so I think that, you know, it's basically like people aren't going to give the FCC the benefit of the doubt. And, you know, I, they, I think they have to earn the benefit of the doubt. But I will say also that Jimmy Kimmel is doing the same thing that Trump is doing. Jimmy Kimmel made a joke that was intended to get under the president and First Lady's skin and have them get into a public spat with Jimmy Kimmel. And so he got it. I mean, like, I just, I find all this, like, incredibly performative and I find, you know, what Kimmel does to be just so obviously bad faith that, you know, it's like, I don't, I agree the FCC should stay out of it. And in fact, I, I'm sympathetic to the people who are criticizing the President here precisely because last time the FCC actually got involved, you know, and all the stuff we've had with Kibble and Colbert and Whatever. But at the same time, what happened was, you know, we. We had something happen with Stephen Colbert where the President comes out, he's terrible, he should do something, whatever. He gets suspended, and then the whole world rallies around Stephen Colbert as some sort of hero of the Republican.

[A]

He wasn't suspended. He wasn't suspended or he was.

[C]

There were. Well, he was all.

[A]

Bear was fired. The show was. The show was canceled.

[C]

Right.

[A]

But he wasn't fired the show. He was informed that come actually next month that the contract to pick up the show for its next season was not going to be renewed. And then it turned out he was.

[C]

He was off when that announcement was made. He was off that night. And so there were concerns that it was beginning now rather than at the end of the contract. But anyway, people turned it into a whole, you know, thing. The best way to put yourself front and center and build your brand as a media person is to get Trump to go after you. And they know it. And they watch what happened, and they saw the rallying and they saw the, you know, viewership get a slight bump afterwards, and all this stuff. And when we talk about Trump doing a pro wrestling thing, you know, where it's, it's, you know, it's like, not exactly scripted, but everybody knows their role. They're doing the same thing. Jimmy Kimmel isn't sitting at home minding his own business and hoping that mean Donald Trump doesn't tweet about him or something like that. He's poking the bear because it's good for him and his career and the whole. And his whole milieu, his whole set to poke the bear. And Trump knows Trump is not going to actually come out and say, and put Jimmy Kimmel in jail and charge him with treason. But he may say crazy things like that and not the two of them are going to go back and forth with a performance. And so I just, I don't have a lot of patience for the complaints from Kimmel's side of Trump's reaction because he was trying to get that reaction. I do think we have to watch the FCC very carefully, though, and make sure this doesn't become a Will someone rid me of, you know, this.

[A]

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[D]

He was mocking the but he was mocking the fact that breaking somewhat from tradition, this White House correspondent center did not hire a comedian to sort of gently roast the president as has happened in the past. They hired a mesmerized so I think the whole skit was based on this Idea of mocking the fact that this is a president who will not sit there and be mocked to his face, which is also hilarious. Cuz there have been roasts of Donald Trump. I mean, he can take it. But I think that was the Kimmel, the pretext for the sketch.

[A]

