Cornell and the Age of Impunity

I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And this week, we are going to talk about the midterms, which, praise Jesus, are now just a month out. But first, I feel like we need to discuss the Cornell rape investigation, which captured national attention this week after a former student filed a lawsuit against the university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The woman, who is identified as Jane Doe in the filings, says that frat members drugged and raped her in October of 2024. According to the legal filings, after the initial investigation, the university expelled only two of the accused students and the local district attorney declined to prosecute. So, for all this information, I am joined by my brilliant colleagues, columnists, Jamel Bowie and David French. Guys, good to see you, as always. Good to see you all as well. Hi, Michelle. Before we get into the details of this horrible case and the legal issues that are at play, I was thinking about why this story struck such a nerve. I mean, obviously, the allegations are terrible, just horrific. And it took place at an elite university. It's an elite institution, one that parents are always fighting to get their kids into. But I'm wondering if maybe there's also something to the fact that we are now almost a decade past the Me Too viral movement. And some days it feels as though vanishingly little progress was made. So, Jamel, what struck you about this case and kind of how it fits into our cultural moment? Well, I think that you can't separate the interest and outrage with regards to this case from the fact that at the highest reaches of government, it appears that many key figures are, at the very least, people who have been accused of sexual assault, accused of mistreating women. And at least one case, namely the president of the United States, has been found at least civilly liable for sexual assault. There not even appears, it is simply the case that this administration is indifferent to concerns around sexual violence against women, that the movement around it glorifies a kind of aggressive and predatory and domineering masculinity. You know, last year, an administration figure whose name I cannot recall intervened to help Andrew Tate and his brother out. Andrew Tate being the, quote, manosphere influencer, who is currently, you know, being prosecuted, charged with basically pimping out women. I mean, a really awful and terrible and, you know, degenerate human being, if I'm going to really say how I feel about it. And that's, that's the, like, that's the, not just the cultural context, but the political context in which all this is happening. Simply. And, you know, a powerful political movement, which doesn't just seem to, you know, hold the notion that there's pervasive sexual violence and contempt. But in some cases, like, celebrates the people who, you know, abuse women for entertainment and profit. And so then when you have an example like this, have a case like this, where it really does appear, you know, at this elite university, these young men. Who are, you know, who may go on into the elite spaces and who may have escaped any kind of real accountability for engaging in sexual violence. You know, people are, many people are angry and upset and do feel as if there hasn't been any meaningful progress since the Me Too movement. And I don't blame them for feeling that way. Because it feels to me as well that it doesn't. It doesn't really seem like there's been much meaningful progress since Me Too. David. I agree with that. And I think I might even, I may even be more bleak than Jamel. If that's possible. Thank you. Because I actually think it's like, it's not that there's been no progress since Me Too. I think there's been regress since Me Too. And I think the arc of events is kind of like this. That if you go back to when, you know, Jodi and Megan are remarkable newsroom colleagues. Broke the Harvey Weinstein story and really launched this Me Too wave. And we began to see story after story that was genuinely appalling. And especially in the media world, just genuinely appalling. And many of these stories were very well documented with multiple people coming forward with dates, times, details. And you also had some stories that were too much, that it was too far. There was an excess where people went too far. And the height of the Me Too movement. So where you went from a age of accountability, where sometimes accountability went too far. To using the excesses of the age of accountability to justify what we're in now, which is an age of impunity. And it's that age of impunity that, you know, when Jamel talks about Trump and the civil judgment. What's so notable about the way in which the entire sort of right side. Of the spectrum ignored that civil judgment is that for years the right had constantly said we hate sexual assault. We hate sexual abuse, but we also really love due process. And what what needs to happen is more due process on campus. And and I agreed with that. We cannot skip due process to leap to liability. Well, Trump got due process. He got a jury trial. He got appeals. He got all of the process that could potentially. Conceivably be due. And he was still found liable. And it didn't