I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the To the Contrary podcast. You're going to have to bear with me for a moment. We're going to be talking about free speech and whether or not we're about to see the end of internet anonymity. And no, we're not all okay with that. We're going to be talking with Sarah McLaughlin. But as Ann Applebaum pointed out, this was one of the strangest weeks we've ever had, even by the standards of the weird times that we live in.

I mean, it started off last weekend on Easter Sunday with the President of the United States

dropping an F-bomb on Easter Sunday threatening the crazy bastards of Iran. A lot of us thought

that that was perhaps one of the most deranged tweets ever issued by a President of the United

States. And then Donald Trump said,

hold my beer the very next day. He threatened the death of whole civilizations. The president of

United States threatening the death of civilizations. We know how that turned out. That, of course,

was followed by Taco Tuesday, which really wasn't a taco event. It was more like a complete

strategic failure, followed up by kind of a series of cluster, you know what, as the ceasefire

didn't really hold, it's not clear what was in the deal, whether there was a deal, whether

there was an agreement, whether or not it's just guys

throwing spaghetti up against the wall. So we live in a land of confusion. And in many ways,

it seemed appropriate that the foggiest of wars would end up in the foggiest of sort of cease

fires. But that was really only part of the week. I mean, you have to take notes here.

What was the

strangest story? Melania Trump comes out on Thursday and issues that, you know, me thinks she

protests a lot. I had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein. We just

went to parties. You know, those emails between me and Galane Maxwell, they were inconsequential. But she did,

she did call for congressional hearings with the victims, which strikes me as very much off

message for an administration that just a couple of days ago had said, Todd Blanche, the acting

attorney general, said, yeah, we're kind of done. We're closing the files on the Epstein case.

And remember,

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