The Chris Cuomo Project - Why Luigi Mangione Is a Hero and Daniel Penny is a Villain

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Chris Cuomo delves into the moral and societal divides underscored by two major events: Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Daniel Penny’s fatal chokehold on Jordan Neely. Cuomo unpacks the racial, social, and economic dynamics driving these debates, highlighting systemic biases in justice and the double standards applied to corporate elites versus marginalized individuals. With sharp analysis, Cuomo challenges viewers to reflect on what these incidents say about our values and the state of American society. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Support our sponsors: Everyday Dose Head over to everydaydose.com/chris for 25% off plus 5 free gifts with your first order including a USB rechargeable frother, Every month after you get additional amazing free gifts with your order. Get Maine Lobster Listeners of The Chris Cuomo Project get 15% off all orders store- wide with the promo code CUOMO. That’s right—15% off the freshest lobster you’ll find anywhere. So this season, create new memories, make it extra special, and add a touch of Maine to your holiday table. Visit GetMaineLobster.com and use promo code Cuomo Shopify Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untuckit uses. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at SHOPIFY.COM/chrisc Cozy Earth Want your Cozy Earth pajamas by Christmas? Order by December 13 for free shipping! Missed it? You can still get expedited shipping until December 20 to ensure it arrives in time. Head to cozyearth.com/CHRIS now and use my exclusive code CHRIS for up to 40% off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

the NBA. Bet MGM authorized gaming partner of the NBA has your back all season long from tip off to the final buzzer. You're always taken care of with the sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Ben MGM and no

matter your team, your favorite player or your style, there is something every NBA fan will love about that MGM download the app today and discover why that MGM is your basketball home for the season raise your game to the next level this year with that MGM

a sports book worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA that MGM dot com for terms and conditions must be 19 years of age or older to wager Ontario only please play responsibly if you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an

advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Luigi kills a man on purpose he's good. Daniel Penny tries to stop someone from hurting others, and he's bad. ["The Big Bang"] Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Cozy Earth. Look, I use the bedding, okay? I even have a set of the jammies. I'm not a big jammies guy, like Greg Ott is. He has all these different jammies with footies

and all these things. Not my thing, but they are really cozy and I wear them around the house. And the sheets are just no joke. You want your Cozy Earth pajamas by Christmas? You better order by December 13th. And by the way, you'll get free shipping. Oh no, I missed it. You can still get expedited shipping until December 20th. That way, you get in there in time.

Don't wait. Go to CozyEarth.com slash Chris. Use my exclusive code. Chris, you can get up to 40% off, that's crazy. Give the gift of luxury this season, okay? It's the holidays, do it right. CozyEarth.com slash Chris. If you get a post purchase survey,

please tell Cozy Earth that you heard about them from the Chris Cuomo Project podcast. It'll help us keep doing business. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project podcast. It'll help us keep doing business. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Get Maine Lobster. Oh, the holidays. It's all about making them special, right? Well, what's more special

when it comes to looking down at that plate than getting Maine lobster? I'll paint you a picture. It's Christmas Eve and all through the house. No, none of that. Certainly not a mouse. You find a mouse in my house, you know where you're gonna find it? On a glue trap. But I'll tell you, here's what you will find. A table filled with people talking about why they love each other, talking about what's good, laughing about what's not, and enjoying food. Especially to an Italian-American family. Man, we love it. And I gotta tell you, you crack open a fresh, sweet lobster,

especially like us, we're all water people, what's better than getting a taste that takes you straight to the coast of Maine? Get Maine Lobster has everything you need. Lobster rolls, lobster tails, whole lobster feast. I feel like Bubba Gump. Plus, as a listener of the Chris Cuomo project, you get 15% off all orders store-wide with

promo code CUOMO. That's right, 15% off the freshest lobster you'll find anywhere. So this season, create new memories, make it extra special by adding a touch of Maine to your holiday table. Visit GetMaineLobster.com, use the promo code QUALMO, and you'll get 15% off all orders today. Support for the Chris Cuomo Project comes from every day dose. Look, we all wanna perform at our best,

