How Do I Become Cancel Proof? | An interview with C. R. Wiley

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The Gospel of Salvation and the Coming Judgment

Doom and despair on the radio. The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of Almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed, and they will perish. God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended, and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Introducing the Interview and Defining Cancel Culture

Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. We're your hosts, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we seek to answer the age-old question, how do I become cancel-proof?

Now, in order to answer this question, we'll be joined by author, writer, public speaker, and academic board member, C .R. Wiley. He's been happily married for over 30 years, has three grown children, and lives in the state of Washington.

He's written for Touchstone Magazine, Modern Reformation, Sacred Architecture, The Imaginative Conservative, Front Porch Republic, National Review Online, and First Things, among others. His most recent book is In the House of Tom Bombadil.

He's also the author of The Household and the War for the Cosmos, published by Canon Press in 2019. He's a board member for the Academy of Philosophy and Letters, as well as New St. Andrews College. So, Chris, we want to start off by saying welcome to the show,.

Welcome to Bible Bash, and thanks for coming on. Yeah, well, I'm honored to be with you guys.

Thanks for asking. Yeah, I know that personally I've listened to the podcast over the years and been edified and blessed by that, and so we're excited to have you on and have a chance to.

Talk about cancel culture. Great, well, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for listening.

Yes, sir. Well, maybe you could start out with just giving us a definition of cancel culture and maybe tell us why you think it's a problem. Well, I mean, cancel culture basically is an.

Environment, kind of a social environment in which because of kind of the, I guess, the cultural moment that we find ourselves in, you can find yourself essentially cut off in a variety of ways because of something you may have said, that you may have said by accident or, you know, because you really intended to say it.

But because of the kind of strictures regarding speech and kind of the high sensitivity that we see in lots of places, you could find yourself without a job, you could find yourself kind of without a platform any longer if you've kind of, you know, had a platform on one of the social media sites or even, you know, out of a job at your church, that kind of thing.

So, I guess that's what I mean by cancel culture. I'm not the person who coined the term. Maybe people who've, you know, been working with the term more would fill it out in ways that I have not thought of, but that's usually, you know, what comes to mind, at least.

For me when I hear about cancel culture. Sure. So, maybe you could distinguish it from something like church discipline or something along those lines.

Cancel Culture Versus Church Discipline

Yeah. Well, there's no process. It's just kangaroo court and you're just suddenly cut off without any even ability to defend yourself in many cases. So, I have a friend who was just recently canceled at Gordon College in North Shore, Boston.

Great guy. We've known each other for over 30 years and he made the mistake of actually, I guess, promoting biblical sexual ethics at a Christian college and found himself after his first address disinvited.

So, he was supposed to be there for a week. The first address led to his disinvitation and it was just simply one of these, you know, things that kind of came up from below, you know, just a bunch of people who, you know, took offense at some things that he said and made the administration there uncomfortable enough for them to say, thanks, but no thanks.

You can go now.

Wow. So, predominantly in terms of trying to distinguish it from other, you know, biblical, maybe forms of cancellation or something along those lines, you would primarily ground the distinction there between the two in terms of some sort of due process or some sort of not bowing down to the court of public pressure, that kind of thing.

Yeah. It's the difference between the mob and the court. Now, court, you can be condemned in a court and you can be disciplined, but also with regard to the church courts anyway, the purpose is restoration, whereas, you know, public cancel culture, it's obliteration.

It's just, they just want you to go away and never come back, have nothing to do anymore in the spheres that they,.

You know, sort of cast you out of. So, part of the reason then why it would be a problem would be that it has no redemptive purpose behind it. It just is an exercise in raw punishment, justice, punishment or destruction where you're just trying to essentially destroy.

A person. Yeah. And then when we were talking about standards of justice and, you know, what are we referring to? So, I made an observation about what occurred at Gordon College. So, Gordon College is a school that is self-consciously and identifies itself as a Christian institution, an evangelical college in the Christian College Coalition.

And as far as I can tell, the, you know, the standards of the school in terms of biblical sexual ethics have been unaltered. So, there's nothing that Marvin said, my friend's name is Marvin Daniels, nothing that Marvin said that would be out of keeping with those standards, yet he found.

