How America's deep south turned blue | The News Agents

The fact that the Mississippi state has voted for a black man, a Democrat, the trends that led to it, we're seeing elsewhere, it's not necessarily destined, but which could leave openings to redraw and rebalance the American political map. Scott Calhoun's opponent was a woman called Cindy Hyde-Smith and she created a rod for her back and she said, oh, well, if beef prices are high, then people can pick another protein. You know, you have so many proteins to choose from. Pick another protein? Shit, I'd rather pick another senator instead. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. I'm starting to speak now. This is a global production. For months and months, I've been telling everybody everywhere I go that we're going to win this election. I was saying it eight, nine months ago. Recently, I've been saying it on the news. Every time I said it, I pointed out that people were going to give me too much credit for it. Because it's not something that I did, y'all. It's something that we did. The unthinkable has happened. Overnight, the Democrat, Scott Colome, won the Senate race in Mississippi. It is something, even in their wildest dreams, no Democrat believed could really happen. Coming after Texas, coming after South Carolina, coming after Kansas. Has there been a fundamental redrawing of America's political map now that a Democrat has won in Mississippi? Welcome to the News Agents. The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. It's Lewis. And we are nine days after the midterm elections. And finally, the result of Mississippi has been called for the Democrat, Scott Collom. And, you know, you can say, well, come on, he was up by 2000 votes for much of this time. So is it a big surprise? It's bloody huge. I mean, the fact that the Mississippi state has voted for a black man, a Democrat. This is the first black senator. From Mississippi, since Reconstruction, that brief window after the American Civil War, when the 15th, 16th and 17th Amendments were passed, and suddenly there was racial equality, everyone was holding hands together, except very quickly the people from the Ku Klux Klan decided to shut that down. You had Jim Crow, you had segregation, and it would be... 150 years to take till we get to this point today. Yeah, and I said at the beginning that no Democrat believed this was possible. That is frankly false, because one Democrat believed this was possible, and that was Scott Colome, as he just told us, that he kept the faith because he saw that movement was possible. And actually... Reporting that has been much closer to the ground in Mississippi will tell you that many of us were missing the signs of what was happening down there. Many of us missed the signs early on in these midterm elections of just how... ...clear and potential this win was. Scott Colom's opponent was a woman called Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was the Republican, the incumbent. He renamed her Cindy High Prices. I mean, it's not a brilliant gag, but it kind of worked for the purposes of what he needed to do because he aligned Cindy Hyde-Smith with the problems, the poverty that ordinary Mississippians were feeling in the state. And she created a rod for her back. Very early on in the campaign, by going on air and using this stupid phrase when she was asked about high prices, and she said, oh, well, if beef prices are high, then people can pick another protein. And there was such a big backlash. Let them eat other proteins. Let them eat other proteins. It was exactly that. So Scott Colom and his genius sort of ad social media advisor put together this advert. And it became known as the pick another protein ad. And it clips in her saying pick another protein with everyone else saying I'd rather pick another senator. Have a little listen. Gone price of beef continuing to go up. You know, you have so many proteins to choose from. Pick another protein? Shit, I'd rather pick another senator instead. Pick another protein? She done lost her damn mind. I'd rather pick another senator. Pick another protein? What the? Pick another senator instead. That simple. That simple. Nothing particularly controversial. You don't actually have to use the mother of a former rape victim, it turns out, to win a seat. You just have to put that incumbent senator's words back in her mouth. And the other proteins, as appropriate. Yeah, exactly. Look, I mean, like, this is a stunning result. I think, John, you're absolutely right to place it in the historical context. You know, this is the heart, Mississippi, heart of the Deep South, heart of the old Confederacy. A state which was basically run by white supremacists for the best part of a century and for the first time since the 1860s it's got a black senator. And I think what is also striking about it and what's important about it is the trends that led to it we're seeing elsewhere. And which could, it's not necessarily destined, but which could leave openings to redraw and rebalance the American political map for the next generation. We've got so used, haven't we, to talking as if the electoral map is almost frozen in aspic, that there are basically five or maybe six swing states which dominate every election. Sometimes, just sometimes, that does shift. And the trends that we're seeing here, look, for a for a senator, for any for any Democrat to win a statewide contest in Mississippi, like everything has to go right. You've got to have a really deeply unpopular incumbent. Well, check. You've got to have had an incumbent. And this is part of the thing that could stick. I mean, if you think about what Trump has