Right? So getting back to the what happened to me thing, not that I want to be completely solipsistic, but I was just struck by the fact that my response to this was the President is violating the First Amendment by calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be fired. And a. That's not true. Because this is not a. The First Amendment, by the way, protects freedom of speech. Does not mean that the president. But it protects it against Congress, actually. Which is, which is an important distinction. Not that the president, you know, can violate, can break the law or anything like that. But, but, but secondly, that we're having this conversation in part, in order not to have the conversation that we need to be having, the famous difficult conversation about what actually happened on Saturday night, what the motivations were, what the origins of Cole Allen's decision to do this were, and what it says about the larger country and our politics. Instead, liberals got a passion because they could turn this on Trump and Jimmy Kimmel. And we in fact, have just spent almost 30 minutes talking about Jimmy Kimmel and not talking about Cole Allen. So once again, Cole Allen wins. Cole Allen won on Sunday night when Norah o' Donnell decided to confront Trump with the sentences in his letter, Cole Allen's letter, about what a monster Trump was, and asked, you know, she asked him to respond to that again, less than 24 hours before the, after the assassination attempt. And he won again. He's won again now because we're not talking about him, we're talking about the press. The press is talking about the press is talking about the press. And maybe we could talk about him a little bit because Andrew Kaczynski of CNN discovered, I think he says 4700 tweets, obviously under different names or whatever, and among them was the fact that he seems to believe that the Butler assassination attempt was staged. Going and trying to peel through the layers of irony that are represented by the idea that the Butler attack was staged and that therefore he was going to be the real assassin, whereas crooks, the assassin and butler was some kind of fake plant assassin who agreed to be killed in order to stage this event. I don't even know where to go from here. I don't understand the nature of how this story is developing. We have bits and pieces of the Story of Cole Allen, his apparently very weird kid at weird, but nice and quiet at Caltech, head of the Christian Fellowship, somebody who went to church every week, which helps explain why he was so intent in his letter on focusing on why a Christian, why it was sort of acceptable for a Christian to do this, then ending up kind of falling down the academic ladder because he ended up getting his graduate degree at a much lesser school in computer science, at a much lesser school than Caltech, being an SAT tutor, whatever. But maybe this is the nature of the media now, that the zone flooding that would have happened 10 years ago and you would have had 300 reporters desperately searching for every scrap they could possibly get. And now we don't even have 300 reporters in the United States. We have 5,000 pundits and 20,000 substackers. But I don't think we have a lot of reporters on the ground.

[E]

No, I don't think it's that. I think it's that. But when reporters who are 98% on the left know, because he also found that in these tweets, they're deleted. So they're somewhat hard to look through, having done it a bit of it myself, when, when reporters on the left who are Democrats know that they're going to show that he hated Trump and other, you know, some of the tweets show that he compared Trump to a Nazi and so on, they're less incentivized to put in the work, shall we say?

[A]

Okay, so that's one way of.

[E]

But if they were right wing tweets, they'd be flooding the Zone. Okay, okay. That we'd know a lot.

[A]

So this is one of Andrew Kaczynski, who is a. Who is a very brilliant reporter, one of the sort of inventors in some ways of digital mining, digital data mining. And so he has done his due diligence here. And the work that he almost, you know, sort of large helped innovate in the early 2010s, so we do now have a base from which to operate based on what he has unearthed. And we do have some people going out and talking to people at Caltech who are like, I'm shocked. He was so quiet, you know, like every. Same thing that everybody says about every mass murderer. You know, he was so quiet. He kept to himself, but he seemed nice or whatever. Still, again, there was more energy in the elite circles of opinion around Trump getting angry at Jimmy Kimmel than there was on, oh, my God. This is the third assassination attempt on the president in less than two Years. Remember, the reason I say third is we had crooks in Butler, and then we had the guy who was in the tree at the golf course. Again, he and Alan were never in close enough proximity to the president to take the shot that would have injured him. But had other things happened, then maybe they would have been, and then they would have taken the shot and done it. So that's three and two years. We're back in a new era. And the urgency that this suggests, and by the way, even prophylactically or in terms of keeping things cleansed properly, as I said yesterday, this does not just involve the president. If we're moving into an assassination era, all kinds of other people are at risk. Anybody who runs for president in 2028 is at risk. How do you run for president before you get to the big office? Right. You're going to the Iowa State Fair. You're going to the Minnesota State Fair. You're walking around eating disgusting fried Twinkies and things like that. People gonna do that. Are they gonna be retail politicking in Iowa and New Hampshire and places like that to try to build up audience, or is it gonna be too dangerous for them to do that now?