Himself disinvited. Wow. So, fundamentally, cancel culture is imposing upon us an alien standard, essentially, a standard that's coming from the outside as to just keeping the pagans.

Happy, something along those lines. Yeah, I think that that's correct. I mean, there's a kind of interest in, well, you often hear this apologized for in terms of, you know, tone. We don't want people to, you know, have their feelings heard or think that we're speaking strictly from some kind of vitriolic and narrow-minded outlook.

So, you know, that's usually the way, at least within Christian circles or maybe in even academic circles that are self, I guess, you know, self-proclaimed, you know, bastions of liberal thought or liberal kind of standards.

And then little is done in terms of actually trying to explore the basis of the accusations, whether they're founded, whether they're justified or not. There have been just a lot of examples, a lot of, you know, situations that we could point to and say, this was just sort of a lynch mob, virtual lynch mob.

And people were punished for things that they should not have been punished for. They weren't even wrong. Just a lot of people took offense. And so, consequently, we've got a situation in which the offense is giving offense.

That's the offense. It's not whether or not that, you know, what was said was right or wrong. There really are situations in.

Which giving an offense is the right thing to do. So. It does seem like we're living in a time right now where essentially right and wrong are determined by how people emotionally respond to that information more, you know, over and against just typically what we would understand right and wrong to be defined as to their correlation to reality essentially.

And so now,.

Why Cancel Culture Feels New in the Digital Age

Yeah, that's right. Now, before we started the show, Chris, you mentioned that you're excited to talk about this topic because it's something that you think about a lot yourself. And so, I guess I would just ask you, you know, what caused you to really think so much about.

Cancel culture to begin with? Well, I suppose it's because I could see it coming, you know, years ago. I lived, you know, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for about a decade, right between Harvard and MIT.

And I was, I spent some time at Harvard. And so I was involved in it or I was kind of sort of situated in a milieu in which many of the, I guess, many of the trends that we see that have come to fruition and have spread throughout popular culture and not just academia, but, you know, entertainment and beyond.

I could see them in an early embryonic stage. And it didn't take a lot of work to extrapolate to kind of imagine where things would go. I did think that much of the evangelical world was vulnerable to kind of what we now call wokeism.

And I consequently began to structure my own life to become cancel-proof. And so I'm far enough along in that now that I'm fairly cancel-proof. And so I'm happy to talk about how I went about that, but that's the reason why, because I could see it coming.

And I felt like, you know, the first place to begin in terms of thinking this out is how do I, as an individual who at that time had, you know, small children, how do I, you know, sort of set myself up so that I'm not going to, well, find myself in a situation where I'm not able to take care of my family the.

Way I'd like. So what kind of, you know, being someone who has a pretty big platform overall, I'm sure you get a lot of people who are, you know, pretty angry about some of the things you say. I remember, I don't remember when I saw the video, but I watched your, I guess, the lecture you gave.

I think it was, you know, when the same night Doug Wilson gave his, I think, sexual by.

Design speech the same night. Well, actually they were different events. Oh, were they different? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But same hostility. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure you face stuff like that.

Pretty often. So, you know, do you, so could you just kind of, you know, spell out one of those experiences where you've had people kind of coming after you for some of the things that.

You believe and that you've said before? Sure. I mean, I've written things that have gone viral and I've gotten hate mail from around the world. So, so, you know, I could say that I'm, I'm infamous in the minds of some people.

Notorious Sierra Wally. That's right. That's right. I try to, I try to help, I try to convince people that I'm a really nice guy, but you know, some people just don't want to accept that. But yeah, so, you know, I've had those kinds of, those kinds of experiences.

In fact, you know, my, it was interesting that my, my years in Cambridge were very helpful in this regard. I was in an environment where initially just kind of give you a little bit of background on me.

I was involved in what could be described as a kind of earlier woke-ism. It was mostly oriented toward kind of economic issues and things related to ethnic relationships between groups and, and race relations and so forth.

So I was, I was kind of on the cool side of the table at one time, you know, people, I traveled the country and spoke about all those kinds of things. My friend, Marvin Daniels, that I just told you about, it was canceled at Gordon College, is Black.

And we actually were involved in urban ministry for about a decade together. So, and he's from, you know, New York City and worked in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago. I mean, so when it comes to, you know, his pedigree and my background, we've had plenty of, I guess, exposure, and I should focus more on myself, plenty of exposure to the, sort of the mindsets that we're dealing with here.

