038: Censorship and Cancel Culture — I'm Speaking Out

Today, I'm speaking freely about my deep concerns with censorship and cancel culture, particularly in the arena of alternative wellness. If you value natural and alternative health information — and want to continue to have access to this information — this episode is an important listen. Here's what's covered: 

• Why I haven't spoken up about this until now
• What's going on with censorship in the natural and alternative health arenas
• The truth about censorship (it started way before the current global crisis)
• The moment "I saw the writing on the wall" and knew this had massive consequences
• Important questions about where we draw the line when it comes to free speech vs. safety
• My thoughts on the rampant phenomenon of cancel culture, and how it relates to censorship
• How we inadvertently censor ourselves and perpetuate the issues
• How our current global climate is activating generational trauma 
• Important lessons from history and literature that we must take into account
• Practical action steps you can take if you are concerned about these issues

Get the full show notes with links to resources here.

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Music: Joseph McDade, "On the Verge"

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to MindSpeak. I'm your host, Holly Higgins, a hypnotherapist and holistic mental health nerd. And I'm here to help you use the power of your mind to become happier, healthier, and more of who you really are. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different than my usual content, but it is something that I am extremely passionate about and something that I can no longer not speak about. So today I'm going to be talking about censorship and cancel culture. And I have been very hesitant to speak on these topics because of the incredibly divisive climate we find ourselves in today. And not only that, but honestly, I've been getting my footing with my opinions this entire year. I mean, it has taken me some time to really filter through information and decide what resonates for me and what's true for me. So it's not just that I've been sitting in a corner like afraid of what to say and afraid of what people will think, but honestly, I've really been trying to think for myself and gather my own opinions before I spew them onto the world. And my opinions continue to evolve as the global situation continues to evolve. And so, right off the bat, I want to encourage you to listen to this episode if you care about access to natural and alternative health information, whether that is in the realm of mental wellness or spirituality or natural health and wellness, if your life has been positively impacted by access to this type of information, that would include this podcast, that would include any natural health groups that you are a part of on social media or natural health influencers or authors that you love and who have helped you. If you care about continuing to have access to health information that falls outside of the mainstream, please, please, please, I urge you to listen to this episode and to think critically for yourself, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, because unfortunately, a lot of the things that I am about to share today have gotten extremely politicized in very, very, very ugly ways. And at the end of the day, where I stand is like, I just want to continue to have access to alternative information, and it is being ripped away from us by the day. Just to give you a little bit of context, if you are new to the show or you are unfamiliar with my story, I used to have 10 different diagnoses. I used to be on 10 different medications. I was told by doctors that the best I could do is sort of kind of halfway manage and just get through life until I died. And one day I decided to reject that story and I started pursuing alternative health treatments, and I no longer take any medications. I have zero diagnoses. I am in excellent health. And that is all because I had access to alternative health information, alternative protocols, alternative practitioners. I did all the woo quacky stuff that everybody says doesn't work, and I radically healed. So that's where I'm coming from. That is my context, and I do not just throw this statement around, but I likely would have ended up killing myself if I didn't find the path that I was on. I was severely, severely depressed. And one other thing I want to add is that I used to be an immunocompromised person. I struggled with autoimmunity. I had a very weak immune system. And it was the information that I found and the tools and protocols that I implemented that strengthened my immune system. And ever since I saved my own life, I have always thought for myself. I have continued to question absolutely everything. Because what that experience showed me is when I listened to the mainstream, what I when I listened to what authority told me, and when I ignored my inner pilot light and my own inner truth of this this doesn't feel right, this doesn't make sense. Surely there's got to be another answer, another way. When I ignored all of that, I stayed sick. And when I started questioning the mainstream narrative about my health, even though people told me I was crazy and none of that stuff would work, and good luck, and like, wow, you have really serious diagnoses, like, you know, not sure if that stuff's gonna help you. When I threw up a middle finger to all of that, I got better. All of that is to say that I am a person who thinks for herself, I