matter. It didn't matter. And so, you know, you now begin to see this world in which people glory and their transgression. And I want to just say by condemning what these guys did, which I think is reprehensible the way they behaved. Yeah, that's not reaching a legal conclusion about the criminality. That's we'll get into that. But I think it's really important that. That we at least be able to say at the very least that this is not how a human being should have been treated under any circumstances. And that to say that loudly and clearly before we get into the legal situation, which Michelle and Jamel is complicated and also betrays, I think, some fundamental problems, the way we approach the issue generally. That does not surprise me. The thing that I found unusual about this and. You know. I can remember, you know, 100 years ago when I was in college, these types of situations would arise, you know, way too much drinking, way too many hormones, way too much entitlement among certain corners of the university community. But what is seemed to be new with this is the part about how in the middle of the alleged assault, these guys sent out. Like a group message to other people to come get some free sex from this poor woman. And and this to me seems to be, you know, like social social media on steroids where it extends the circle of culpability and raises questions about kind of responsibility that, you know, even if they're not legal questions, there are like certainly moral questions. And it just makes this whole thing that much more horrific and complicated. But but I guess we should go back and look at like how like one of the big questions here is how the university responded and how the fraternity responded. So, David, why don't you walk us through some of the specifics about how it was originally handled? Well, so and we're still learning a lot. And our newsroom folks did a really excellent job on this. Whenever something like this occurs. There's sort of multiple processes that can unfold simultaneously. So you have really, for lack of a better term, three legal systems that that are potentially involved. One is the criminal justice system. This is the district attorney who investigates. Another one is the civil litigation system. This is where when she ultimately filed a lawsuit seeking damages and that's the civil justice system is liability in its preponderance of the evidence. And then you have a university system that is a Title nine system involving sex discrimination investigations and sex abuse is a form of sex discrimination. And that is much more informal and also has that lower standard of proof, usually proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So you had unfolding pretty soon after the alleged assault, you had unfolding a criminal investigation and a university Title nine investigation. And these university investigations. And these university investigations tend to happen behind closed doors, the participants are protected by privacy laws, for example. They resulted in a degree of punishment for the young men involved. The district attorney took a look at the case and at least as of the initial investigation declined to prosecute. Now, a number of people are questioning that, questioning that decision and questioning whether the district attorney's investigation was comprehensive enough, whether he dotted all the I's, crossed all the T's. It did not appear, for example, that the district attorney had the Snapchat messages, had the free access message, which really doesn't exactly communicate a whole lot of consent to say, you know, essentially free, you know what. So the DA has since reopened the investigation. And also the individual has, the way this hit the media is the young woman filed a lawsuit, so civil justice. So all three of the systems have been now activated to some extent. And so there is no such thing here, so far as we're able to know or see, as anything that looks like a comprehensive, adjudicated outcome that creates at least a body, that provides us with a body of facts that we can sort of sit and clearly analyze. We're right now in this process of basically learning something new almost every day. So combining Shamel's observation with kind of your, your legal observations here, do you think on any level Cornell is being or has been extra cautious about this, in part because the Trump administration has been hammering schools on anything that, you know, smells of airing on the side of, you know, that would be seen as unfair to men or, you know, wokeness or this sort of thing? Or do you think that this is just, what happens in these cases period? It's really tough to say. These cases are extremely difficult, especially for universities to adjudicate. I mean, we've been going through years and years and years of litigation over Title IX. We are in a period, we've kind of, the pendulum has sort of swung back and forth. If you go back to the Obama years, there was a dear colleague letter sent out to universities that unfortunately paid short shrift to due process in some ways. And there were, a lot of campus tribunals and campus disciplinary proceedings against accused students without very much due process at all, like no ability to cross-examine a witness, often not really able