When I went to Harvard initially, there was a kind of a fun story behind that, and it has to do with what we're talking about. So I had a friend who was chairman of the Republican city committee for the city of Cambridge.

He actually went on to work in the Bush and Obama administrations and trade. But at that time he was there in Cambridge and he got a, he got a call from Harvey Cox. That name probably doesn't mean anything to you, but he was a big deal back in the sixties and seventies, kind of death of God theology, stuff like that.

He wrote a book called Secular City that sold like 2 million copies. Anyway, he was a big deal at Harvard divinity, kind of public intellectual, you know, got into New York times and the Atlantic all the time.

Anyway, so he's having, he has this class on kind of evangelicalism for students at, you know, Harvard divinity to kind of like, you know, learn about those strange creatures, you know, yeah, conservative Christians.

And so he called my friend David Trumbull and David said, I'm an Anglican. I don't fit the, you know, the bill, but I know some guys. And so he called me. And so I went into this classroom environment where, you know, there was, there were three of us and there were 30 of them.

And we, and we just kind of had it out for like an hour and a half. It was just like complete kind of free for all kind of bar brawl. And Harvey Cox was overseeing it kind of like the referee. He's a cool guy.

He's still alive. But afterward, he actually, asked me, he said, Hey, I'd like you to come to Harvard divinity. And so that's how I ended up there. Yeah. He became my sponsor, but every, every class was like this.

So, you know, the situation I faced at, at, you know, university of Idaho, they were really junior league. I mean, they were like the junior varsity of the liberal world. I mean, they were, they were actually kind of laughable in terms of just, they had, they had really had nothing that.

And they're done that got the t-shirt.

Well, yeah. I mean, I, I've, I've got, I fought their big brother, you know, so it was, it was kind of amusing for me. I was kind of, I wasn't just enjoying the experience and I, and I had plenty of police protection.

Yeah. I didn't have any death threats. Do you get it?

Technology, Leftward Trends, and the Making of Cancel Culture

Well, you know, one of the things this, this kind of gets back to can't, you know, how do you become counsel proof? I really do think that there are certain ways that you can like make yourself more vulnerable and you can kind of work at trying to make sure that those, those means by which people can get at you are removed or at least hard to find.

And so I used to get more than I do now. And it's because I've kind of systematically figured out, okay, these are the things that I can do to make sure that I don't get, you know, sort of hate mail in the middle of the night, wake me up at two in the morning, that kind of thing.

Fair enough. Well, one of the questions I wanted to get to before we maybe dive right into the, the method that you're withholding from us, but you know, I think there is a sense in which there's obviously nothing new under the sun and maybe that applies to counsel culture to some degree.

I mean, in some sense, I think counsel culture might be as old as Cain with his rock.

Yeah.

As far as that's concerned.

Yeah. The apostle Paul had a lot of cancellation issues.

He did. Yeah. I mean, same with trials. I mean, there's been plenty of, I think, historical examples of this kind of phenomenon, but, you know, what do you make of the current trend towards counsel culture and how do you distinguish it from historical manifestations?

It seems like there, there's something a little bit different going on today than maybe before, but maybe that reflects a historical naivety on my part, but what do you think?

No, I do think, you know, technology plays a big role. Things can happen really fast. And because everything is kind of funneled through the internet now, there are these choke points with regard to even your financial, you know, means to make a living or to even conduct business.

So, you know, businesses can be deplatformed that happens, debanked, you know, that kind of stuff. So I think that that, that technological aspect of the, of the situation does distinguish it. It also gives it a more, I guess, sanitary sort of character.

So like when the apostle Paul was canceled, they actually had to pick up stones, get their hands dirty and, and try to harm him physically. Right. You know, and that can do something to your conscience.

You might feel a little bad when you see some blood, that kind of thing. Whereas this is kind of a bloodless depersonalized kind of, even anonymous at times, right? Yeah. Yeah. Virtual experience and anonymous.

So people, and so I guess we figured out a way to do this humanely, you know, nobody's dying in the street. You just cut off their means of livelihood and let them try to figure out how to.