[D]

Well, that's one of the. That's the effect. I mean, we had this debate after 9 11. We're not gonna let the terrorists win. But there is a kind of terroristic element to this idea that an average, quiet guy from Caltech could be transformed into a lone assassin. And I think the. The fact that he thought the Butler assassination attempt was staged, I think the reason reporters don't want to dive too deeply into that question is that that has also become a kind of mainstream. Ha ha. Just kidding. I've heard that from perfectly educated people. Yeah. I mean, they're like, why? Why does his ear look fine now, having evidently never heard of Reconstruct. But this. This idea that he. And I think they were also astonished by how courageous he was in that moment and stood back up in the fight, fight, fight. And that. That whole moment, for a lot of Americans who really, really pathologically dislike Trump and to take it, we have people on either side who, if you criticize Trump, you must be deranged. If you love Trump, you must be deranged. And those polarizing forces will instantly go to the conspiracy theory. And so the fact that this guy is. Had that view, but also shared some policy views that I think are also in the liberal mainstream, it makes him very difficult to categorize. And we talked about this the other day, but I find it deeply disturbing and fascinating to try to pick at several of those threads. The Christianity, the obvious intelligence, the very, seemingly very supportive family structure he came from. He does not check any of the boxes for how we usually look out for these sorts of assassins. And that should scare us, that should worry us, how he became more radicalized or paranoid or intent in this way. We should care about that. And I don't think the sweeping categories we've used in the past are going to be helpful here. And that's where I think the reporters are falling down on the job if they're not doing those sorts of deep dives.

[B]

I think that we've yet to reckon with just how many mostly young Americans are walking around with their heads packed with malicious nonsense that they take for reality. And I think the number is so large that we keep coming up against these cases, because when there are that many deluded people in a society, some of them are going to act. And it is this terrible confluence of breakdown of trust, the accessibility of Internet garbage, social isolation, hatred of Trump, political polarization. And I just don't know where it goes. I mean, I'm genuinely despondent about this.

[D]

There was a study that just came out recently that speaks to this, and I think it also might speak to this challenge, which, Abe, I think you're absolutely correct. We in general, as people, speak to other people much, much less these days than we used to. In face to face conversation, there's a couple social scientists who are now quantifying that and what that means for being able to check. If you spend all day in your own head and online and you start to believe some of this stuff, there's a really wonderful grounding touch grass moment. If someone's like, really? That sounds kind of crazy. And if it's someone who knows you and loves you and cares about you, maybe you'll listen to that, or maybe it'll just get you to pause and rethink the direction you're headed. We do that less and less, and that obviously is part of the larger social isolation question. But I think for someone like this guy, maybe that was part of the problem. He just didn't have those conversations on a regular basis. And too many Americans are in that same position.

[A]

I think I just finished reading the memoir of Lena Dunham, the creator of the paradigmatic show Girls on Amazon.

[D]

Does this mean the rest of us don't have to read it? Because you took that.

[A]

You don't. You don't. So it's called Fame Sick. And it's a very, very interesting book. It's interesting in itself and in spite of itself, or it's interesting for what she knows she is saying. And it's also interesting for what she does not know she is revealing, let's say, very much like Girls itself, which was very brilliant and very repulsive and sometimes you couldn't sort through which was which. But I bring this up only to say that the book which tells the story of her unbelievably rapid rise to prominence and celebrity and creative fulfillment, is a story of how her life completely crashed and fell apart, partially due to chronic illness and partially due to the stress that made her chronic illness worse. And her. And the fact that she grew up as this creature of the world in which the Internet was building, in which what she knew how to do was to overshare about herself and about her friends and knew nothing about how to guard herself from the hostility, the meanness of the Internet, the nastiness and all of that, because this was the amniotic fluid in which she had been born and it was the ocean in which she swam. And what struck me as most interesting about this was that in the course of this very long, as I say often brilliant book, the idea that life should be about higher things than career, success, fame, money, and that the only thing that sort of restrains you morally or personally, is that you should be nice or somehow that you should be nice, people should be nice to you and you should be nice to them, or you should listen to them when they have problems and they should listen to you when you have problems. The idea that, like, the world is a very difficult and complicated and tragic place and you need to involve yourself in it, particularly if you're a person of high standing with a lot of influence, that there are deeper and more enduring things like face. And for her, she had a very close family, but this was clearly a very dysfunctional family and not much outside the immediate family that she was in. And this world of simultaneously being completely exposed to everything and yet entirely interior and solipsistic is very striking. And you can see a through line in a weird way between Lena Dunham and the kind of mindset that ends up afflicting Cole Allen. That is, if you have a person who is socially awkward, complicated, inept, whatever, and he can descend into the world of the net and social media and stuff like that and find a way to express himself, be part of other things and all of that without actually, like Christine says, talking to other people, having the problem of not being able to say to another person, you know, the kinds of things that you can say on the Internet anonymously or to other people because you're not speaking to them face to face. The ability to depersonalize and to sort of go down this road into utter. I don't know what you would call it, like utter psychopathic depravity while not even knowing that that's happening to you because you haven't been basically informed of proper morality. Now he's a Christian, so that he's in a different frame here, I would say. But I was very struck by this fact that when we think about Internet culture, one of the things that is so jarring to us is that of all public cultures that have ever sort of governed societies, it doesn't even seem to have an overall moral architecture except self expression. There's no idea that people are on Twitter to help the world be a better place. Just. Just as a. Just as a matter of course. Like even if that's like pompous, a pompous thing to say or like they're