am a person who questions things, and I am a person who has very much been failed by the mainstream. I want to take a minute here and recognize that you might not know what I'm talking about when I speak about censorship of natural health information, when I talk about cancel culture, you might be like, wait, what's going on? Did I miss something? She sounds like really fired up about this, but I'm not even sure I know what she's talking about. I falsely assumed that everyone was aware of all the natural health censorship going on. And I've talked about it on Instagram a couple times, and I have been surprised by the number of people who have DM'd me and said, I had no idea that any of this censorship stuff was going on. Wow, you really opened my eyes. And that's another reason why I am choosing to record this podcast. Because if you aren't aware of some of the things that are going on, I want you to be aware of them because if you value access to information like I do, you need to be aware of what's going on. Okay, so what is going on? Censorship in the natural health space has been happening for several years, but within the last year, especially since COVID, it has ramped up exponentially. So what this looks like is that accounts that promote or talk about natural health are being flagged, they are being quote unquote fact-checked and having the posts hidden as false information. Posts are being deleted, Facebook groups are being taken down, major search engines push natural and alternative health site rankings way down. So they are next to impossible to find organically. People's accounts are being deleted, people are being banned from social media who are talking about and sharing natural health information. And by the way, this is happening in many places besides the natural health world. Lots and lots and lots of information is being censored and banned and deleted for all sorts of different reasons. But basically, the overlord of big tech and big media is deciding what is and what isn't fit for our consumption, and they are editing their platforms accordingly. Now, it's not my goal to speak to everything that is going on right now. That would be impossible. Like I said, the truth is that censorship is happening in many, many places. Today I want to focus on the censorship that is happening in the alternative health space because this is one of the areas that I am most passionate about and that I am directly affected by. So one of the big, big things that I want you to know is that censorship in the natural health space isn't just something that started with COVID. Yes, it has ramped up during COVID because there has been a lot of concern about the spread of misinformation, you know, keeping people responsible during a time of this global situation. When I've briefly talked about this subject on social media, I've gotten several DMs from people. Hey, I understand your concern with censorship, but like in a time of a global pandemic, it is very different. We have to keep everybody in line, we have to be following protocols, we have to make sure everybody stays safe. And I hear you. I think a lot of people assume that what is going on right now with the censorship is about preventing the spread of quote-unquote misinformation during COVID. But I really believe that it goes a lot deeper than that. Now, if you want to look long-term within the scope of history, natural and alternative health information has always been censored in some way or another. But in the United States, in the online media space, it's really been happening a lot within the last two to three years. We, and when I say we, I mean alternative practitioners and voices, really started noticing that we were getting hard about two to three years ago. So my website traffic rankings dropped significantly two to three years ago. My colleagues' websites, their rankings dropped significantly two to three years ago. These are people who have poured their hearts and their souls and their livelihoods into making this information accessible. They have poured their hearts and their livelihoods into building businesses. And many of us were flatlined, completely decimated overnight because these online structures that we built that were supporting ourselves, which seemed stable and solid for so many years, Google and big tech just pulled the rug out from under us overnight, and our website rankings plummeted. Now, many of us recovered, many of us got creative, many of us turned to social media and different sorts of outlets to get our voices out there. And now the same thing is happening in these other digital homes and digital spaces that we've made for ourselves. The rugs are being pulled out from under us, accounts are being deleted, voices are being silenced. We have been frogs in pots of boiling water for a while. We have been conditioned to think and to accept that all of this is normal. And now it's just becoming really, really obvious what's happening. Now the censorship, which we've gotten a little hit here and a little hit there, and a little punishment here and a little ding there, now it's just becoming over the top where it's like, no, your whole freaking account's just gonna be removed. So to everyone who thinks that all of the censorship is just about keeping us safe during COVID and making sure health misinformation doesn't spread, this has much deeper roots. This is much more insidious. This has been going on for much longer, and COVID has acted as an accelerator for this phenomenon. I really saw the writing on the wall about a