to see the evidence against them. And there were tons of lawsuits filed and many, many of them came out against the universities. So now the pendulum has come around to, in a different direction. We need lots of due process here, which I think is completely fair and correct to see there has to be due process. There has to be due process in a government mandated disciplinary proceeding. So, Jamel, here's a kind of non-legal question, but from what you've read and what you've looked at, like, how do you find the balance between not railroading the accused men, but also making sure you're not putting undue burdens on the woman who's the victim, like she's, where do you go with this? I suppose my starting premise here, where I begin, is that we don't live in a society where sexual violence is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, investigated to the fullest extent, taken seriously, right, to the fullest extent. We don't live in that society. We just don't. And you know, the evidence suggests that the rate of sexual violence against women, and, you know, the evidence suggests that the rate of sexual violence against women, and, you know, the evidence suggests that the rate of sexual violence against women, and, you know, the evidence suggests that the rate of sexual violence against women, and, you know, the evidence suggests that the rate of sexual violence against women, and, you know, the evidence suggests women is considerably, you know, it's more pervasive than what is charged and prosecuted. The fact that these young men engage in this behavior, talked about it the way they did, treated it as some big fun game is, to my mind, like evidence enough. Like these aren't, the thing I'm trying to say, these aren't exceptional young men, right? In a lot of ways, just ordinary young men. And the fact that this was not, didn't seem to be remarkable to these ordinary young men is, I think, evidence of the actual state of American culture as it relates to, you know, the treatment and dignity of women and as it relates to how serious we take sexual assault and sexual violence. And so for, I guess, from my view, my starting point would be, I would want the. I would want the criminal legal system and I would want universities to take this extremely seriously, to really dedicate themselves to serious investigations. My sense of reading, you know, reading the various accounts of how this has unfolded is that there was a real reluctance on part of the various authorities to really want to press further. And that seems to be generally the case when it comes to these incidents. A real unwillingness to want to press further. Further investigate, further take, you know, serious action in response. And so that's, I mean, for me, it's like, it's that. It's really treating this like the incredibly serious problem that it is. You know, I was in college 20 years ago and I was involved somewhat in, you know, sexual assault education for other men. And we. We were having this conversation then about the importance of respecting consent, of understanding that consent is a process, not just a binary thing. That women face, especially in the context of, say, fraternities and alcohol and drinking drugs, there are real and serious safety concerns. And that it's the responsibility of men in these situations to. Police each other. Police each other. Keep people safe. I mean, these were the conversations we were having 20 years ago. And these were the conversations that were happening 10 years ago. And they're happening now. I want to jump. Let me grab that piece. Because I think one of the people named in this suit is the then president of the fraternity, named because he didn't appropriately oversee his members. Now. That's. That sounds great. But that, from my experience of college fraternity parties, is a really unrealistic idea. It's a tough case to make. I mean, when you're talking about facts on the ground, I'm wondering if this is part of what throws institutions like Cornell into a swivet, is just like, they don't really want people looking into how much partying goes on in these schools. It's like so much. It's like so much insanity that I have a hard time wondering how you expect anybody to police other members in that situation. You know, there's a couple of things I want to. Two huge problems I want to emphasize, cultural and legal. So here's the cultural problem. And I think we have confused the minimum legal standard, which is consent, for the moral standard. And I do not agree that the moral standard. For sexual activity should be consent. I think it should be care. Now, I'm not going to ask that people agree with my conservative evangelical Christian sexual ethics that sex is for marriage between man and a woman. Look, I know lots of people disagree with that. Obviously. But at the minimum, at the minimum, is this the kind of thing, if these young men actually cared for her, rather than just asked if she agreed with it in the moment, or if they actually cared for her, is this how they would. And that's the problem I have with a lot of these arguments culturally, is we almost treat it like, well, you know, everybody was consenting, and then that makes it morally okay. I want everyone to be caring. And if you're caring, you're