Shut the F*ck Up

The American Way Of Silencing And Oppression Is Nothing New If You Are Black Or Brown

The Shock of Being Silenced

The empire grows stronger and voices like Colbert, Kimmel, or basically anybody who says out loud that Charlie Kirk was a racist piece of white trash is being thrown aside through government pressure. Americans are acting like they just realized censorship can happen to white people also. While the media (and who owns the media nowadays?) is busy tiptoeing around the fall of democracy and ignoring the blatant authoritarian actions of the current White House agenda, Trump and clowns are busy defining their own brand of “cancel culture” wrapped in the typical nationalistic patriotic bullshit shielded by hypocritical Christian beliefs. We should all know by now it’s just more distraction to throw fuel on the fire of their division war and keep the conversation away from exposing the cheetoh stained Epstein files.

In reality, America as a government has been silencing people since 1776. The only thing new now is who’s feeling the muzzle. It’s not just Indigenous people, Black folks, immigrants, and the poor anymore. Now it’s nipping at privileged voices who always assumed their mic was untouchable.

And now it’s a existential emergency? Don’t get me wrong, I will use my voice against racism, fascism, and authoritarianism any day of the week.

But its crazy to be surprised that friendly non melanated faces on the TV are being silenced for their truth telling against our corrupt regime, and for anybody that’s Black or Indigenous in America, it’s just another fucking Tuesday.

1776: The Original Cancel Culture

Lets go way back to the beginning of the corrupt regime and lets look at The Declaration of Independence, America’s sacred birth certificate (or Dear George Breakup Letter) which outright calls Native people “merciless Indian savages.” That line wasn’t a slip. It was policy. And tt set the stage for two and a half centuries of erasure, invisibility and silencing.

The Constitution followed that document by literally counting us as Indigenous peoples out with the line: “Indians not taxed.” This meant that native people were not counted at all and therefore couldn’t be taxed and definitely couldn’t be counted when determining congressional representation. It completely erased Native presence from the political maps. Whole nations living within U.S. boundaries were treated as if they didn’t exist when it came to congressional representation.

Then came the treaties — over 370 of them. Every one broken. Treaties are supposed to be the supreme law of the land. But for Native nations, they always ended with us losing land, rights, and our voices.

The Supreme Court sealed the deal in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), ruling that Native people couldn’t hold title to our own land. Imagine someone breaking into your house, kicking you out of bed, and then calling the cops to say legally you never owned the place. That’s the U.S. justice system in action.

This wasn’t an accident. It was the American way of life. Shut the f*ck up, and hand over the land.

When Prayer Becomes a Crime

By the late 1800s, the silencing of Indigenous voices got so pervasive that even prayer was outlawed.

The Code of Indian Offenses (1883) criminalized Indigenous ceremonies. Sun Dances, Ghost Dances, sweat lodges, all punishable by violence, incarceration, and even death. Agents withheld food rations if you prayed. School children in boarding schools like Carlisle Indian School in PA were forced to brush their teeth with pumice stone if caught speaking, singing or praying in their own language. People were jailed for dancing. And so many of our nation’s religious practices were driven in to secrecy which is still heavily guarded even today for fear of police oppression.

The Ghost Dance terrified the U.S. because it was a vision of hope that colonialism and the settlers that followed their manifest destiny could one day be overturned, and that ancestors could return, and that balance could be restored. That is one hope that an evil empire can’t tolerate.

So the Army continued to violently oppress native people, and where I grew up we had a daily reminder driving by Wounded Knee, SD where the US Calvary slaughtered more than 250 Lakota men, women, elderly, children and babies in 1890. A massacre disguised as crowd control that handed out medals of honors to the murderers.

We actually didn’t even get the legal right to practice our religions until 1978. Read that again. Our religious ways were still being criminalized until almost the 1980s and movies like “Star Wars” and “Grease” are older than our Indigenous rights to practice our own religions in the USA.

The Black America experience

Silencing didn’t stop with Native people. Black America has been fighting the same gag order since the first slave ship docked on the east coast.

Chains, whips, poll taxes, literacy tests, and Lynch mobs are all tools of the oppressor to keep voices quiet. Civil rights leaders were stalked, infiltrated, assassinated. The FBI labeled Black organizers “threats” while white supremacists got a pass and continue to hold office today.

And voices who have attempted to protest inequalities, police brutality and racism like Colin Kaepernick have been outrageously demonized for standing up to their truths.

And we all have watched the last few months as the highest academic institutions and corporations have folded to the US Government and have dismantled DEI programs that were designed to bring Diversity, Equity and Inclusion into all things. Things that for generations were denied talented people because of the color of their skin.

Silencing of black voices in America has always been an American way but the resistance has never stopped. And imagine the power of unifying Black and Indigenous voices together to stand up against the wannabe hitlers.

Erasure as a National Pastime

America’s strongest silencing tool isn’t the gun, it’s rewriting the national story.

History books still glorify Columbus, Jefferson, Washington — men who owned slaves, signed orders to steal land, and called us savages. History textbooks don’t tell kids about the hundreds of treaties broken, the boarding schools that beat languages out of children, or the massacres hidden in plain sight.