Take care of themselves after that. Out of sight, out of mind. Yeah. Yes. Something like that. Well, how would you rate it, you know, as a historical problem, as it relates to that? I mean, in terms of there, there are some things that distinguish it, the technology aspect of it.

I think, you know, the fact that there's so many people now who can basically have access to that information too. The ease of spread of information.

Yeah. I think, yeah, I think those things are, you know, are certainly unique to our time. I do think that, you know, we can't, we shouldn't over sort of like state the problem in the sense that, you know, Christians in the Soviet Union had it a lot harder than we have it.

And so there's not much a basis for comparison in terms of hardship. You know, I'm not consented to Gulag, you know. But in terms of, you know, being sort of, sort of aware that at any moment, something could be thrown at you that, that I do think is kind of, kind of new in the sense, you know, for example, here I am speaking to you on a computer.

I've got my cell phone or my smartphone. So the means of kind of access to me and my means of access to kind of this larger world, instantaneous,.

You know, speed of light, that's different. Isn't it sort of weird that, I mean, you know, you could have said something 15, 20 years ago, and it could be resurrected today through technology in a way that they wouldn't have that same kind of access to information in different times in history to be able to do that.

I've had it happen to me. I've had it happen to me.

And I've been in situations where people are bringing up stuff from years ago and I'm like, what did I say? I've said a lot of things, you know, can you give me a little context here? Where'd you find this?

You know, that kind of thing. And, you know, and so anyway, yeah,.

Leftward Trends, Critical Theory, and the Pressure on Language

That's very true. So I guess the follow-up would be, you know, how do we get here to where we are at this point where essentially you say one thing that someone doesn't like, and you're at a place where, you know, you lose your job, you lose your livelihood, go bankrupt, get sued.

How do we get here? What are some of the factors that have led to this kind of moment for us? Well, I think there.

Have been trends in political life and also academic sort of thought that have coalesced with the technology that we now possess. So these things have kind of come together in such a way to create a kind of perfect storm for this.

So, you know, if we think about kind of the leftward, the kind of strong egalitarian kind of undercurrent that we see in the modern world that has kind of spread throughout society and kind of leveled many things, including our ability to make legitimate distinctions between just, you know, even biological realities, like men and women are different, this stuff, you know, it goes back a long way, at least to the French Revolution, but I think that there are antecedents even to that.

And it's been kind of working its way through the West for some time now. So, you know, things like what we saw in the 1960s with, you know, a lot of what occurred with the rise of the new left, people, you know, who've been influenced by the Frankfurt School, people who've been influenced in more recently by developments and, you know, sort of literary interpretation with Foucault and Derrida and so forth.

All this stuff is kind of working its way out to kind of the ground level. I mean, I remember back in the 90s, I would talk about intellectual sort of trends and how I thought they would be eventually sort of felt in just, you know, popular culture and in just everyday work environments.

And people just thought I was nuts. People thought that I was overstating the case or I was, you know, an alarmist or something like that. And I'm afraid that I was right. Everything that I said was going to happen has happened.

And so, I can go back and look at stuff that I was writing in my journal back in like 1995, and I can say, yep, yep, yep, all those things happened.

So, partly you're mentioning critical theory and then postmodernism, the absence of any kind of objective notion of truth. And then, so you mix those two things together and then kind of the egalitarian impulse, you're putting that in there as well.

Right, correct.

Combine that with the technology and, you know, we're in a situation where feelings matter more than facts, essentially.

The Trades, Feminism, and Physical Reality

Yeah, certainly. You know, many people live very kind of constant buffered lives, you know, because they don't actually have to deal directly with the physical world. I think that's another thing to kind of consider in all this.

There are certain professions that are much more kind of susceptible to the woke-ism that we see around us than others.

Like math is not, math and science aren't, but then when you're in the realm of literature, is that what you mean?

Well, you do see it there, but math and science are starting to feel the pressure now in the way that no one anticipated they would. There are a lot of crazy things going on in those environments that a lot of people that I

Math is racist and two plus two equals five kind of stuff.

Yeah, almost that bad. But I was thinking more in this in terms of, you know, guys who work with their hands, they either can do the job or they can't. You know, as I'm driving down the street and I'm looking at all the guys who are working on the large construction projects, you know, in very liberal places like Portland and Seattle, they're all guys.

You know, they're all guys.