mentally and physically. Sometimes habits don't set us up for success. Everyday dose. It's coffee, but better than coffee. Since I started drinking everyday dose, I can get through my day and I get more consistent energy. I don't need the hits the way I did, you know, another cup, another cup, another cup. And it's not that roller coaster caffeine crash. And gut health for me is everything. And the mushrooms, collagen,

it's like a one-two punch for keeping me regular and feeling good. The taste is legit. It's like a one-two punch for keeping me regular and feeling good. The taste is legit. It's smooth, rich, it's actually got more of a creaminess than drinking black coffee. And it's definitely coffee flavor. None of that dirt water stuff that I've tried with some others of the mushroom drinks. So head over to everydaydose.com slash Chris for 25% off plus five free gifts with your first order including a USB rechargeable frother. It helps.

It helps. Definitely thickens it up. I like it. Every month after, you're going to get an amazing free gift with your order. So go to everydaydose.com slash Chris. You get 25% off plus five free gifts with your first order. I'm Chris Cuomo, welcome to The Chris Cuomo Project. And I'm trying to figure out who we're becoming. And you probably are too.

So let's take a look at these two young men and these two cases, these two situations, and try to figure out how they make any kind of sense about what is right and wrong in society anymore. Now, here's the good news. This is not a new frustration or question. H.L. Mencken, do you know that name? Henry Louis Mencken, end of the 1800s

into the early, almost mid 1900s. Do you know that name? Henry Louis Mencken, end of the 1800s into the early, almost mid 1900s. Journalist, thinker, philosopher, huge influence on society then Baltimore native, talking about life and virtues and society, a lot of the same grievances that we have now, corporate class, rich, poor, morality, how to change things, institutional failure.

So the good news is these struggles may suck and the attendant problems and issues may be really frustrating and self-limiting, meaning that they hold back the individuals who worry about them. In fact, they hold back society, but they're not new. So the idea of, well, I never, yeah. Now, the only well, I'll never, I'll give you,

is I can't remember an assassination of somebody who wasn't a terrorist. Now, I guess I got to put an asterisk on that because of how some of you see health care companies, and I'll get into that, where the person who did the assassinating of a non-criminal, and again, asterisk because a lot of you believe that Every Health Insurer is a criminal organization, was celebrated. I hate that Luigi Mangione or Mangione, as they call themselves, although that's not how you'd say it in Italian,

but that's all right. I hate that the kid is Italian with that Italian name, especially when, you know, it just adds to more bad stereotypes I hate that the kid is Italian with that Italian name, especially when, you know, it just adds to more bad stereotypes when this guy, it's not like he was living the Italian experience, he was living the uniquely American wealthy, generational wealthy experience.

I'll get into that. So let's just go back and forth. You know the facts of the two situations. Luigi Mangione, 20 something, becomes disaffected. Maybe it was partly because of an injury. Maybe it was just because of what he was feeding his head, but very smart guy. Wines up killing a healthcare CEO

because he believes that he had to make a statement against the system. Daniel Penny, young guy, got known as the Marine. He is a Marine, but he was only, he was in and out, but they're using it as some kind of like suggestion. He's a train killer. Is on the subway, passengers, including females, are freaked out by a homeless black guy who comes on,

who's threatening them, not saying, give me money, give me money, but saying violent things and he doesn't care if he goes to jail, puts him in a choke hold and he dies. Those are the basic things. You can look them up, but there's not much need for fact analysis here.

Luigi kills the CEO, that's good. Penny kills a black homeless man, that's bad. Why? Well, because Luigi was killing a bad guy and Penny was killing a good guy? No. I mean, I don't mean to judge somebody for being mentally ill.

That doesn't make you good or bad, that makes you sick. But Neely was actively harassing people and making people feel that they were gonna be hurt. But Penny's bad for getting involved. But Luigi is good for getting involved because healthcare CEOs are an extension of the establishment and the elites who are oppressing us. Now, healthcare as an industry,

to me, gets separate consideration and analysis than other corporate grievances. And I'll deal with it in depth in a different episode, but it's not the same as how they fuck you at the drive-through. It's not the same as credit card companies. It's not the same because it's about your health and how they commoditize and make profitable

figuring out how healthy you should be. That makes them different, fine. But we're assuming that Brian Thompson was a bad actor in this because they all are. But the same assumption is not being offered up to what Neely represented in this equation. Now what's interesting is part of that is because Neely is black. If Neely is white, I don't think we even have this conversation. I don't think Daniel Penny gets charged. Now that's interesting, why?

Because the black side of the argument, although it shouldn't be broken down this way, and I don't like that the media is doing it, but that's the way that it was explained. I think that you don't have to be black to have an affinity to black suffrage and the injustices that are sometimes systemic, sometimes episodic

in our society. I think white people can be allies. I think when white people go too far and pretend that they too are victimized because they support those who are, that's adopting an oppression and that can get a little toxic. We've seen that also because that's what Luigi did.

But one step at a time. also because that's what Luigi did, but one step at a time. Well, the argument goes that if Neely were white, Penny would have been convicted, but because he's black, he wasn't. The opposite is that if the homeless guy was white, then you wouldn't have had the black argument that it's racist if he doesn't get charged.

And maybe then Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor, a person of color who does like to traffic in racial politics, wouldn't have charged him because a lot of people thought he wouldn't be charged. And then you look at it on the other side. What if Daniel Penny was black? Well then he would have been shot 50 times by everybody in the subway car because a black man can't do anything violent and get away with it. If you look at the statistics, to the extent that we have a racial component when it comes to crime, you will see that minorities commit more crime against other races. Now, does that mean that minorities are racist

in terms of who they pick to victimize? I don't think so. I think it's more socioeconomic. But if you're going to look at it as, well, do we have a problem with race and crime? To the extent that we do, it does not paint minorities in a good light. Because the problem, if we're gonna put race

into criminality, it's hard to make the argument that white people hurting black people never get punished as if it's a racial disparity issue when it's black people hurting other races that happens more often. Now, I happen to accept, acknowledge, and agree with the idea that systemically, black people do not get the benefit of fairness under law

as the majority does. I believe that, and I believe it's very complicated. And I believe that's why you gotta be careful about trying to meet out a measure of comeuppance or of correction in a given case, like the Daniel Penny case. One, I don't think you fix the racial imbalance by punishing the people

who tried to control Jordan Neely. Jordan Neely is not the face of the victimized black man by the justice system. I don't agree with that. Knowing Jordan Neely's background, I think he is the face of how our society deals with mental health or doesn't deal with it and sets people up to fail and creates,

makes them monsters and makes them bad because they're sick. But I don't think that any black guy can be Jordan Neely. That's not true. They're not mentally ill. They're not on subways harassing people. And in very extreme ways, okay, this wasn't, give me money, give me money, again, it was, I'll kill you.

I don't care if I go to jail. Closing distance, you know, it made a Brown guy very nervous and he helped Daniel Penny hold him down. But all of that is seen as wrong because even if the circumstances required it, it was too much. Yet that analysis is not being applied to the CEO case because even if you want to assume

that all healthcare CEOs are bad, right? Which would be the same kind of stereotype that we don't want applied to Jordan Neely. It's still okay that Luigi took this guy out. And indeed, if you are concerned and motivated by the idea of the established, the privileged, the elite getting away with shit, getting over on the rest of the established, the privileged, the elite getting away with shit, getting over on the rest of society,

Luigi is the picture of privilege. White by today's standards, though profoundly ethnic in his name, but being Italian American is not being a minority, certainly, and is not being an ethnic anymore, not like it was for his grandparents' generation, my parents' generation. So he is a white guy, rich, no small irony,

how'd they get rich? Health care. So he assassinates a health care CEO, yet celebrates the wealth and prosperity of his own family that made their fortune off of healthcare. And this does not in any way subdue the support for him. So he is the picture of the elite. No, no, no, I'm just mad at the healthcare companies.

No, you're not. No, you're not. The same people who are saying fuck the insurance companies say fuck everything that's corporatized. And fuck the elites and fuck the everything that's corporatized. And fuck the elites and fuck the privilege. But not this guy. When he checks every box because he did what you like? Now you sound just like a MAGA person. Where all your values, all your character, all your right and wrong goes out the window when you find a change agent who does what you want done but don't feel you can do it yourself.

Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from select quotes. Look, so much in life is uncertain. And the older I get, the more comfortable I am with my decision to have life insurance in place to take care of my family, all right? Now, the problem is, it's complicated. You know, there's so many sales pitches, there's so much pricing, there's so many sales pitches,

there's so much pricing, there's so much variability. That's why I am so happy to partner with Select Quote. It's one of America's leading insurance brokers, 40 years of experience. They've helped over two million people find over $700 billion in coverage since 1985. Head to selectquote.com and a licensed insurance agent will call you right away with the right policy

for your life and your budget. Select quote, they shop, you save. Get the right life insurance for you for less at selectquote.com slash Chris C. Go to selectquote.com slash Chris C. Go to selectquote.com slash Chris C today and you get started. Selectquote.com slash Chris C. Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from Shopify.

Listen, my friends. Success in selling comes from a business and how often that business behind the business gets it done for that business. What does that mean? It means that you need people to help you get your wares where you need them to be. They work with untuck it. They work with death wish coffee so When you think about a business that sells through the roof like ala are all birds skims. Yeah. Yeah, they must have a great team Yeah, what they have is the business behind them known as Shopify my brothers and sisters upgrade your business and get the same checkout that untuck it uses

Sign up for your one dollar a month trial period at Shopify.com slash Chris C. All lowercase, if you please, Chris C. Go to Shopify.com slash Chris C. Upgrade your selling today. Where? Shopify.com slash Chris C. So Luigi is the picture of entitlement who assassinates a man who is the picture of the American dream.

Brian Thompson is all self-made. He is exactly what you say you want to reward in society. Oh yeah, but what he decided to do. You don't know what and how Thompson did his job. You look up UnitedHealthcare and him as the CEO. Well, first let's start with the fact that, and I will take this on in an entirely different episode. I'll give you just a little hint.

I am on the precipice of litigation against the healthcare company right now for my own family's situation. I get it. Oh no, you don't get it. No, I get it better than most of you unless you are someone who's had your life ruined over the course of years by a health insurance company.

Okay, but most of you are not that. Okay? I've covered it for over 20 years. You go back and Google, GMA gets answers. I don't know why ABC News is an amazing organization, but they take all their stuff offline. I don't know why, but go, you'll find transcripts and stuff. Slow walking claims, how they pick their experts,

how they do their pricing, the lack of transparency, how they do their billing, how it's an entirely separate industry, how little transparency there is and what your plan covers and does not, how they make the language and the prescriptive nature of it so hard to understand and abstruse by design so you don't know what you're getting into. Pharmaceuticals, same thing with transparency of pricing. The idea of the later administrative cost of a system that is fundamentally empowering a middleman when we don't need one,

and eschewing the idea of a single-payer system. Why? Well, just to support a corporate class. Gee, I wonder how I know all that if I don't give a shit about it and don't understand it. I've been covering it for a long time, and I gotta tell you, it hasn't meaningfully changed. Except, ironically, by the ACA, who enforced Obamacare, that enforced pre-existing conditions, which is a huge way they used to get them. They wouldn't even want to give me life insurance, let alone what they would charge me for health insurance because I smoke an occasional cigar.

All right? I can jump up on a pull-up bar and do 15 of them right now and run a mile in under seven minutes, but I shouldn't be insured because I have an occasional cigar. Come on. So I get it. This is not about the system. This is about a society that has forgotten what to reward and what to punish, and no longer knows what it is becoming. Penny kills the black homeless man?

Bad. Luigi kills the CEO? Good. But Luigi is the picture of entitlement, Ivy League, everything else, living in Hawaii on his parents' dime to figure out his best self. Thompson is a self-made guy, comes from nothing, achieves the American dream, gets killed by the privileged guy,

you take the privileged guy's side. Well, but the healthcare business is actively menacing people. And Luigi stepped up. Neely was actually actively menacing people. And Luigi stepped up. Neely was actually actively menacing people. And Penny and others stepped up, but that doesn't get rewarded. If Neely was white, this wouldn't happen.

