Skillet's John Cooper Blasts Cancel Culture: 'This Is Very Frightening'

John Cooper, frontman for Christian rock band Skillet, never shies away from talking about his faith or conservative values. And he clearly isn't afraid to discuss the disturbing "cancel culture" trend that has everyone walking on eggshells, either.

And let's face it, you can get "canceled" for anything these days. Cooper called it downright frightening.

"I'm of the feeling that we Christians and we conservatives ... I think we need to begin to spend your money on the things that you believe, buy things from people of like mind," Cooper said on his Cooper Stuff podcast. "I never thought that I would be the one saying it. That makes it sound like we want our own little Christian bubble — Christian candy, Christian chicken, Christian barbecue sauce, Christian shoes, Christian music, Christian books. I could go on and on. I never thought that I wanted to live in that bubble, and I do not wanna live in that bubble. But things are changing."

Cooper also criticized Twitter in January for suspending President Donald Trump's account, calling it a form of censorship and an attack on freedom of speech. He explained that further on his podcast.

"A few weeks ago, some people came at me on Twitter and things, and they were like, 'John's talking about government censorship. This isn't government censorship.' So I tried to make it clear. You're right — it's not government censorship; that's not what I'm talking about," he said. "The government doesn't need to censor something if we create a culture where you're not allowed to say certain things.

"If we create a culture that does that and there's no incentives — if businesses yank your stuff, if book publishers yank your stuff. I even said that as an example a while back. If you've got a publisher that drops you. You've written a book, your publisher drops the book because they don't wanna be associated with you — you've just said hate speech, or whatever you've done. Well, now there's going to be incentive for Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million, whoever, there's gonna be incentive for those companies to also drop your book."

Cooper continued. 

"So if you've created a culture where freedom of speech is so disincentivized that you've got publishers, book stores — everybody — who doesn't want anything to do with you," he said. "Now Twitter wants to ban you too because you're hate speech. Then there are no platforms for you to get your stuff out. This is very frightening. The government doesn't even need to do anything. The government doesn't need to crack down on you because they're like, 'Why would we crack down when culture is doing it?'"