going to be preventing an awful lot of this stuff that where years later people, and even days later or hours later, people look back at what they did when. Michelle, as you were talking about, the combination of alcohol and hormones does not always make us our best selves. And then we look back at that and go, I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be that. Now, legally, what we have done is legally we have privileged getting wasted over taking care of people. And here's what I mean. If you look at New York law, the crime, second-degree rape, where someone is incapacitated, say, through. through intoxication. If you are voluntarily intoxicated, that's not going to count. It has to be the involuntary intoxication. In other words, being drugged. But Michelle and Jamel, whether you're voluntarily or involuntarily intoxicated, what are you? You're still intoxicated. The level of intoxication doesn't depend on the voluntary or involuntariness of it. And then you start to get into the really difficult question of, okay, which line of ketamine? That was snorted, was coerced versus which line of ketamine that was snorted was voluntary. And you begin to see. why these prosecutions get really difficult. So here's what I would think morally and legally. We need to flip the ethic here towards the ethic of care over consent morally and legally. We need to privilege when people are intoxicated to the point of incapacitation. We need to privilege safety and bodily security over, well, this is college. People are going to get wasted, right? That's not the way the law should be operating. Well, I want to ask about the cultural guardrails that we have put up, because I do think I agree that in recent years, we've fetishized consent just by itself, like whatever, like that's the only question people ask. So Jamel, this has been, I think, my theory is that, especially with progressives and the whole kind of sex positive, you know, women shouldn't, it's like, the extreme version of no slut shaming. You're not supposed to call anything out of bounds as long as everybody has said, oh, no, I'm okay with this. It's like, I mean, Jamel, kind of where do you stand on this? Should there be another piece to this? Or is that just kind of what we have to work with? My own inclination is not far from David's, frankly. It is that consent is fine as far as, kind of a, you know, broad minimum. But that when it comes to having sex, engaging in sexual activity, I'm not sure that minimums are what you should be aiming for. Or I'll put it this way, you know, my kids are quite young, but my, both my children, but my son, especially, I'm not going to, when we have these conversations, it's not going to be, oh, you know, as long as you get the minimum approval, then everything's cool. It's going to be, you know, take this person seriously as a full person. They're not merely an object for your own satisfaction. They are a full human being who feels and thinks just the way you do. And think about how you would want to be treated in this situation. Think about how you would want someone to take account of your feelings and think about what, how you would feel if you felt that you were being violated in some way. Like that's the minimum, right? The absolute minimum is to put yourself in that other person's place. And, and make your decision and make your choices with that in mind. I don't know, you know, as far as thinking of cultural standards, I don't, you know, I don't know how you make that a cultural standard. But I, I, I do think that part of what we're witnessing is the extent to which many young men have both internalized the consent requirement, and also the quite vicious and aggressive misogyny that has, I think, you know, maybe not reemerged, really kind of like taken a more prominent place in American cultural life. You put those things together and you get a situation where young men, they basically think that they look at someone basically incapacitated saying, yes, put quotes over that, yes, and, and go forward with it. As if that was, that's the only thing they need to account for. And the idea that, no, you need to account for the fact that this is another human being, that women are people. And you need to, you need to take that seriously. That doesn't, that doesn't enter the picture. Yeah. I, I spend my days, as you know, dealing with political candidates and politicians, and it is depressing to me that what we're talking about on college campus is also what we've seen, certainly this last year, reemerge with a vengeance among members of Congress. I mean, we've had members have to resign. We have members who have declined to resign over accusations of mistreating spouses or, you know, in some cases, taking sexual advantage of young staffers. So I have to think that this just, you know, as role models go or as cultural signifiers, it's just a terrible swamp that, that people are, are being subjected to. And so I, I am worried about where this, where this goes. Where do we think this case is going? I mean, do, is there any chance that we think it's going to lead to reforms, either how schools, how institutions handle these things, or one piece that we haven't gotten into a lot? And David, you probably know more about this than I could