If Luigi were black, one, he'd have a very weird name for that guy, but would he be celebrated the same way? If Luigi were a black man, would he have the same fans? I actually believe maybe. Maybe. Now, here's one for you. If Brian Thompson were black,

now how do you feel about what happened? If Brian Thompson is a black CEO fighting his way to the top of an absolute boys club of white males, and he gets shot by an Ivy League white kid, now what? I think it changes the analysis and I think that's really, really wrong. And what I'm trying to distill for you

is that we have gone from principles to triggers. And the problem with the distinction for me is a lack of consistency and completeness. Look, sometimes you can get triggered by something that activates your feeling about a principle or a moray. Okay. But sometimes the trigger is just what it is. You have a reflexive response to something, but it's not a consistent principle.

Again, think about that. If the healthcare CEO were black and Luigi shot him in the back of the head and said, these people are parasites, I don't know that he has the same fan base he has now. He has some of them. He has some of them. He has some of them. He has the white, really radical,

hate the corporate class guys, even though they're forgetting that Luigi comes from it, but I think it changes it. And that means that we're not valuing the right things. If Luigi was black, would he be celebrated? Maybe, maybe not. If Thompson was black, would Luigi be celebrated? Because now you fall more into what Daniel Penny was about.

Murder by assassination to make a point is okay. A guy trying not to kill someone to help others, it's not okay. And it results in his death accidentally. Accidentally. Not okay. Do you see the inconsistency? The argument for why they are not inconsistent

would be that the victim in one, the deceased in one, was a bigger problem than the death of them, how they died. So Neely is a victim because he wasn't doing anything that warranted killing him. But Brian Thompson did deserve to die because of what his company does. His company killed so many people. Now, that is a characterization of something that's gonna be really complex.

Now, certainly it's not as simple as that because you would have a lot more history of litigation against insurance companies criminally, right? Not just civilly for wrongful death. And even then they're very rare. Why? Because it's a business, so you have to play by their rules.

And it gets you back to the point that the more, why is it a business? Ah, okay. Now we're talking. But I'll tell you what, we'll never make it single payer, government sponsored. That's socialism.

Well, maybe, maybe it is. Maybe it is socialism. But unless you're gonna just run away from a label, you gotta look at what the net effect is of it on society. I'll tell you what one effect would be. Much higher tax burden for the rich, much higher. Is that gonna happen? Nope.

Did you make it more likely that it might happen by killing a rich guy? Nope. What you did was make sure that a lot of CEOs are making people who run security companies a lot of money because they're all going to get security now. And you have lost the moral high ground of the fact that they are doing the wrong thing as part of their profitability model, and you've actually made it less likely that there's gonna be change

because you've taken some of the sting out of, look what you're doing to people, because they get to say, look what you just did to him. Look what you just did to Thompson. We're supposed to change what we do that is lawful for people who are just vigilantes. And by the way, they're not even a vigilante because where's the justice in it? You killed a man who by all accounts is a good man who is self-made. This is the problem with honoring Luigi is that you wind up hurting your stated goal

of having the system get to a better place. Similarly, by condemning Penny, you are making the change that you seek less likely because you are punishing the wrong thing. You're just making it so that the next time a guy like me is on a subway and sees something that they should try to stop, they won't. Because God forbid, I get this guy and he's got these health conditions or whatever it is,

or I'm choking him the wrong way or for too long, and he dies, I'm gonna go to prison for the rest of my life? Fuck it, let him punch the woman in the face. Is that what we want? I don't think so. If you don't change the way we want to, we get to shoot you in the head and make you do that. Is that what we wanna be?

Is that what we wanna be becoming? I don't think so. But the reason I say I don't think so, and instead of, of course not, is I don't decide. You decide. The collective decides in terms of what it rewards and what it punishes. Right? In a very subtle way, this is what we were dealing with with cancel culture. And why is it dying out? Well, because it wasn't consistent.

It wasn't based on a real principle. It was just the opportunism of bold-faced names. And how do we know this? Well, go back. Did anybody ever check the different entities that were involved and whether or not they changed in a way that women specifically feel safer and easier and to report what happens and freer to move up without restriction of any type of harassment. I don't know. Neither do you. Nobody ever went back and figured it out. You took down the bold

face names. A lot of people got paid out a lot of money for things that a lot of other people thought were complete bullshit and not worth it. What got better? I don't know. I hear people all the time saying that they're slow to hire women, especially if they're attractive. They'll never say that in public,

but, and by the way, they don't even wanna say it when they find out who I am or that I was there. And I definitely don't agree with their answer. I mean, you know that just by looking at my staff. It's almost entirely female, right? It's overwhelmingly female. I don't know, I've never, I didn't specifically count, but it is.

