Hey everyone, welcome to the Natasha Crane podcast. Well, I hate that this episode even has to be done.

I, like everyone else, am absolutely gutted and devastated by the events of the last week.

There are so many things to be said, and a lot of people are saying them.

I have been sharing a lot of my own feelings since Charlie Kirk's murder on social media.

I've been sharing on Facebook and X.

If you're interested in seeing some of that from the past week, then I'll

point you there. I'll put some links in the show notes. But I just keep coming back to this thought

that I have so many things I want to say that are extended thoughts on all of this beyond those

little snippets on social media. And all of those thoughts are things that I

wrote in my book that came out earlier this year when culture hates you. What I wrote about in that

book, if you can't tell from the title, could not be more relevant to what has happened,

why it's happened, and how to respond to people who are criticizing everything that Charlie stood

for and who he was. But I've been really hesitant to say that anywhere, to say, hey, this is what I was

talking about and when culture hates you because I didn't want anyone to think that I was

promoting my book in the middle of all this.

At the same time, I really want to share some of that content because it is so relevant.

So I reached out to my publisher, Harvest House, and I asked them,

hey, can I just publish the first chapter of my audiobook? Can I just put this content out there for

free on my podcast? Because it's so specific to everything that's going on. I desperately want

people to hear this. And they were gracious enough that they were willing to offer that.

And so this episode is actually just pulled straight from the

audiobook of When Culture Hates You. It's the first chapter. And what I want you to hear from

...