[C]

definitely not on Blueski to make the world better.

[A]

Right, right. I'm just.

[D]

Well, the underlying architecture of these platforms does have a moral goal and that's to capture your attention and keep it for as long as possible.

[A]

That's an am.

[D]

Amoral frame. It's just we want it, we don't care how we get it. This is what we want. And that has been obviously wildly effective.

[A]

Yeah, go ahead.

[B]

A couple of points. One is just about the Internet culture, its complete lack of any of rubbing up against a moral framework. There's something that I'm sure every one of us has experienced this, like on Twitter, where you'll post something about some anti Semitic incident or anti Semitic statement or something, you know, and a commenter will prove you right in saying you're lying or something like, I mean very bluntly, as in, yeah, right, Jewish, you know, and you're like, so you're left with this. Well, what do I do with it? Well, we can't do anything with this. We're at the bottom here. That's the feeling that you get from living on the. If you live in that constantly. The other thing, John, about your interesting comparison to Lena Dunham and the attempted assassin. I don't think it's that, but it's as fanciful as others might. Artists and assassins create fantasy worlds. Artists get to actually breathe life into theirs, get it out of their system on the page, on the screen, whatever it may be. Loners who become assassins they don't. They. Their fantasy worlds are left to fester and they have to breathe life into it in a different way.

[A]

Right. I want to make clear that I draw no moral. No, no, no. I know between Lena Dunham and Cola, it's just important to say because I'm trying not to be facile about this. It's just that there was something. And of course it's a little more. I was being a little caricaturish because while I'm saying that there's no moral frame to social media, of course, performative outrage is all expressed in moral terms like that's disgusting or how dare you say that you must apologize. The famous case of. What was her name? Melissa Sacco, the woman who made the drunken joke about going South Africa, Justine

[D]

Sako, before she got on the long haul flight.

[A]

She gets on a 16 hour flight and she gets off the plane, having made this joke, a racially tinged joke, gets off the plane in South Africa and her life has been destroyed in the same way.

[D]

And so you've been publicly shamed. Entire book about people like this. What happened to them?

[A]

Yeah, so outrage is the lingua franca of performative outrage, as we often say. But that's the thing. If outrage is performative, it isn't really outrageous. If it's performative, then you're stepping away from the moral frame into a kind of play in which you're, or as Abe would say, sort of like a fantasy world in which you're expressing your rage is the way that you show the truth about something. But if the platform, but the platform

[D]

allows extremes of self expression to be sort of manufactured into a version of self awareness, the people who are, who are getting a lot of this positive feedback from the attention they receive from anonymous strangers, they then never have to do that. Self reflection, the self awareness, the practice of moral formation that happens in the real world never has to happen on these platforms and yet they get a lot of real world attention. And I think that does distort the ability of the individuals, especially the ones who are, you know, who become famous or infamous, to discern the difference between those two things.

[A]

You guys know that.