I will count. So how many guys do I have? I got Tom, I got Ron, I got James. Who am I forgetting? I got Ben, he's like one of my main producers. I don't like him, so I kind of buried his name. Kidding. Yeah, I mean, maybe a third.

So what's the point? I obviously don't agree with not hiring women. We need them. But reaction formation as a principle of what you are becoming, looked at through the lens of these two cases, it seems that we don't know what we're rewarding and what we're punishing anymore. Because we don't know who we are and what we want to be. Well, we don't want corporate class to do what we're doing.

Listen, all you have to do is spend five minutes researching the history of change in society. Unless you are trying to throw off a violent oppressor, violence is almost never as effective for long-term sustainable change as nonviolent resistance. I mean, look, look at our own example here in America. What's the biggest systemic change we've seen in my lifetime, let's say, or in the modern era? Look at our own example here in America. What's the biggest systemic change we've seen in my lifetime, let's say, or in the modern era? It's gotta be the end of Jim Crow

and the move towards racial equality, right? I mean, that's gotta be the biggest systemic change that affected our overall culture. The two pieces of litigation, legislation in 64 and 65. How was that achieved? The violence was all on the side of the people who wanted to keep it the way it was. They lost to people who were committed to nonviolence. Martin Luther King and a generation of people.

That's how they did it. Gandhi overthrew British rule through nonviolence. The Velvet Revolution. There's a lot. I mean, there was some violence in the Velvet Revolution, but it was largely nonviolent. Shooting people in the head is not gonna make the change that you seek. Now, does that mean that there shouldn't be change? Well, you made it harder, but I think

that you have to now kind of raise the specter of the desperation of this situation. And does that make me worried that I'm gonna be rewarding an assassin's dream? Yeah. That now when I start talking about how, look, people are pissed at healthcare for good reason. It's just he did what he did for bad reason. I kind of am rewarding it. I am kind of saying that he gave it the attention. Who are we becoming? Daniel Penny is your kid and Luigi is your kid.

Which one do you support? I mean, do you even have to think about it? I mean, of course you can't quit on your own family, but Daniel Penny didn't want a bad outcome. All Luigi wanted was a bad outcome. And yet he is a folk hero and Daniel Penny is being attacked. Why? The simple answer is the perspective on who was killed.

The black homeless man who was mentally ill and menacing people on the subway somehow shouldn't have been killed because blacks get a hard time. The CEO who made his own success and was doing nothing wrong gets assassinated, and it's good because his company denies people care in a way that people hate. I just don't see the through line of what kind of functioning society that is. It's just based on preferences of likes and dislikes that don't always make sense.

Who are we becoming when you look at it through the lens of these two cases? It doesn't make sense to me. Am I surprised Penny got charged? No, not by Alvin Bragg. And you have a dead guy. And he was choking him for many minutes. Would I have been surprised if he wasn't charged? No, I would have had to think about it

and I would have thought that, wow, that's impressive of that grand jury to not charge him. Do I think it was the right verdict? Yeah, the way they came about it was a little weird and kind of makes me feel the jury quit on it, but understandable. And yeah, because if you don't have an intent to kill somebody, you're not a murderer. And Jordan Neely put himself in the position

for this to happen. He wasn't a hapless victim. And the Luigi case, I mean, I am really trying to see it from the perspective of the people who are saying this is a good thing, and I just don't know how they get there. So you tell me, because now I feel that change in healthcare is gonna get harder, not easier.

And I think we gotta think about who we're becoming. You tell me, what do you think? I'm Chris Cuomo, thank you for subscribing and following, being part of the Chris Cuomo Project. These are tough questions. And the instinct is to have a snap judgment about it. But that's you being triggered, not necessarily being thoughtful and being a critical thinker.

So play it through, figure it out, and then let me know. I'll see you at News Nation, AP 11P, Eastern, every weekday night. If you like this, but you don't like the ads, go to the sub stack. You wanna wear your independence, go get the free agent gear and show that you're not gonna be co-opted

by some poison party. My friends, problems are real. You can't be passive. Let's get after it.