year, year and a half ago. Oh my gosh. So I think it was late 2018, early 2019. I was a member of a very large group on Facebook. Uh, it was our community group for the Nutritional Therapy Association. So all graduates of the Nutritional Therapy Association, we had this Facebook group. We had that group for years. It was an absolute goldmine of protocols and masterminding and exchange of ideas. It was like a natural health encyclopedia. You could just go into that group and search. Like I could have a challenge come up with a client who was having really tricky health symptoms, and I could go search in that group, and I could find people who had dealt with that challenge before, and I could ask my colleagues for help. It was a really awesome group. And I watched it disappear overnight. And as far as I know, we don't we still don't have answers as to why that group disappeared overnight. I watched as members were deleted from the group. No admins had any answers whatsoever. And then over the course of an evening, the group was closed, it was banned, it was locked, nobody could access it. It was the freakiest, one of the freakiest things I've ever experienced. To have years of wisdom erased without warning. As far as I know, Facebook didn't even provide a warning that this group would be coming down. And again, you know, any of you are free to message or correspond with me about this, but as far as I know, we still don't have any answers as to why that group was removed, who removed it. It is all extremely fishy. So when that happened, I saw the writing on the wall. I saw that the websites had been censored, I saw that that beloved group got deleted overnight. And that was one of my big motivations to start this podcast because I saw that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, I saw that all of those digital homes were no longer safe for me to continue sharing my message. Now, do I continue to use them? Yes, because they're monopolies and I've built my house there. And just like when you have to move a house, it's not an overnight thing. So I do plan to migrate to different platforms, but that's the thing about how social media has set itself up as a monopoly. We've all built our homes here. And unless we all get together on, hey, maybe we should make this a national thing on December 1st. We all get together and we migrate to MeWii and Telegram, which are the platforms that I am in the process of migrating to. Unless we rally together and all migrate to these other platforms at once and boycott Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, it's hard to move from those houses because they are monopolies. We have set up shop there. We've gotten very comfortable there. Not to mention we have gotten addicted to these platforms. And these platforms are intentionally designed to be addictive. Whenever you see those little red notification buttons or you have a message, it's a dopamine hit. And most of us are incredibly addicted to that dopamine hit. I'm addicted to it. I manage it, I've got boundaries around it, but I am a functioning social media addict, just like you probably are. And it's designed to be that way. They've got us. So you have these highly addictive platforms where we have all gotten cozy, and now you have big tech censoring what we are allowed to see. How convenient they're addicted, and now we get to manipulate what goes into their brains. And if you follow the trails of money, which is very important to do if you are committed to thinking for yourself, if you follow the trails of money, you find that big tech is in bed with big pharma, is in bed with big food, is in bed with big government, and everything that is being funneled down to you is ultimately serving an agenda of profit and control. If all of the platforms that we use to speak and share and research are being puppeteered by the strings of these giant industries, how can we trust that the information that we are receiving is unbiased? We can't. It is more comfortable, it is easier to go along with the mainstream, to believe what we are fed, because to believe otherwise means that we have to wake up to the fact that we are in the matrix. We have to wake up to the fact that everything we thought was a given isn't a given at all. When you take a step back and you look at everything that's going on and everything that's being censored, you have to ask yourself, what is really going on here? Legitimate doctors who have different or alternative opinions of COVID are being rampantly censored. And if all of us are so pro-science, which we claim to be, and if science is still based on the scientific method of gathering information and creating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses and collaborating with other scientific minds, why would we want to silence a whole group of scientific minds? Suddenly, oh, science, science is God, but the only science that is real is the science that is coming out of the select mouths of a few scientists that are very heavily tied to industry. How does that make sense? If we have a global pandemic going on, and our number one priority is to get this global pandemic under control so that we can all be healthy, we can all go back to living our lives, wouldn't we want to come up with the solution as quickly and as and as expediently as we could, with as many brilliant minds at the table as we could possibly gather? How come all of these other minds are being excluded? And I think that's my biggest question is where do we draw the line? Because as I've said, when I've shared about my