Museums put Indigenous artifacts behind glass without mentioning how they were stolen. National parks celebrate “pristine wilderness” while erasing the Native nations who lived there for millennia. Monuments and statues of colonizers and Confederates still dominate city landscapes, while statues of Native or Black leaders are rare to nonexistent.

It’s a narrative fortress: the U.S. tells its story in a way that makes BIPOC voices background noise at best and disposable at will.

Across multiple states today, Republican lawmakers have passed or proposed laws that limit how race, instances of racism, and colonial history can be taught. These laws target discussions of slavery, Jim Crow, Native genocide, and broken treaties, framing them as “divisive concepts” harmful to young children’s minds. The ongoing removal of BIPOC stories from curricula and shelves is a way to keep power in place because it controls the story of who the “we” are in our nation.

Silencing has always been America’s strategy, if you can’t kill the people, kill the memory and rewrite the story. National Ignorance is bliss for the fascists.

Standing Rock: The New Ghost Dance

Standing Rock, SD. Thousands gathered to protect water and sacred land from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Prayer camps, songs, ceremonies, a modern Ghost Dance. The movement and the energy was massive, unifying nearly all native nations. We all played a role wether participating or amplifying, our team in Minneapolis sent truckloads of food to support the protesters from massive food donations.

And the empire responded the same way it did in 1890 Wounded Knee, with violence. Militarized police, private security dogs, water cannons in freezing weather, hundreds of arrests. And when the camps were gone, legislatures passed “anti-protest” laws to make sure it would be harder if not impossible next time.

Winona LaDuke said, “Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.”

We need that kind of energy again to bring all people together in the face of a militarized state.

Voting Rights: Dilution by Design

Like many people of color, most native people in the US could not vote until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. But now we are disenfranchised amongst other communities of color through gerrymandering.

North Dakota, South Dakota, Arizona and more have all drawn lines to dilute Native votes. Reservation communities are cracked apart or packed tight to minimize election influences.

Very recently here in 2025, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals eroded voting rights further by ruling that private citizens, including tribes, might not even have the right to sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and that only the DOJ could. Which means if you’re silenced by gerrymandering, good luck waiting for Washington to take any kind of action to protect voices.

It’s disenfranchisement disguised as legal procedure. Another way of saying: shut the f*ck up. The Republican Party knows it can’t win a popular vote without cheating and so do we.

Undocumented yet Essential

Then there are the millions of undocumented workers. They harvest food, build homes, clean hotels, care for kids and elders. Without them, America collapses.

Yet they’re treated as shadows. Demonized in political speeches, erased from labor protections, denied a political voice. And now they are being preyed upon by an unjust government and the new American Gestapo ICE. Their silence is enforced by fear of violent deportation. Their contribution is stolen while their humanity is ignored.

It’s the same pattern America has shown before, benefit from people’s work, then erase them from the story, and keep their voices silent.

Today’s Version of Shut the F*ck Up

Now let’s talk about the new wave.

Say something critical about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, and that doesn’t line up with Washington’s talking points so you’re branded antisemitic, radical, extremist. And suddenly the same “free speech warriors” are fine with censorship.

Don’t even consider saying something unsavory about a dead nazi like Charlie Kirk who was able to openly say the most racist, mysogynistic sh*t imaginable about women, LGTBQ, Black Americans, immigrants and more and gets a congressionally voted National Day of Remembrance.

If we have to be stuck with Charlie Kirk Day, I say we completely rebrand Charlie Kirk Day with a National Day of Silenced Voices, since that is what also happened to him. We could make it a day for all the people in America who were told to shut the f*ck up. We’d speak the names of Native leaders who have been killed, and the massive native communities who were wiped off the face of the earth in places like Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, and Whitestone Hill. We would lift up the Black voices who have been erased from history and plagued with violence. Instead of “remember the Alamo,” we shout “remember Tusla.” We’d honor all immigrant and undocumented workers whose hands helped build this country while their existence was denied. Classrooms could crack open banned books. Museums could hand stolen objects back to the people they belong to. And the motto wouldn’t be “Make America Great Again.” It could be: Make America Listen for the First Time.

Assemble or Be Erased

So what now? We assemble.

We the People means equality for everybody, not just for white christian republican nationalists.

Native, Black, undocumented, queer, poor, immigrants, privileged, all of us. Because history shows that governments silences people to keep power, and that works best when we’re divided.

If they can erase Native voices from the founding, if they can chain Black voices, if they can make immigrants invisible, if they can jail activists, then they can silence anyone.

And if we don’t fight back together, they will.

What’s happening now isn’t new. It’s just the American way of life as it always has been. And its very aggressive now since we put White Supremacists in power, but it doesn’t have to stay that way forever.

America’s been perfecting cancel culture since 1776. The real fear in front of us isn’t whether truthful voices against authoritarianism might get silenced — because spoiler alert, they will — it’s about if we actually do nothing. We have to finally stop playing along. Together we are the majority. And the only way forward is to join forces, refuse to be silent, and build an American future where nobody gets told to shut the f*ck up again.

Well except for Nazis, fuck those guys…

and #fucktrump