I'm Charlie Sykes.

Welcome back to The Contrary podcast.

It is Black Friday, so I decided to dress in Black Friday.

I have to say that Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays of the year,

because we all have so much to be thankful for. Black Friday is my least favorite fake holiday

of the entire year, joining meeting on this Black Friday, our good friend, the professor, Tom Nichols.

Tom, how you feel about Black Friday? I'm just not, I'm Friday? I do not leave the house on Black Friday.

I am actually a shopping guy.

So I, but I don't like big crowds, but I do love, like I go shopping for electronics and

clothes and things like that.

So I'm kind of a, you know, a mall guy.

But yeah, Black Friday, the thing is Black Friday brings out a lot of the worst than Americans after a day where we should be thankful for

everything. Well, and I always feel bad for the people who have to work on Black Friday. You know,

when I was a very, very young reporter for a daily newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, I remember I was,

I was too junior to get the day off. And so they would send me out because, again, bottom of the totem pole, you know, who draws the short straw? You know, go out and see whether or not shopping is busy. And you go out. Like, what is the story? Like, yes, there are a lot of people here. Yes, no, I mean, it's like, there's amazing bargaining. Go stand outside. That's, that's, that's right. And, and so as a result of that traumatic experience, I have really made it a, a kind of a life rule, never to work on the day after Thanksgiving, but in any case. Okay, so we have a lot to catch up on. And I don't know that we'll be able to do it,

but I did want to highlight what I think is probably the most, the most interesting story of the

entire week. And I'm sure you'd come up with the exact same one. The fact that I am going to

read this here.

The president of the United States, the person with authority over nuclear codes, the military, in the Department of Justice, is personally calling studio executives to broker the production

of Rush Hour 4.

Not Rush Hour 1, Mike Brock writes, which was culturally relevant in 1998, the fourth installment of a franchise that nobody asked for.

And he's using the august power of the presidency to try to revive the career of, and I haven't followed this, I have to admit, Brett Ratner, who left Hollywood after multiple women accused him of coercion and harassment

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