done, you know, what's one of the consistent themes across Texas, across Kansas, in Mississippi, you know, these states which have big urban centres, but which have, you know, loads of rural voters, which have been the heart of Trump country. Well, guess what? Donald Trump has basically done almost everything he can during his term to deeply piss off. Farmers, rural voters, he's started a war in Iran which has led to diesel prices being at a record high. He's imposed tariffs which have made it harder for them to export their goods to different markets around the world. Data centres are cropping up. Where? Not in urban centres, not in downtown Brooklyn, but in the middle of big states like Texas. And people hate them, and they see the impact that they're having on the environment. So you saw rural turnout come right down. But, but, but, and this is also crucial, is that the other person actually, Emily, who sort of saw it could be coming, is Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, or that soon-to-be majority leader in the Senate, who has been talking about Mississippi for a while. Why? Well, it has the biggest black population in the South. And the problem historically has obviously been, there's been voter suppression. But also that white voters were outnumbering them at the polls because black voters tended to vote in fewer numbers. That wasn't the case this time, not least because of their antipathy to Trump, but because also the Republicans were seen to be part of that Supreme Court effort to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, which was a 1960s piece of legislation which helped guarantee equality and access to the ballot box for ethnic minority voters, for black voters, and the Supreme Court gutted it. And black voters were pissed off about it. And the Dems, including Scotland, but others as well, appealed to them, say, you've got to turn out to protect your right to vote now. So everything went right. The question is whether it could be a one-off, is a one-off, or it could be a portent of something to come. Well, let's hear now from Cindy Hyde-Antoinette. I mean, sorry, Cindy Hyde-Smith. ... the decision of Mississippi voters. I want to congratulate Scott Colome and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state. To my family, our campaign staff, all the wonderful staff that I've had through the years, volunteers, donors, and the thousands of Mississippians who stood with us, I cannot thank you enough. You have meant more to me than words can express. Together we have accomplished... So Cindy Hyde-Smith. And her concession speech to Scott Colome and this slightly unbelievable moment still in American politics. And Liz, you talked about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. And it's worth just remembering that the South used to be a Democrat stronghold. But it was back in the days when Democrats were pro-segregation. They were kind of anti the civil rights movement. And, you know, Lyndon B. Johnson, when he was president, introduces the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And those were things that tipped the South into the Republican corner and has stayed in the Republican corner pretty much solidly since then. A white working class. And after Hurricane Katrina, I traveled through Mississippi. To get to New Orleans and we stayed in Gulfport and then we moved on to Biloxi before going into New Orleans and it is impoverished is poor. There are signs on the shops after Hurricane Katrina. You loot, we shoot. And, you know, it's it's redneck country and you feel you're in a different part of America. It feels very different from New York and Washington. And dare I say Austin, Texas, as well, where you were last week. But, you know, this is the moment, as you say. Where all the stars aligned and suddenly you've got a map in America, which isn't just about Arizona or Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania or Georgia, the five states that were in play, you know, even at the height of Obama kind of. Mississippi wasn't in play then. Texas wasn't in play then. This is something new that has happened in America in these midterm elections. Look, I think something really significant has happened for the Democrats this time round, and that is that they have managed to flip the message. Of their party versus the Republican Party, because ever since Trump came on the scene, the narrative has been that the Democrats somehow were the coastal elites. The Democrats were the ones that were connected to Wall Street, connected to Goldman's, the Hillary Clinton, the George Soros, dare I say. Although he did put money into this race for the Democrats as well. And they have, I think, been on the back foot trying to prove that they were still the party of the working class because, frankly, they had stopped becoming the party of the working class. And that Iran war, the price of gas, the price of oil has been incredibly helpful, frankly, for the Democrats because they now become the party that rescues the vote. Against a backdrop of economic woe, which is why the pick another protein works, which is why Cindy Hyde-Smith works, which is why the Democrats are no longer trying to sort of scurry around saying, oh, we know we're not university educated and we're not a Californian. We're not New York. They just kept to their three words. And if you go back to Chuck Schumer again. He had three Cs, which he told every single candidate on the campaign to use relentlessly. It was cost, it was corruption, and it was chaos. And they have been so disciplined about getting that out. The first thing you start with is cost. Right. You tell everyone how much the Trump administration is costing you. You link it into corruption. If Trump's family weren't spending your money on their corrupt little ballrooms and businesses and jets and all the rest of it, you wouldn't be suffering. And if you didn't look up to Washington now and see chaos, the swamp that clearly hasn't been drained, you would not be feeling this way. And so I think within that messaging is something. It's far more profound than just one state here or one state there. It's the Democrats regaining, retaking the mantle of being the party for the working class. And if that holds, it gets them 28. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. Well, I think it's even broader than that. I think it's not just a part of the working class. It is, to go back to that kind of almost post-2008 discourse, it's being the party of the 99% versus the 1%, right? And what's amazing, I think, about Trump's political fecklessness, you know when you consider where he was in 2024 is how he has consciously or otherwise retreated from basically all of the pillars of his political potency squandered it so badly what were the things that led him to office in 16 and 24 well it's being the anti-war party yeah gone It's being the party of. Being seen to be actually represent the kind of dispossessed or the never-possessed, the left behind, gone. Being the party that in some ways or you know very unusual for the Republican party which which has defined itself against corporate America. And it's not just that he defined himself or allied himself back with corporate America. He allied himself with the most despised bit of corporate America, the billionaires and the big tech and big AI from which he hasn't resolved. And as you rightly say, Emily, as well, was seen to be completely decadent, you know, completely decadent about his own wealth creation and his own interests. And that has allowed. And it wasn't the kind of, you know, remember in 24, we were thinking, where do the Dems go now? Where do they go in the end? Trump opened up the political path for them, which was to become the anti-system, anti-establishment party. I mean, you know, the Dems now, I mean... They are Bernie Sanders' party. Unless it's just about being the anti-incumbent. I mean, that's what we don't know. Yeah, and Bernie lost the battle in 16, but he won the war for the soul of the Democratic Party because the Ossoffs, the Talaricos, the Alcides, they sound more like Bernie than Hillary. I mean, just to take issue with Emily about one thing she said when she talked about small ballrooms, there is nothing small about Donald Trump's ballroom that he's building at the White House. Don't talk about small Donald Trump and ball in the same sentence. I think there's a gold. Honestly, it's twice the size. Gold ballrooms, I think. If you look, there's a great aerial shot I saw the other day which shows that the ballroom is going to be about twice the size of the whole East Wing and West Wing of the White House. I mean, it's a monstrosity that is being built. Anyway, let me not get detained by that. But there are two slogans that Trump used very effectively in 16, which are now coming back to haunt him or have been turned on their head. One was drain the swamp. Well, frankly, he looks like the swamp, surrounded by all these billionaires who are all enriching themselves. Off the largesse of, you know, government contracts and the like, where corruption becomes the number one issue. Who would have thought that when Donald Trump was saying he was going to drain the swamp and he was the outsider who was going to clean up Washington? And the other is build the wall. Yeah, he did build the wall. And he had initial great success in stopping the flow of illegal immigrants from coming across the border. But then Stephen Miller gets hold of the old ICE agenda. Overreach is massively and an awful lot of people in America, white, black and brown, think this is profoundly un-American and it is overreach and that they have gone too far. And so two of the great things that he campaigned on are now being used against him. He went too far on immigration. He accepts that himself in the 60-minute interview. He admits it. That contributed. To Mississippi and also, you know, the fact that it is the party of the billionaires and their data centers and all the rest of it, which also played into it. The effects of these results, because now we've got basically full of results. It looks like the Democrats will win in Alaska as well. So they're going to have a really big Senate majority. The effect is whether this is a. Whether this represents a fully blown reopening of the map or not, and a changing of the electoral geography or not, what it definitely means is that it changes the contours of the 28 race. Because suddenly, you know, if you are a Democrat in Texas, or in Mississippi, or even states they nearly won, like Louisiana. I mean, actually they came in a few thousand votes of even winning in Louisiana. You know, you can say, look, we need investment here. We need money. We don't need to limit ourselves to just the Rust Belt and those sorts of places. And, of course, it terrifies the Republicans. They then have to start spending tons of money to keep Texas. Because, as we were saying last week, if you don't have Texas, if you don't have states like South Carolina, there's just no path for you in terms of winning the presidency. So, I mean, I wouldn't be convinced necessarily that this... I don't think the Dems would or necessarily will convince themselves that this is like some fundamental realignment, that it is, as you said, John, like it happened in the 60s, where the Dems, as LBJ famously said, had lost the South for a generation because of the civil rights changes that he made. I think it's much more contingent than that. I think it resembles, it feels to me that American politics in this case, you know, it's reminding us of what we're seeing in other countries, in European countries and other democracies, right, which is like a deep, corrosive, anti... incumbency feeling which is translating to huge volatility which could rebound on the Dems but it doesn't mean that it doesn't represent a potentially very potent opportunity. You know everything that was said before these elections was that all the kind of districts and whatever else in America are so gerrymandered very few seats ever change hands and very few states ever change hands and what these elections have shown is that quite a lot can change hands and that the solidity that that you thought was a Democrat. State or seat, or what the solidity of a Republican state or seat is nothing like as solid as you thought it was. Just an erosion thing, just finally. I mean, it is worth remembering, I mean, irrespective of what happens in the future. I mean, Mississippi, this is a state which had the Confederate flag. In its state flag until 2020 and actually before that a referendum two to one had rejected the idea of taking it out. So it's a moment. And 37% of the population is black, the largest black population in the US. Jensen totally denies that. I asked him today because I did speak to him today just to see if he's feeling all right, how you doing? And I asked him about that. And he said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy. I asked him that question. Did you have any idea that she was a spy? He said, I had no idea that she was a spy. And I really believe him. Just to talk about NVIDIA for a moment and kind of the, we'll come to the wider picture. NVIDIA's stock price over the past 10 days, it has lost a trillion, trillion dollars in value. The sums of money that are being spoken about with this company affect the whole U.S. economy. The U.S. economy is largely afloat at the moment because of A.I. And NVIDIA, with its high-tech chips, are a vital part of the whole A.I. revolution. And NVIDIA has been built up by one man. Jensen Huang is NVIDIA. NVIDIA is Jensen Huang. And I think that if he goes, it's not just, oh, it's like a football manager, we'll bring a new one in. It is about the fact that you are going to see something fundamentally upsetting what is the economic balance in America right now of big tech, of AI and America's battle with China to win that war. Yeah, this is a really complicated story because at the heart is the scale of NVIDIA. The relationship between Donald Trump and Jason Huang, a bit of a bromance, and the relationship between China and America in this huge AI war. And what is fascinating is, frankly, for the last year or so, we've been speaking about the existential threat of AI. Is AI coming for us? Is it going to be the end of humanity? Is it the doom? And what is starting to unravel, the very blocks that form AI, is this extraordinary human frailty of one man. Having not one, but two affairs. One, according to the FBI, with an alleged Chinese spy. Now, to get a sense of NVIDIA, you have to see it in a way as the central bank of AI. It makes chips. It was founded in 1993. It is the big supplier of artificial intelligence chips. So, in other words, everyone who wants to invest, everyone who comes through the market, everyone who wants to be part of the AI... sort of world has to go through NVIDIA. They are central to this. Yes, and... It is probably important to go back a little bit to the Biden administration to set out what happened in 2022. I was put on this by a journalist called Leo Schwartz. When Biden decided, this was remember the months before we even knew about ChatGPT, before we even had started talking about these intelligence language models, Biden decided that he would bring in an export control on NVIDIA Selling chips to China. In other words, he put up a firewall and said, American chips stay in America, they can't be exported to China. Jason Huang was not happy with this because he wanted the market. He earned about a quarter of his revenue from what was being sold in China. And so for him, what Biden was doing, what the Biden administration was doing was limiting the ability of NVIDIA to expand, to sell, to grow in China. And I mention this now because obviously. When Trump appeared like the fairy godmother in 2025, Jensen Huang suddenly starts seeing, ah, will there be a way through to sell to China now? Will there be a new market for me? Will it become easier to get round these export controls? But in the meantime, what we have since learnt is that his lover, Alex Wong, no relationship. ...was a former state media journalist in China... Yeah, for China Television. ...who then became an investor, who then set up her own business... In Singapore. ...in Singapore and other businesses in Malaysia. She started to buy Huang's chips and put them in Singapore, put them in Malaysia, put them in places where Chinese AI could get to them. And in other words, a workaround. Yeah. And so far, so normal in this being a guy who runs a big business that's worth a huge amount of money and he wants to expand the footprint of where he sells. That's kind of, you know, and Donald Trump seems a more amenable figure. But of course, it gets complicated because, you know, American intelligence is convinced that Jensen Huang's lover is a spy and she's working for the Chinese. And so that now has... national security implications and there are all sorts of people in the crosshairs now because apparently