[C]

And you, you, you should. We widen the lens because I'm really glad Christine brought up that book. So you've been publicly shamed because it makes an important point which is the effect on the shamers. Right. What happens to a cult, the wider point is what happens to a culture of public shaming. And one of the reasons the book is so interesting is, I mean I find this chapter the most interesting because, you know, he's our friend. But Michael Moynihan is. Became the center of one of the chapters because he had revealed some of Joan o' Learr's fictionalizations of things that Bob Dylan had said. But Michael is a Dylanographer and he read and Lara wrote about Dylan and Michael said, I don't remember any record of that. And if you know Dylan, Dylanologists, the idea that they could say, I don't remember Dylan saying that. As you remember, the guy is in his 80s and has been saying this stuff for decades. And whatever Dylanologists have been like through the archives, you know, for somebody to have the confidence to say, I don't remember Bob Dylan saying that. So he probably didn't say it is like a certain. And so he. And, and so it made an impact on him and he looked into it and he found more stuff and whatever the whole thing, Jonah Lehrer's thing, you know, his, his. I wrote a piece at the New Yorker, whatever, it unraveled, okay. Joan Oleiro was like this up and coming wunderkind in a way, you know, on his rise to the kind of, you know, left of center New Yorker writer superstardom. And Michael brought it all crashing down. The book is the Interview. The book contains a lot of interviews of Michael because he describes how difficult it was the process of knowing, you know, what he does is he reaches out to Jonah and he says, I don't see a source for this. You know, and then I found this. And it kind of looks like you're in, you're doing shenanigans here. And I'm a journalist, you know, I'm gonna like, tell me what's going on here, but I'm looking into this. And so there's a months long process wherein it, it dawns on Michael that he is. Even though Jonah maybe deserves it or, or what he's saying is true, he's grappling with this guy has a wife and a kid and he's going to lose his job and he's gonna, you know, his name's gonna be ruined. And the self doubt of taking that step, right, to ruin someone. So the larger, the larger. I mean, the book describes, you know, Michael like he became, he started chain smoking. Like it was real pressure, it was real pressure on him, on his soul. And the drawn out process of the investigation was very hard on him. And so, you know, the lesson that I took away from that was what happens when the Internet is just millions of people doing this, right? What is what does it say about a society when it's so easy for people to do this? Most people don't talk about, you know, going through their own self questioning the way Michael Moynihan did. Most of this stuff plays out on the Internet within seconds. Somebody says something, somebody jumps on them, then this happens, whatever. But everybody's always looking for something to get somebody else on. And that, I think, is the other part of this, is that there really is a kind of stress on a society that is consumed by this cycle almost no matter where in the. If you're a bystander, even you're worried that it's going to be you next, someone's going to dig up something on you or, or whatever, or you're going to, you know, it's going to be somebody. You know, the stress of this online life and the shaming culture is itself something that is kind of a self reinforcing downward spiral. And it's not, it's not good, it's not healthy. And I think that's the other part of this.

[D]

Well, and now that most people get their news from social media, it means our politics plays out on that platform more often than not.

[A]

Yeah. You guys know about the condition, the disease, toxoplasmosis, right? So toxoplasmosis is a. Is an infection caused by. By a parasite. Sometimes it comes from eating.

[D]

If you've ever been a pregnant woman, you know it, that's for sure, because you're warned about it endlessly. But if you don't have cats, you're

[A]

like, okay, yeah, so cats. So there are two. You could get it from. You can get it from undercooked meat, you can get it from being around cat feces, basically. And one of the weird symptoms of toxoplasmosis is irrational rage, often in conjunction with something else. I mean, there are other actual physical symptoms of disease. And as I say, as Christine says, it's particularly dangerous for pregnant women. But toxoplasmosis has this weird effect of causing people to get irritable and outraged and angry. And they don't know why, because they're often breathing in. They have no symptoms of anything. They've been breathing. They live near a litter box or something like that, or the litter box hasn't been cleaned and they breathe in the parasite from the litter box. And then they, you know, like they throw a chair across the room when they get frustrated or they, they trash a room or something like that. There is some quality of toxoplasmosis to Social media in which. And you can feel it happening in yourself. So I have a Twitter problem, as most people know. I. There's something. I spent four and a half weeks.