concern on social media, I usually get messages from people saying, yeah, but there's so much really horrible misinformation out there, and we really have to get a handle on all of these crazy COVID conspiracy theories because they make people irresponsible and it gets out of control, and we have a global situation to manage. And I hear you, I really, really do. But where do we draw the line? It is a slippery slope. It is a very slippery slope. Slippery slope. I have seen my colleagues post simple immune boosting tips. Get some sunlight, have vitamin C, exercise, basic immune boosting wisdom that we have had for centuries, very innocuous immune boosting wisdom that we have had access to for centuries. And nothing in these posts has claimed anything about, you know, COVID isn't real or any of the conspiracy nonsense. Like, this is just like basic immune system health principles. That can be an adjunct to traditional therapies. These posts have been flagged as misinformation. They have been fact-checked and claimed to be false. No one's ever claiming that these things can cure COVID. They're just saying, hey, if you have an immune system and you're concerned about your immune health, maybe try these things. Why is that so dangerous? Why is that misinformation? I've started to scratch my head. I've been scratching my head for a while. It doesn't add up. And on September 17th, just a couple weeks ago, I will link it up in the show notes. I saw a routers article about how Facebook is no longer going to show health groups in recommendations. They're already deleting them back and forth, and now they're not even going to show up in your recommendations. And if you want to press fast forward into the future, it's looking like you won't be able to access natural health information on any of these social media platforms. All under the guise of saving lives and keeping people safe. And I hear, well, we have to do something because the misinformation is spreading like wildfire. And yeah, the algorithm isn't a perfect science, but we have to do something to stop the spread of misinformation. To me, that is like saying, oh, I needed to get my gallbladder removed because I had issues with my gallbladder and I went in for gallbladder surgery, but they took out my lung and my small intestine and six of my ribs. But I'm really okay with that because they got the job done and they needed to do what they needed to do. And like we had to do something. My gallbladder was really hurting. I want to know what about the lives of the people that are going to be claimed because they no longer have access to alternative health information. I was one of those lives. If we could do a little time machine shenanigan thing, and if if I was really sick in the way that I used to be really sick right now, I don't know if I would be able to heal in the way that I healed because access to information is becoming so limited. It is not just the stuff about COVID that is being slammed. It is all natural and alternative health information that is being slammed. My Instagram account has been shadow banned for months, and people say, well, you can never really know if the whole shadow ban thing is real, yada yada. My stories used to very consistently get between 1,500 and 2,000 views. Now on average, my stories get about 200 views. The reach and the engagement on my posts is way, way down. And I'm not even somebody who's been super vocal about COVID or approaches to natural health and COVID at this time. But I am somebody who has consistently and long term posted about alternative health information. And this isn't just me coming on here and whining because my numbers are down. This comes from a place of deep concern of what is happening to voices in the natural and alternative health space in general. We are being censored blatantly with deleted posts, with flagged posts, with shadow bands, with account removal. And we are also being censored covertly because we see these things happening to our friends and our colleagues, and we think to ourselves, ooh, I shouldn't tread into those waters because look what happens to people when they tread into those waters. They just get deleted. And so we stay silent out of fear of being censored, out of fear of being called out, out of fear of being othered and labeled the bad guy. And so when they censor us, we end up censoring ourselves. And this is only fueled by the rampant phenomenon of cancel culture that is going on right now, which I'll speak to in a minute. But I have decided, you know what? I'm not censoring myself anymore. I've done it for too long, I've bitten my tongue, I've waited for this to pass, and it is only getting uglier and uglier. And I talk to colleagues in my DMs every single day who feel the same way that I do. Something isn't right here, something isn't adding up. But I'm not dare going to voice my opinions because to do so feels like I'm murdering myself. Feels like I am opening myself up to criticism. That feels strangely like being burned at the stake. And I think that energy is coming up for so many of us. This feeling that if I speak my truth, I will die. If I speak my truth, I will be burned at the stake. The current astrology that is going on right now, and I'm talking about deep astrology, not like, oh, I'm in Aries, but like when you really truly look at the astrology, the planets were in very similar alignments during the Salem witch trials. The planets were in very similar alignments during past pandemics. And so a lot of that energy is resurfacing for us of what will happen to