hing that makes everything better. Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip.

Watch it go. Go. Oh, that's so good.

Well, the news is hilarious today. I'll start with the fun stuff. Keith Olbermann, who has been my critic for decades, decided to come in on me on my Fox News Christmas tree joke that I tweeted. Now the joke, I told you the joke yesterday, but just so I give you some context. I tweeted yesterday, I don't know who lit the Fox News Christmas tree on fire, but the two white guys who attacked Jesse Smollett are still out there somewhere.

Now that got a thousand retweets, which is big for my size account, and ten thousand likes. So can you conclude that it's funny? A thousand retweets, which is high, and ten thousand likes. Apparently people like Keith Olbermann have not learned that art and humor are subjective. No, it's really true, Keith. It's the first time you're hearing this, but it turns out there's no universal objective standard for humor. No, there isn't.

And so, Keith, if you don't find something funny but ten thousand people did, what do you conclude? Use your big old brain there, Keith. Ten thousand people laughed but you didn't. What did you conclude about the humor potential of that thing? Well, Keith Olbermann concluded it wasn't good because he decided that he would weigh in with this valuable comment on my joke, referring to the two white guys who attacked Jesse Smollett. He retweeted me and said, "Do they write your material too?"

Oh, I felt that like a dagger through the heart. I woke up this day feeling good only to find that Keith Olbermann does not approve of my comedic humor. Well, so I replied to him and said, I didn't know Keith Olbermann was still alive. I stole that from Elon Musk. You probably recognize that one. Yeah, I said I didn't know Keith Olbermann was still alive, to which Twitter user Kathy, also known as Mustang Girl Three, replied, "Only on the outside. He's only alive on the outside." Which I laughed about for about ten minutes. He's only alive on the outside. I'm still laughing about it.

Well, I think I'll talk about this later. No, I'll talk about it now. Jonathan Turley, who you should all be following and reading his stuff, probably the best writer on a lot of stuff. He's one of the best writers. He's a great writer, but he's also a lawyer, and so his takes on things are extra fun to read. And he's got this great take on Jesse Smollett's defense strategy, and I hadn't really seen it this way until he laid it out, and I liked it.

Which is that Smollett is trying for jury nullification, meaning he's not even going to convince them about the facts. You know, he's going to say the facts are all untrue, but beyond that he's got nothing because the facts are clearly true. There's plenty of evidence for them. So instead of doing something normal like, your evidence is not as good as you thought, which would be a normal defense, he's basically just putting himself on trial against the world and saying if you don't like the injustice in the world, I represent that.

So he's putting himself as sort of the martyr who represents the injustice against Black people in the system in general, trying to find at least one juror who says, you know, he is guilty as hell, but I'm still going to say he's not because I don't like the way Black people have been treated in this country. Do you think he's going to get away with that? Maybe it's not the worst play I've ever seen, because how hard would it be to convince one person to just do something that's non-standard? Probably not that hard.

So I don't know if he's made enough of a case that he's really the victim in this, but it's a bold strategy. Not one I would have used, but I don't know that this would have made sense in any other world. We've reached the point where everyone agrees the facts don't matter anymore. Do you remember when people argued about that? There was a time when I kept saying the facts don't really matter, and that what you hear about the facts or everything that's never been true, never been true, never will be true.

The facts matter sometimes in science over time, but in any moment the facts are usually lies. We can't tell what's true and what's not. So the facts don't really rule our existence and never will. So I guess this is in a weird way Jesse Smollett's approach. The defense is a high-awareness defense, meaning he understands the world maybe better than most people because he knows the facts won't be relevant. And I think he's trying to make them certainly not relevant by painting a framework in which you're judging the system itself. You're not even judging Jesse.

Now imagine that you're on the jury and you do have sympathies in that direction. Do you think that Jesse Smollett should go to jail for staging a hate crime hoax that inconvenienced law enforcement but not so much other people? Well, most of you do think so because it's clearly a crime. I mean, there's a reason it's a crime.