ever imagine. It's just like fraternities are big players in these situations. Like there have been, and I know Caitlin Flanagan years ago for the Atlantic did a big piece about when members get into trouble, like fraternities will, their national organizations have a lot of power. And then they sometimes come marching in to make sure their members get handled delicately. But like, where does this go? Do we think? Can I be, well, I don't want to, I want to say bleakly realistic. I do think that, I do, I do think that there will be and has been a renewed burst of concern and not just a burst of concern about the state of the law. And should the law sort of say that voluntary intoxication is this sort of zone of privilege versus reforming it to where intoxication is, intoxication? Okay. That's sort of a low hanging fruit kind of legal reform that I think could be undertaken. Is there a burst of interest in maybe the reforming and rethinking the moral norms? Yeah. But, you know, what we've seen is just relentless impunity. And, you know, we haven't even raised the name Epstein yet. Right. And, you know, we, Michelle, you and I had, we had, we had both been watching this show called Furious. On Hulu. And what was so powerful about that was how it really accurately portrayed how so very difficult it is to bring powerful people to account, hold powerful people accountable, especially when it comes to sexual misconduct. And then you also have a dynamic where sometimes prosecutors, you know, look, we've had some cases where prosecutors and sort of the public went crazy, like the Duke lacrosse situation, where people leaned way in ahead of the, and so, you know, we shouldn't be doing that. We shouldn't be leaning in and making judgments on evidence before adjudication. So it's hard. But one thing that I also think is in play here is that, you know, prosecutors don't like hard cases. They, they want to, they want a case that's going to be like, I walk in and they're going to plead it out because it's so open and shut. Or if they are stupid enough to take it to jury, it's going to be a quick jury deliberation because it's open and shut. And this is a case where there's a lot of different text messages. Some of them are really, really bad. Some of them clutter the picture and cloud the picture. And that's the classic kind of case that a lot of prosecutors will try to kind of lean away from or do what this prosecutor said they're going to do, essentially punt it to the grand jury, sort of say, we're going to see what the grand jury says. But that's not really the role that if they believe the case is prosecutable, tell that to the grand jury. Jamal, are you feeling bleakly realistic as well? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think my, going just on based on what I said earlier, this, we seem to be stuck in a bit of an eternal recurrence. I am afraid that I'm quite pessimistic about all of this. And that, you know, my hope is that, that there, that some accountability is found, that the young woman finds some peace and justice in her life. And that I hope that we can use this to, to build better systems. But I'm not, I'm really not going to hold my breath about that. Quick PSA, whatever you are feeling curious or concerned about, whether it is politics, AI, or what fantastic shows you want to stream this weekend, you can search for it in the New York Times. And you can do it without paywall. You can do it without paywall. For a full month, when you download the Times app. Better still, you'll get access to the back catalog of our fantastic show and all of the Times' fantastic shows. So run, do not walk, download the app today. Now I'm going to have us do a hard pivot to a topic that has been a repeat favorite among our conversations, but now is getting down to the wire. The very high stakes political midterms where, you know, I don't want to say the soul of the nation is on the ballot, but we can do that if you like. We're about a month away from election day. Early voting has already started in some places. It has been quite the journey thus far. As we are heading into the home court, we're going to have to make sure that we're not going to have to do a lot of things at the same stretch. What is like one isolated story or nugget that has stuck in your as telling us like a lot about what's going on and where we're headed? One of you, go. So, you know, our newspaper ran this story about Kansas Senator Roger Marshall not long ago about how he was apparently having people from his practice, his medical practice, arrested for basically small bills, $50 here, $200 here, you know, a pittance relatively, but, you know, sicking the law on them for not having paid up on time. And this has become a big issue in the Kansas Senate race. And Marshall, who faces a surprisingly tough challenge from a Democrat, I believe his name is Adam Hamilton. Marshall appears, basically unable to really figure out how to deal with this, this controversy with these attacks. He really is flailing. He's like, well, actually, you know, I had them arrested for not showing up for a court date, which, you know, isn't really, doesn't really capture what people are upset about when it comes to this story. And you see something similar, this sort of flailing