[E]

Hi, John.

[D]

It's okay.

[A]

Anyway, but when you're on Twitter and you read a tweet that is deeply offensive to you, there was one this morning for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, reporting on its incredibly softball interview that this agency, which is a news agency that supplies Jewish newspapers with material on Jewish content for Jewish newspapers. That's why it exists. So they did an interview with Hasan Piker. That is a softball interview with Hasan Piker. And as I see this, and I read the tweet, and then I look at the interview, I am filled with rage. I'm filled with rage, and I tweet something, and then I rewrite the tweet. I delete it. I rewrite it. I do something else. I know the people who run jta. I know them personally. First tweet I wrote, went at them personally. I took their names out, whatever. And then there's something up that says, you know, I hope you're proud of, you know, what you did here, whatever. But I felt different. I felt this rage bubbling inside me from this. And I don't know that I would have felt it had I come across it in another context or if somebody had emailed me and said, did you see this thing in the jta? And sent me the link? And then I would have read it, and I would have been. I would have thought, this is disgusting. But it didn't have that. Like, I'm so angry. I need to respond right now, right this second, right now.

[D]

It's no barrier to entry, to respond. It is designed to have no barrier to entry and to feed exactly on those most immediate and powerful emotions.

[C]

That's how it's a riptide. Before you know it, you're standing 10ft, you know, downshore from where you were standing before, right?

[A]

And then to get to Abe's point about how assassins build fantasy worlds, it's not just that they build a fantasy world in which they create this architecture that leads, that precedes. Right. That's the manifesto or whatever that precedes the action. It's this question of whether the toxoplasmodic effect, if that's the adjective, I don't know, but that that effect is. Now you really do. It's sort of like Dick Cheney's 1% rule. You really only need one person to cross the barrier from that rage that I'm talking About to. Maybe I can get a gun. I have an idea. Maybe I can rent a room at the Washington Hilton. Maybe I can take a train across country so that no one will see that I have a gun and knives in my bag because I'm not gonna go through a magnetometer. Maybe I can scope out the place to see where the points of entry are to the ballroom. Maybe I can do this, maybe I can do that. Then it turned out one person did it. And as it happened, because of the security system, he was unable to successfully achieve his aim. But he didn't come that, I mean, came closer than 95% of people who want to assassinate a president come. And it only takes one. And this is a huge problem because the material affects hundreds of millions of people. So you can't say Twitter did this or social media did this. And therefore social media must be shut down somehow because most people, the overwhelming majority of people who use social media aren't going to go out and try to assassinate the President, even if they hate Trump. But we have this, that's another barrier to entry problem. There's no barrier to entry to this. And then somehow the barrier to entry from crossing from your fantasy life into trying to make your fantasy life actual in a way that will change human history is now lower than it's ever been. It's just, you know, on the one hand, it's harder because the Secret Service is much more, it's much harder to try to assassinate a president now than it was in 1963 even, right? Or in 1881 or, you know, when McKinley was killed in 1900 or however. But it's, it's easier, it's much harder now. All of Washington, I would still like

[D]

to see them make it even more difficult. I mean, I think post Butler and certainly post Washington Hilton, that conversation, we haven't had that one on this podcast yet. But what the Secret Service is doing and should be doing is.

[A]

But look, I lived in Washington in the 1980s and, you know, you used to be able to walk up to the fence of the White House and look through, you know, Pennsylvania Avenue wasn't shut down, the roads around the White House weren't shut down. You know, half the city didn't shut down whenever, you know, somebody burped or something like that. Like, streets weren't rerouted. Everything like the entire city was restructured pretty much after 9, 11 to make it a, you know, sort of like a security heavy city. And I used to live in a world in which that was not the case. In Washington, where you could literally drive past the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue if you're going from 17th street to 15th Street. It was an open. It was an open road, just like the Capitol was.