Isn't that amazing how that works, that feminism doesn't want to advocate for equality on the construction jobs, but only in the CEO kind of jobs.

Well, actually they try, but they fail. You see, this is like the story that no one wants to kind of get into. There has been a push for at least 30 years, because I can remember it, to get girls into the trades and they just simply wash out because it's too physically demanding.

And the work has got to be done. This is not about making you feel good. In fact, one of the things that you see and sort of, I have a background in the trades and I've been a contractor. One of the things you see is you got to make money and you are in a competitive environment.

And if you're not fast enough or competent enough, we just can't wait around for you. You know, so why don't you just go hold a sign on the side of the road that says, you know, stop and drive slow. And that's where you see a lot of the ladies event, you know, end up is doing that kind of stuff.

If they have any kind of, you know, direct experience with the trades or sometimes you'll get some, say, you know, home improvement company that's, you know, founded by a bunch of lesbians. And they, unless they've got like this strong community of lesbians and feminists who keep them busy, they're out of business before you know it.

It's a tough way to make a living. And there's a lot of physical, there's a lot of physically demanding aspects to it. You know, just picking up a worm drive saw is too much for most people outside of.

The trades. Yeah. That kind of reminds me of, you know, when I first got out of seminary, I did an appliance delivery job for a little bit. And, you know, we were working from, you know, four in the morning to seven at night and delivering 600 pound refrigerators and all that kind of stuff.

But there are some ladies who worked that job with us, but, you know, they largely, you know, as a guy in that kind of job, you know, if you had a lady that was, you're supposed to help you, you knew that you were doing, you're taking that refrigerator in there by yourself, essentially.

Well, and often what they'll have is, there are kind of these awkward moments where the weakness of the gentle sex or the fair sex is unavoidable. We can't pretend that this is not true. This refrigerator is on a landing two flights up and it needs to go up three more.

Either get out of the way, gal, or, you know, help. And if you can't help, then why did you ask for this job? That kind of stuff.

The Christian Case for Public Truth and Due Process

Yeah. A big part of cancel culture is obviously the idea that whenever the mob, you know, the general group of people don't agree with something, they typically just want to take whatever dissenting voices are there and just totally remove them by whatever means are available to them.

And certainly for Christians, there's plenty of views and takes in the world that I think any person who reads their Bible and believes that it's true and wants to commit their lives to following what God has said is righteous, there's plenty of things that the world believes that we would look at and say, Hey, I really wish that this idea would go away.

I really wish that anyone who's pushing for abortion would just totally stop, you know, advocating for it. And so there's a sense in which I'm sure there are plenty of Christians who might be tempted to say, man, I really want to cancel this person who keeps pushing for homosexuality, who keeps pushing for abortion, you know, whatever it is.

So Chris, do you think that there's ever an appropriate time for the Christian to partake themselves in cancel culture when it comes to.

Talking about unbiblical views? Yeah, I think there is. I mean, what we were referring to earlier as church discipline, when civil law has been informed by scripture, then the civil authorities find themselves in situations where they're enforcing a set of laws that has some kind of Christian input in their development.

So in a situation like that, Christians who are, you know, thinking as Christians and involved in sort of the political and legal process and doing so self-consciously as Christians are looking to secure the public good, enforce justice, these things.

It's not necessarily about whether or not something that was said hurt your feelings. Like, for example, just a few moments ago, I said some things about the differences between men and women that some people today would find deeply offensive.

But that doesn't matter. They're just real. And I'm not going to pretend that they're not. Now, they might try to craft laws to make it illegal for me to say things like that. And, you know, they would have some kind of philosophical and kind of political outlook that's informing their approach to what matters relating to law and justice and so forth.

And so they're pursuing that vision. I simply disagree. And I would argue that their understanding of justice is incorrect and that, you know, an understanding of justice that's informed by the natural law and by scripture is what we ought to be looking to if we want to order society in ways I described.

In other words, securing the public good and securing justice. But I guess that gets at what you're saying here, Harrison. And that is, I think sometimes there's an assumption that people have that if there are matters that I believe to be true because I'm a Christian, that means I can't call for their recognition in the censorship that sometimes goes on because it seems like we're just kind of foisting our views on other people.