about in the face of a strong challenge from Ken Paxton, right? Who, although Ken Paxton, is, I would say, like a sub-replacement level Republican candidate, he hasn't experienced one at the very least. He's run plenty of races, but he's never really run a competitive one against a Democrat for statewide office in this way. And one of the stories, I think, of these midterms, and this is, this is how you get waves, right? Is that when national conditions make more seats competitive, make more candidates viable and challenging, whoever the incumbent party is, you find that there are all these incumbents who just have never had to run a truly competitive race and just don't know how to do it. And if they lose, it'll be as much because of that, of a lack of being able to deftly respond to attacks and criticism and the like, as it will be national conditions, right? Like you can, you can outperform national conditions. Part of the reason why Susan Collins is still in the Senate is that she has consistently outperformed national conditions, in part by being a very effective main politician, a very effective local politician who knows the state, who knows its voters, and who knows what they want to hear, and who knows what she has to do to get ahead of criticism from Democrats. And I think what you're seeing in both House races and Senate races are Republican candidates, who have basically, if they ever had the ability, lost the ability to do that. And now they're up against challengers who don't just have the wind at their, the wind at their back, but are genuinely hungry to win. All right, David, what you got? So I'm, I'm glad Jamel brought up the Paxton Tallarico race. And, you know, one thing that really stood out to me was if you move past sort of the, the grass tips of MAGA, you know, like the somebody who follows Trump and says, Ken Paxton's our greatest attorney general, which is usually entirely related to the fact that he absolutely will carry water for Donald Trump, no matter what. I mean, but outside of like that core MAGA that, that upholds him as sort of Trump's a number one water carrier, there just isn't an affirmative case for Ken Paxton. And so everything depends on tearing down Tallarico, and, you know, it's funny after spending years hearing from MAGA that we're electing a president, not a pastor, that why are we asking about what Donald Trump's believes theologically? Why are we diving too much into his character? Because policy is all that matters, etc. Now, all of a sudden, James Tallarico's theology matters. The theology of James Tallarico's pastor matters. So wait, is it? Are we electing a president, not a pastor? But when it comes to the Texas Senate race, we're electing a pastor, not a senator? I mean, all of this doesn't make a lot of sense. And so it's so muddled. And a lot of the attacks on Tallarico, or 90% of them, don't have anything to do with his conduct in office. They're all about this other stuff, like how many paths to Jesus are there? And, you know, all of this stuff. They can't do the conduct in office, and they can't do personal morality, because if you open those cans of worms, then Ken Paxton goes down. I mean, the defense that I've been hearing from his supporters in the state is, oh, personal morality doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, you know, why do we care if he's had affairs or been, you know, indicted or impeached or whatever? And it wasn't just personal morality. I mean, he, members of his own team resigned and blew the whistle on official misconduct, including allegations of bribery that got him impeached. He was impeached by the Republican-dominated Texas House. It really is this interesting microcosm at the moment, where it's very hard at this point, given the sentiment in the country, to make the positive case that we should have united all Republican government for the two more years. It's very hard to make that positive case when public sentiment is this low. So what is all that's left? All that's left is Tallarico this, Tallarico that. And, I'm just not sure it's going to work. And, and Michelle, I'm also kind of not sure it's going to work because I honestly think that people are getting a little bit tired of the constant catastrophism, just the constant vote for me or the world ends. Apocalypse. Apocalypse. Yeah. And so I don't know, you know, it's going to be interesting. Tallarico is taking a very different approach. He's trying to be that more, you know, ecumenical, welcoming, upbeat, kind of politician, motivation. Happy warrior. That happy. And so it's, it is almost like a, a perfect storm kind of case. And we'll see how it goes. So I'm going to take Texas as well. So I did, I did some following around of Bobby Polito, who is the Democratic House candidate in Texas 15, which is in the Rio Grande Valley, which is one of my favorite places to go report. It's just the most fascinating cultural experience. Um, and he's running against Monica Dela Cruz, who took this blue district and flipped it, uh, you know, a few years ago and the Democrats want it back. And of course, Republicans have redistricted and all of this. It's a, it's a hard, it's a hard thing to claw back. But while I was down there following around, uh, Polito, this is a hugely