Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 409. 409. I'm Douglas Wilson, and you have joined us, and here we are. I want to talk about something

here that is maybe a little awkward. Maybe not for you, but for me. You may have noticed over the last,

over the last year, maybe, the ministry here in Moscow

has acquired a good bit of what you might call notoriety. And I'm kind of in the middle of all

that, right? So there was, there were many, many years, a number of years where we were under the ministry here in Moscow and the

things we were doing, the things we were trying to accomplish, things we were trying to build

down, were under an embargo. There was sort of an agreement. It was not universally held,

but there was generally an agreement that we were not to be given the time of day.

We were not to be named. We were not to be quoted. Early on, you know, I would tweet something

and people would retweet it, but a memo went out and, you know, people would be policed and

admonished and exhorted not to do that anymore. We would invite speakers and they would

agree to come and then the screws would be put to them and then they would cancel. So we were

under embargo for a long time because of the exhortations that were going on out there in the

world of Big Eva.

I'm reminded of Ambrose Beers' definition of exhort in the devil's dictionary where he said,

in religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.

So people were exhorted to not have anything to do with us.

Within the last year or so, we have moved, we've transitioned, and we've transitioned to the point where two things, we need to be opposed by name, where people are alleging things about us, attacking us for different things so we are attacked

by name and that's i mean that's something and the other thing is that we've gotten a lot of

press attention from the secular press wall street journal CNN new york times meet the press

politico and so on there's just a lot of outlets. And it's

gotten to the point where I get recognized in airports now. And it's an unusual trip if I don't

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