me. Will I be safe? Will I be okay if I speak my truth? That generational trauma is surfacing for us, both around what it means to speak our beliefs when we feel like we could die for it, and the generational trauma of living through global pandemics, global unrest that is surfacing for all of us, that is in our DNA. So if any of you are feeling like, I want to speak my truth, I want to stand for what I believe in, but I feel like if I did so, I might die. Maybe you did die for it in the past, and maybe that's why it's so scary. So we've got this censorship coming from big tech. We also have self-censorship because we don't want to go out on a limb because many of us have seen very clearly what happens to our colleagues and our friends who go out on a limb. And also we have a lot of pressure from others to not go out on a limb. Friends, family, acquaintances. Make sure you're on the right bandwagon, because if you're not on the right bandwagon, we will cancel you. This phenomenon has been very, very strong the last few months. People have lost their jobs, they have lost their platforms, and some people believe rightfully so. Rightfully so, they should have been canceled, they are a smear on humanity. I'm glad that they're suffering now. So many people have been canceled for so many different reasons, politically, ethically, for what they believe about health. Like, I cannot recount all of the people who have been canceled. Is there a list? Does anybody have a list? I'm gonna talk about lists here in a minute. But it is this phenomenon of just completely outcasting people. And I am gonna talk about one individual in specific who was on this podcast, Dr. Nicole LePera. She has come under a lot of criticism. She is having a lot of hateful things being said about her. There are pages now dedicated to trying to take Dr. Nicole LePera down. And I get DMs all the time from people asking me to reconsider my support of Dr. Nicole Lepera. There is like a full-fledged underground war against this woman who has addressed the claims, who has attempted to make amends, who is, by the way, producing some of the most helpful, incredible content on the internet. And no matter how much she apologizes, no matter how many amends she makes, no matter what she does, these people that want to cancel her, nothing that she does can make it right. To these people, it has been decided nope, she's canceled, that's it. Bye-bye. You're over, you're done. How is this going to get us anywhere when we just go around labeling people with scarlet letters, outcasting them, saying, you're over. How do we expect to change society like that? And what I'm seeing is a lot of people are really afraid to not jump on these bandwagons. They see the division, they see the heat, they see the consequences, and they say, Oh, I better pick a bandwagon, I better pick a side because I don't I don't want to be one of these cancelled people. I don't want them to come after me. And I used a mocking tone just there, but listen, I get it, I get it, because the bandwagon that I have chosen up until now is oh, let me be mostly silent about what I really think so I don't rock the boat. But you know what? I'm jumping off all the bandwagons, including my silence bandwagon. I'm gonna be down here on the streets thinking for myself and dodging all of these big angry tires that feel like they're gonna run over me at any minute. I get it, there are very real implications for speaking your truth right now. There are very real consequences. But if we stay silent out of fear of rocking the boat, the loudest, most hateful voices are going to take over, and then we're gonna sit alone at home in our rooms feeling crazy. Like, gee, am I the only one that feels a little bit weird about this? Am I the only one that thinks that something's not right here and maybe we should be treating people a little bit differently? I must be the only one. Ugh, maybe I should go get on one of those bandwagons because it doesn't feel good to not belong, and I just want to belong somewhere. Belonging is our most core human need. So, of course, in this time of chaos, we are going to make reflexive decisions about where we belong and what we believe because the consequences feel so great. All of this needing to be on a side, all of this needing to be on a particular bandwagon is fueling the censorship further, and it is making us okay with censorship. It is actually making censorship something that we think of, and when I say we, I mean like the mainstream, it is making censorship something that we view as good. And if you notice, if you pay attention, you will start to realize that the media, the media only censors one side of the narrative, they don't censor the other. I don't care what your politics are, just start paying attention to what side of the narrative gets censored, what side of the narrative gets favored. And because we are so wrapped up in politics and especially not really politics, but in my opinion, we are wrapped up in the personalities of the candidates. Many of us have have just become okay with censorship because the information being censored on a broad level is part of the side that we don't agree with. So, oh, that's great that that's being censored. That's crazy information. Of course, that would be censored, that's bonkers. Censor that political candidate because he has gone off his rocker. Censor that health person because they're spreading misinformation about COVID. Censor it all because that is the bad information. And look, once again, I am using my mocking tone, but I want