Latino district. Like this is like, you're, it's a, it's a good test case for whether or not Trump's inroads into the Latino voting community are going to hold. And I was just talking to this woman. She, she runs a restaurant down there. She voted and she and her husband voted for Trump in 2024 because they liked his economic message and they just feel burned. And she's like, never again. She is out. She's all in for Polito. She's, you know, changed her mind and decided that she was sold a bill of goods. And if what we've seen from other reporting and other polling, this is potentially a real problem for the Republicans broadly, if they can't hold these Hispanic inroads, but especially in places like Texas, where they redistricted on the assumption that they would get a certain percentage of the Hispanic vote. So it could turn their gerrymandering into dummy mandering, one of Jamel's favorite things. And so I am just waiting to see how all of that plays out. And that will affect them going forward well beyond this particular cycle. Jamel, I can't tell you how much I've used the term dummy mandering, but I always credit you. I always give the right attribution. It's a fantastic possibility. And it would be the, it would be divine justice. I really think if after all of the stupid game playing that Trump did pressuring all these states to redistrict, if a lot of dummy mandering came back and bit him on the butt, I would just, I would be so pleased about that. Not gonna lie. All right. With that, I feel like we got to change time for recommendations. What you got for me? I saw the new Robert Pattinson movie, Primetime, about to catch a predator. It's been somewhat of a controversial movie because there are a lot of people who quite like the show to catch a predator. And the movie is very clearly critical of the television show. But I think it's worth watching. I still, I'm still like myself working through what I think about the film. Pattinson gives a great performance. Merritt Weaver is excellent. Also Skylar Gizmondo. Like the whole cast is really working at their absolute height of their power. But the most interesting thing to me about the movie is it really feels like a, like a Moby Dick kind of story, like a movie about the dangers of fanaticism first. But the film is very much about post 9-11 America. I mean, it begins in 2004. It's very much the height of War on Terror, the War on Terror. And it draws an analogy between the kind of fanaticism and, you know, yearning for clarity that characterizes a show like To Catch a Predator and the War on Terror and the War on Iraq and the desire to have something clear and black and white. Where the moral stakes are exactly as they appear. So it's an interesting movie. I'm not going to say it's like the best movie I've seen this year, but it's a very interesting movie. And I really recommend it. Okay. David. All right, Michelle. Two words. Last scene. Okay, this is an Apple TV plus drama. Australian. You know, normally I'm British crime. Let's go Australian crime. Yeah. You know, these Anglo countries and their horrific crime problems. And so this one is a 911 or in Australia, triple zero dispatcher. And his daughter had disappeared at age three, 11 years ago, written off as deceased. Gets a call from somebody he believes is his daughter, 11 years later. So it's hard to watch. I just want you to tell you that. But it is so well done. And at the end of episode four, I think it's only about six episodes. At the end of episode four was one of the most gripping and intense 45 minutes of television that I have seen in a long time. And after it was over, like my wife and I just looked at each other and just said, wow, because it went in a way we didn't fully expect. And wow. Okay, so it's that time of the election cycle where I turn into a hideous nag about people getting involved. So I'm going to take this moment one month out from Election Day to recommend that people figure out a way to get involved. I have, for instance, a lovely friend who has started every Sunday holding postcard writing parties. Now, she's not doing it in a particular partisan vein. She actually got voter lists from Reclaim Our Votes that are registered. But not regular voters. And so she has people over to her house every Sunday to sit and just write. I think they're targeting Texas. Just little notes that say, remember, you have the right to this, that, the other. You know, make your vote count. And then they send those out every week. And there you have it. They're going to do that through the end of the election. So that may not be your cup of tea. Maybe you want to go knock doors. Maybe you want to call. Maybe you just want to donate. I don't know. But we can sit here and complain all day long about how horrible this administration is, how pathetic the Republican led Congress is in terms of letting Trump run all over everybody. But if you don't get out there and get involved, get your early ballots, whatever, it's all for nothing. Just saying. And with that, we're going to end this and land this plane. Guys, always a pleasure. Yes, despite the grim conversation. Yeah, always a pleasure. It's not really a pleasure this week, but it's always a sensation. That's a low bar, Michelle. That's a low bar. Thank you.