I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to this weekend to The Contrary Podcast, and it's just me. This is a solo podcast.

I do this once in a while because we have so many readers who have questions, and I want to be able to cover all of these subjects.

But a couple of quick housekeeping notes first. Please consider subscribing to my Substacac newsletter, to the contrary.

Almost all the subjects that we discuss are in that newsletter. It is

completely free. Many of you have been generous enough to become paid subscribers, but if you

subscribe to the newsletter, you will be able to listen to this podcast or watch it on YouTube

without any ads whatsoever. And also, there needs to be a place where we can, on a daily basis, remind ourselves,

which I'll remind you later, that we are not the crazy one. So I have just a stack of questions here.

Everything from Christenome to Pete Hegzeth to the war in Iran, the price of oil, the Epstein files, the midterm election. So we might as well dive in.

All right, on this weekend's podcast, where should we begin? Okay, I cannot resist talking about the firing of Christy Noam.

Rather extraordinary because, as you know, Donald Trump

has been extremely reluctant to give the Libs or any of his critics a scalp. You know,

and think about how bad you have to be, to be too deplorable to be in the Trump cabinet,

you know, to look around and go, yeah, Christy Noem is worse than Cash Patel. He's worse than Pete Heggzeth or RFK Jr. But Christy Noem managed to do that. And there are a lot of interesting questions about all this. You know, she was not. And these are the notes, and I mentioned this in my newsletter over the weekend, what she was not fired for. She was not fired for killing her puppy. In fact, that may be one of the reasons she got the job. She was not

fired. this in my newsletter over the weekend. What she was not fired for, she was not fired for killing her puppy.

In fact, that may be one of the reasons she got the job. She was not fired for the murders in

Minneapolis or the way that she lied about it. She wasn't apparently fired for this fancy

multi-million dollar plane, the, you know, the Gulf Stream jet. You know, only Trump gets planes like

that, but she wanted that. She may not have been fired for her special advisor sidepiece,

Corey Lewandowski, although that has been messy for so, so long. And then there was her terrible, terrible testimony before the United States Senate. It was too

awful, apparently even for Donald Trump. Look, Christy Nome was not fired because she lies,

because that's not disqualifying in the era of Trump. You know that, right? But she lied about

...