to slow it down for a minute. And I want to say, I'm not denying that some of the things that get censored are bad information. I'm not denying that some of the things that get censored are absolutely bonkers. What I am trying to point out is where do we draw the line and how much of our freedom of speech are we willing to give up? What happens when we all wake up one day and see that the mouse took away all of our cookies? So, do you know that old children's story? When you give a mouse a cookie, first you give the mouse one cookie, and then the mouse wants like a million cookies. It's the same concept of like, you give somebody an inch, you're going to take a mile. How much are we willing to give up in the name of safety? When does that line get crossed? When do we start to become uneasy about? Oh, I don't have access to the information that I used to have access to. When does that happen? Most of us listening to this podcast, and again, I am making assumptions and generalizations, but we have been alive in a time of history, and especially if you live in America, a time in history where things have been relatively comfortable and stable. Now, obviously, there was 9-11, there's some other big events, now we are living through this pandemic, but I think many of us are very, very entitled and just assume that all of the really bad, crazy, chaotic stuff of the past is behind us. And now we are entitled to no really explosive things ever happening again in our lives. Like, yeah, okay, we're living through this pandemic, but like a civil war or an no, no, no, no. All that's behind us, that was in the past. I, again, I'm making generalizations and assumptions, but I think a lot of us feel that way. That, oh, the bad stuff is in the past, really crazy stuff could never happen to us again. And I felt that way for most of my life. I felt entitled to a safe and comfortable and cushy life where major national and global unrest was something that I was sheltered from and I didn't need to think about. But with all of the incredible division going on, I'm starting to really question that assumption. I saw a meme the other day that brought me to tears, and not in a good way, not in like, oh, I'm crying, that's so beautiful, but like, what the hell is happening to our country sobbing tears? And I saw this posted in many different places. This meme said something along the lines of, if you see your friends and family posting about how we all need to love each other and remember that we are still neighbors after the election, those are the secret Trump supporters and they can keep that. So basically, what the meme is saying is loving your neighbor is now politically incorrect if your neighbor voted for Trump. If your neighbor voted for Trump, you can't love your neighbor. Now, me personally, I don't care who you vote for. I really don't care who you vote for. I see all of us as humans. But what I am very concerned about is that we are starting to look at other humans and label them as not humans, as not our neighbors. Neil Strauss posted something today that was very, very resonant with me. He was talking about this phenomenon and he said, This way of thinking has more in common with genocidal regimes than peaceful ones. When we lose our empathy to this degree, we lose our humanity. And that's what I've been observing across the board is just a complete lack of empathy for any side that doesn't align with ours. A complete lack of empathy and a complete unwillingness to question anything that doesn't fit on our box or in our box or anything that doesn't fit on our wagon. And my question is, if we don't have love, what do we have? If we don't have the ability to dialogue, what do we have? Have we forgotten the history books? Are we so entitled to think that really bad things can't happen in our lives? Nazi Germany was less than a hundred years ago. MKUltra, which was the CIA mind control experiment, wasn't halted until 1973. Cigarettes were once marketed as physician tested and approved until the 50s. All of these agencies that were supposed to have our best interests in mind were working extreme evil very, very recently, and they continue to work extreme evil. And we keep our eyes closed to the fact that that's going on, and we say, not in our lifetime, that could never happen to us. We are living Fahrenheit 451, we are living 1984. If you read those books, we are in the modern day book burning. Now they don't call them thought police, they call them fact checkers. And now there is something called the Trump Accountability Project, which is a website that takes names of people who voted for Trump, compiling a list and the big fat headline on that website says, remember what they did. And so if you must know, I think all of the candidates suck and I don't care who you voted for. But creating this sort of vague hit list is absolutely terrifying. Because you know who else created lists? Joseph Stalin. And you know what Joseph Stalin said? He said, our enemies must be labeled once and for all to put an end to their subversive work. When has censorship or list making of the enemy ever proven good for a society long term? Now you might be sitting here in the short term, angry about what's going on in the world, angry at ideas that feel repulsive to you that you don't align with, mad at the other wagons. I get it. And you might feel really justified in well, they deserve to be on. That list and you might see that in the short term, mmm, it feels really good to put those people on that list. But when in our history, and history always