Donald Trump was warned about this months ago. A year ago. A year ago and chose to ignore it and Jensen Huang at the very last minute joins Trump on Air Force One on a trip to China. You've got Howard Lutnick the Commerce Secretary who's been banging the drum for Jensen and NVIDIA. And now is being seen in national security circles in Washington as compromised by this. And so there are Republicans who are gunning for Lutnick and he could be a casualty of this. How much did Trump know and when? And if he did know, why did he ignore it? There have been contradictory answers given and sources close to Marco Rubio have come up with very different accounts from Trump on what he knew and when he knew it. And this all comes as Trump is due to fly to China next week. This is potentially explosive. And so here we are, kind of not the news agent's natural home of talking about kind of the sale of high-tech AI chips and the marketplace for them and what they could do and the effect it could have on the economy. But this now goes straight, the blast area, the blast radius from Jensen Huang's affair could be enormous. Donald Trump denied, as you heard, being told last autumn. That Huang was probably compromised, was probably having an affair with this Chinese spy. He was then told before his trip to Beijing, the one that Huang joined him on in May. And it is curious that there are people, voices now saying, ah, Marco Rubio definitely reminded him of what he knew. Is this Marco Rubio trying to throw his president under the bus, say, you ignored what we told you, you ignored what you should have known a year ago, and now we're back here? But I think one of the interesting questions at this point is, and we know that the board gathered yesterday trying to decide what to do with this man who had not one, but two affairs, his second one with a subordinate in the office here, which is normally a kind of easy HR no. They don't know how to fire him. Because he is so central, not just to this company, or even to this sector, but to the entire United States economy. And this is the problem, really, where when you have a company that is now almost, well, frankly, bigger than a state. They don't know how to control us. There is no planning. There is no succession. There is no second. Elon Musk, I think, has reached over and said, oh, I'll find Huang a job. Well, great. You know, that's the answer to all our prayers. But how does NVIDIA exist without Huang? And what does Huang do if he's not at NVIDIA? Look, you think back to 2008 and the financial crash and that whole thing that there were some banks that were so systemic. To the global economy that they were too big to fail. These were institutions. We were talking about the biggest banks. And, you know, we saw those guys carrying out their boxes, you know, when they were eventually the bank eventually folded. And yeah, and the effect that that would have. We are now talking about an individual. Who is too big to sack. We're not talking about an institution. We are talking about potentially the US economy depending on one guy, one Taiwanese-born guy who hatches the plan for NVIDIA over coffee at Denny's where he was working as a server. And now we are saying we can't sack him. I mean, he may have done wrong, but he's just too important for the U.S. economy. It's the American dream on steroids. It's just nuts, absolutely nuts. And his story is the American dream. The tech bro who was kind of, you know, cleaning the floors at a Kentucky private school, who then goes to work in Denny's and is now... The CEO of this kind of multi-trillion dollar company. But it is interesting how all these things come back to Trump. You know, that Trump clearly is compromised when it comes to the Russia conflict, because he's kind of in bed with Putin. We've seen that now. He should be a real hawk when it comes to China. Right. That is that is very much in the sort of Republican spirit. And it's very much in the Trump spirit. Remember, the whole tariffs was about bringing China to its knees. And yet, by befriending this guy, by making Jason Huang in the centre of his kind of bro circle, ignoring all the reports that he was told that this guy... is probably fatally compromised because of an affair with a Chinese spy. Trump's like, oh, it'll be fine. Don't worry about it. Oh, he says he didn't. Oh, well, that'll be fine then. That'll be okay. Right, off we go. And this is the bit that doesn't pass the smell test about what is it, why is it that Donald Trump is so willing and kind of being so plausible about the explanations being given and isn't asking more searching questions because, you know, You know, Jensen Huang wanted to... Sell his AI chips to China. And Donald Trump, who says that the most existential battle that America faces today is its battle for dominance of this technology, and is yet kind of, OK, if you want to do it, never mind. And, you know, you've had congressmen like Jamie Raskin, Democrat from Maryland, raising big questions about what's going on. Well, the fate of Mr. Wang is the CEO of his company is up to his board. Now, apparently, he exercises a lot of influence over his board. Alas, that's not unique in corporate America. I don't know how independent a decision they'll make, but that's really not a question for us in Congress and government. We've got to be concerned about the chief executive of the United States, not the chief executive of that corporation. And what we've seen is China, allegedly, through this honeypot scheme and a woman who was acting Acting on their behalf. Was able to exercise influence over a corporate CEO who through his money was able to prevail upon