The Christian faith is not based on our personal predilections or, you know, desires. The Christian faith is based on objective realities. And so because those realities are simply true, the Christian faith should be presented as public truth.

And so my argument would be that if we don't present the Christian faith as public truth, then in some sense we're implying that it's not true for you. It's just true for me.

So it's not about whether we're going to impose a certain morality on our country. It's what morality are we going to impose, essentially?

Civil Disagreement, the Image of God, and the Limits of Self-Censorship

Yeah, not whether or not, but which. That's the thing that I think is absolutely right. So, there's no neutral ground to kind of retreat to where we all can be play, you know, play it safe and be nice.

I think that we need to be civil with the people that we disagree with. But I don't think that, I think that the days of self-censorship are over. And I think we just need to get used to a future for the foreseeable future in which we need to, we're called to present our convictions as public truth.

You said that obviously one of the, one thing we do need to do is we need to be civil in our disagreement and in our pushing for, you know, righteousness in our nation. I'm assuming when you say that, you mean that we shouldn't be, I guess, essentially going after individuals who would disagree with us in the same way that it seems like, you know, the cancel culture mob typically does today, right?

Yeah. I think that Peter is pretty clear, you know, be prepared to make a defense for the hope that lies within you, but do so with respect. And the reason why we do it with respect is because of our convictions that human beings are made in the image of God.

So it's not just that we're trying to be nice. We're trying to win friends and influence people in a kind of Dale Carnegie way. We're not being manipulative. It's just simply, we're recognizing some facts, some realities.

And one of those realities is that the people that we disagree with are made in the image of God. And we need to, even as we disagree with them strongly and argue vigorously, recognize those realities and limit ourselves in terms of what we resort to.

Okay. All right. One more question before we get to the title question, Chris. I mean, the right essentially believes that cancel culture is largely a problem of the left, and then the left will in turn look at the right and essentially say, you know, you guys are being hypocrites.

You cancel just as much as we do. Where would you fall on that kind of argument? Well, I think we got at it a little bit.

Already, and that is if we have standards, then there are going to be applied. And then the question just has to do with, are we going about it in a just way? Are we Due process. Yeah. That kind of stuff.

And are the things that we're trying to enforce things that ought to be enforced? So I do think that there is a kind of range of matters in which we just kind of have to accept that short of the parousia, we kind of have to live with people who disagree with us in a range of things.

And then the question is, what goes in those categories or that sort of area in which we're unlikely to get any kind of useful set of standards applied? So an example would be, say, prohibition. So I'm sitting here enjoying a beer right now as I'm talking with you guys, but there are a lot of Christians out there who think that that's a problem.

And there's a range of opinions about the status of alcohol, even in the church. So, you know, that would be something I would categorize as a matter that we're going to have to have generous, just sort of generous.

Regard for the people who disagree with us about. Sure. So would you say then that cancellation that the left is engaging in is largely based on just the standard of hurt feelings, essentially, then what the right should be based on is more matters of objective truth with some sort of tolerance for disagreements at those levels?

Critical Theory, Language, and the Difference Between Left and Right

Yeah, I think on the left, what we're seeing.

Today can be described the way you just described, Tim. But I also think that there's a pretty significant difference between groups of people in our society about the nature of language and how it's used.

So if a person has come under the influence of, say, you know, critical theory, then language is just another tool or weapon to kind of get your way in the world. It's not necessarily a means by which we convey the truth or sort of reflect reality.

It's just sort of an extension of a particular group's interests. So if a person maybe feels like, you know, something that you've said is in some way harming their interest, you know, then those things should not ever be permitted to be said.

Whereas a more, I think, traditional understanding of language is that language has a capacity to express realities that are true and not just simply the interests of.

Any particular group. Sure. Well, we've been kind of beating around the bush with this, you know, cancel proof. You've spent years, you know, crafting your life in a way that you've sort of protected yourself from all of the death threats.

So now you actually get less of them. So it seems like whatever you're doing is working in some capacity. So could you go ahead and explain to us what you meant earlier when you were talking about, hey, I've crafted my life, I've sort of, you know, set up my life in this specific way that has allowed me to become.

Cancel proof? Yeah, I think that what I've done could be described as bringing sort of the things that I need to control closer to me, in other words, so that I can have greater, I guess, autonomy and agency.