repeats itself, when in history has it ever been good to put somebody on a list? Has it ever been good to censor society? It's never ended pretty. Someone wants to send me an example of when that has ended pretty, when that has been ultimately beneficial, I'm all ears. As far as I'm concerned, as far as I know, I'm pretty sure that's always ended in absolute disaster. There is this trend of latching on to one damning piece of information about someone, and then using deductive reasoning and saying, oh, if they did this or if they said this, or if they stand for this, they must also believe this, this, and this, and that makes them the enemy. And then people are unfairly thrown under the bus. This is happening left and right. It is making us hate each other. It is terrible. And when we suppress free speech to unreasonable degrees in the name of safety, when the idea of loving our neighbor is politically incorrect, we are living in dangerous times. And I've been afraid to speak up, but I am choosing to speak up because so many people are afraid to, and I've been inspired by others who are using their voice, and I am going to use mine because what is at stake is bodily autonomy, medical freedom, access to alternative information that saved my life, and saved the lives of many people that I love, and freedom of speech. And these are some of my highest values, and I will not see them stripped away and know that I said nothing. If I continue to watch these things strip away, and I know that I said nothing, I will never be able to live with myself. Too much is at stake here. And so you might be wondering, what can I do? Because hearing all of this, living through this, I know it can feel very, very hopeless. And so if you are also passionate and aligned toward the things that I shared in this podcast, here are a few very tactical and practical things that you can do. Number one, if you value somebody's work, whether that is somebody that you follow on social media or an author that you like, a thought leader that you admire, get on their email list as soon as you possibly can. Because as it stands, email lists are mostly safe for now. The people who own those email lists are mostly in control of what they can send and all of that. So if you admire somebody's work and you want to continue to have access to their work, get on their email list ASAP. You can get on my email list if you haven't yet. That will be linked up in the show notes. You can go to mindspeakpodcast.com and anything that you download from my site will put you on my email list. So that's number one. Number two is to start being more deliberate about the types of search engines that you use, about the type of media that you consume. So I recommend using a search engine like DuckDuckGo instead of typical Google Azure search engine, because Google, it's not only this year, they've been doing it for years, really censoring and pushing down alternative information. And using a search engine like DuckDuckGo will give you more fair and balanced search results. If you are, this is my third thing. If you are concerned about medical freedom, if you believe in medical freedom, if that is a value of yours, go to standforhealthfreedom.com to learn how you can get involved in standing for your health freedom rights. And what are we on? Number four, starting to transition to different platforms. As I said before, this is very hard because we have all set up our cozy homes, we have all set up shop, and so migrating is a difficult process. But I am going to be making the transition to Mi Wii and Telegram, and I'm going to be doing that gradually, but I have a feeling there will come a day where I just pull the plug and I hop on over. So start to transition to different platforms. And finally, number five, I just recommend that you get your news, you get your perspectives from varied sources. So follow a few people that you totally don't agree with. Open your mind up to information that is different from what you believe in. Now, me personally, I draw a line there when it turns into hate and gets unreasonable, but you can expose yourself to information that is different from what you would typically consume, and you can still have that boundary for yourself, that line drawn of, okay, I'm going to expose myself to different information, but these are my boundaries. And finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, make sure you are taking very good care of yourself. Make sure you take timeouts from information. Because even though it is tempting at this time to be constantly plugged into information, we all want to know what's going on, we all want to know what's happening. Make time to disconnect, make time to go outside and put your bare feet in the grass and remember your humanity. Remember your connection with nature. Remember who you are. Hug somebody that you love. Connect with somebody. Spend time away from your phone. Remember your humanity. That's all I've got for you today. I know today's episode was a long one, but it felt like an important one. And if you've listened this far, thank you. Thank you for spending time with me. And if you are not on my email list yet, be sure that you hop on that. It'll be linked up in the show notes. You can go to mindspeakpodcast.com and download anything on my site that will land you on my email list. So no matter what the tech overlords do, well, I can't say that 100%, but the social the social media overlords, um, we can still stay connected, which I would love to do. So until next week, go believe in you. I do.