Donald Trump to make lots of sales of the Nvidia chips, these AI chips to China. That's what is of central concern to Congress. Did this whole scheme. end up compromising the national security of the United States. That is our legitimate interest, and it's hard for me to believe that we won't conduct oversight hearings into that problem. So there you have Jamie Raskin saying, look, this is national security. This is the purview of Congress. We're going to be looking at this. Of course, you've also got simultaneously... Just literally now. He's literally, as we're talking to you, as we're recording this, we can now tell you that he has resigned. So Jason Huang, we have had a push notification from the FT saying that Jason Huang has resigned as chief executive after the affair allegations. We were just asking how this would pan out. Given that there is no clear succession and there is a massive hole that he leaves at the top of the company and possibly the top of the economy by going. But he will depart the company following revelations he had to extramarital affairs. OK, I've just got the Nvidia statement up now. It feels like we're doing breaking news again. Jensen Huang resigns. Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer, appointed interim CEO. Harvey C. Jones appointed first ever chair of the board. Board of Directors announced today that Jensen Huang has resigned as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board. Effective immediately. Colette Kress goes on to talk about her and her qualification. And then the board is initiating a search for a permanent chief executive officer and will consider internal and external candidates. And I'm just scrolling through as we're sitting here speaking. And it says NVIDIA's strength has always come from its people. And together with our leadership team, I'm committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the past 33 years, said the interim CEO, Colette Kress. So, I mean, it is a seismic shift in business life in America that this guy has now been forced out. And we don't know where this leaves investigations. We do not know where this leaves Howard Lutnick. Trump's Commerce Secretary. We don't know where this leaves Donald Trump and the kind of glib assurances that he gave. Look, a sidebar to all this is whilst the FBI were on to him, whilst the security services thought that something was going on, there was one very obvious tell in Jensen Huang. And that was, according to many women who are looking at the changes that have happened over the last few years, his very expensive... leather jackets. Here's $9,000 Tom Ford leather jackets. And I think the New York Post has put it like this. Huang is known among the Patagonia-vested dweebs of Silicon Valley as something of a luxury leather jacket aficionado. They are to him what black turtlenecks were Steve Jobs. Did nobody see the leather midlife crisis coming? That's the tell that everyone has ended up with. As we finish this recording, he'll be able to spend more time with his leather jackets. Well, before we go, we just wanted to let you know about the show we're doing tomorrow. On Friday, we've been speaking to Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. Very fine constituency, I must say. You're Your Birmingham accent got stronger then, as you said. I know. Well, were you waiting to hear my conversation with Jess tomorrow, Pap? We were coming right out. But she's obviously a former safeguarding minister and has... Dedicated her whole political life, but also her professional life before that to the fight against violence against women and girls. So we thought in this week of all weeks, it would be a good week to catch up with her and her reflections. I thought we'd just share a brief preview of it where I asked Jess what she thought of how brands. Brands. Casey described his rape, the anal rape that he subjected that poor woman to. Listen to this. Everybody in the country and everybody listening to this knows, loves, works alongside somebody who has harmed women. Statistically speaking, it would be impossible for that not to be the case. These people are people we are all around all the time and actually I think people are so frightened to say that they know they know somebody who's done this and they still like them and they wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt or they weren't sure like we we do we we the crowd. need to open ourselves up to that conversation because, do you know what, that's what victims experience. So what victims will have thrown at them in court is, well, why did you text him afterwards? Like, if he raped you, why did you keep in touch with him afterwards? Or indeed the description of Rape during the brand trial is a momentary lack of respect. Momentary lack of respect. I often think of anal rape as a momentary lack of respect. Sometimes, and we're all guilty of it, I commit momentary acts of a lack of respect. So far, I've avoided anally raping anybody. Well done, Jess. You can't argue with it, can you? That's straight talking from me, and that episode will be out tomorrow. And just to remind you, you can also get News Agents Plus, our new subscription model for members. There will be a Q&A session with Lewis and I. There's also a newsletter coming that I think Emily and I have written for. I don't think you've done anything. Well, I've written for it, and I know that Maitlis was due to be writing for it. So there we are. That is all to come. So that's tomorrow with you, and we'll be back on Monday on News Agents Plus this weekend. Bye-bye. Bye for now. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This has been a Global Production.