[D]

Actually. I lived on Capitol Hill pre 9 11, and I used to jog the stairs up and down the Capitol Building, which, you know, you don't get anywhere near without. I mean, it. It 911 absolutely transformed with the barrier. I mean, understandably so. And there's no going back, but a huge, huge difference. However, the personal security protocols for the presidency don't seem to have had that a dramatic transformation in terms of how he's, you know, and I will. I want to give Trump huge credit for something he did. Not only the calm ability to have a briefing right after the attempt on Saturday night, but to say, I'm. They're not gonna stop me from doing it. It's a version of what George W. Bush said after 9 11. It's like, they don't get to win. They don't get to determine that I can't be out in public and going to these events and doing stuff. And that's really important. And that's actually why the question of how the Secret Service learns to protect the president going forward will be that absolutely pressing. I have a lot of criticism of how the Secret Service functioned, particularly under Biden and the transition to Trump's second term. And I think that's where Congress really does have to start its oversight and make sure it's getting the proper funding and training for those agents.

[B]

Yeah, I want to give Trump credit for something else in the wake of this, which was he actually spoke very uncharacteristic. Well, somewhat uncharacteristically about unity and a sense of love in the room when the violence broke out. And it's part of what made the Norah o' Donnell interview so unfortunate, because it was like, oh, it's over. I mean, you know, because he's talking about how people from across the aisle hugged him and, you know, and there was a sense in there of being one and all the rest of it, and he wants to do it again, but. And then she makes him defend himself against the attempted assassin's accusations.

[A]

It's like, oh, yeah. And we did not get to the big news of the day, which is that apparently the UA United Arab Emirates is leaving almost immediately, is going to leave opec, the oil cartel that practically drove the west into penury and the. The 1970s. This is a gigantic geopolitical event, potentially, because it would mean if you have oil producing nations and one of the four major oil producing nations leaves the cartel, the cartel effectively stops being a cartel. And this is a huge 50 year like it's an epic changing moment. And another moment at which we're going to have to start calculating what it means to say that the Iran war isn't going well if it just broke up opec, not that that was an aim of the Iran war, but if it's an offshoot of the Iran war, people are going to have to revisit why they think it was unnecessary and bad. They won't, but they should, but they won't.

[C]

Well, you've made the other side gets a vote point a lot right recently on this. And so there's, you know, there's, there are other discussions about how to bypass, you know, the Strait of Hormuz also. In the future, though, the world is going to adapt. It's, it's like, you know, the world adapts. There's an, there's an evolutionary process. There's no way that after this, everything about producing and shipping is going to stay the same. There's no way. It's just a matter of what specifically will change. This seems like the first major domino to fall. But you can expect the Turks are talking about they want a railway system to go through Europe because they're right there, and bypass the Strait. There will be other dominoes to fall because the world doesn't just sit.

[A]

But look, the central point here is that the UAE appears to be acting in a way to ensure that the world, to the extent that it can, particularly with Iran's oil supply being choked off, as it has been by our blockading that part of the Strait of Hormuz, that the war that they wish to continue because they wish there to be regime change in Iran, they are going to take actual steps to ensure that there isn't a world economic crisis that convinces Donald Trump that he should back off. And the war, they are doing what they can do to facilitate the continuation of the effort to destroy the Iranian regime and Iran's ability to harass its neighbors and eliminate Israel and do everything that it's doing. And that is a very, as I say, we're only at the very beginning of this event with opec. But it's a very significant, very, very, very, very significant thing that just happened, happened. And we're going to have to digest it and we'll also see what the practical consequences are. A lot of what you're talking about, Seth, is takes years. I mean, UAE flooding the market with oil so that there isn't a world oil shock as a result of the war going on longer than we thought. That's an actual thing that can happen Thursday. That will have an effect on Thursday.

[C]

It was just also have a permanent effect because they had to leave OPEC in order to take that step.

[A]

Exactly. Okay, well, we will be back tomorrow. For Abe, Christine, Eliana and Seth, I'm John Pothoric. Keep the camera burning.

[D]

Sa.