This Land Was Never F*cking Yours

The Fallacy of Freedom and the true White Supremacy Agenda from 1776 to Project 2025

(*DISCLAIMER: I don’t have an editor so please forgive typos, misspellings and such. I’m just the cook…)

July 4th, 2025, here we go again…

Today, America celebrates Independence Day, another 4th of July.

Images of kid rock and ted nuggets offspring drunkenly filling backyards BBQ parties with American flag themed swag, beer guts, store bought buckets of processed mayonnaise salads, cheap American beer and ending with a display fireworks made in China exploding over stolen land.

Cue the collective amnesia wrapped in red, white, and blue with matching Target apparel.

fuck this guy...

But let’s call out the hypocritical bullshit. This holiday was never about freedom or to celebrate a country where “All Men Are Created Equal”.

On this day in 1776, a bunch of privileged, land and money hungry white dudes, most of them slaveowners, declared independence from a king who was, frankly, getting in the way of their expansionist wet dreams. They wanted free land, labor, and power and King George was keeping from that vision by policing their illegal land surveying and their penchant for inciting violence with the Indigenous communities which the king was tired of funding.

So they wrote a breakup letter to the Mr George, aka the Declaration of Independence. And in it, they conveniently left out a key few things, like slavery, genocide, and the fact that most of what they were pissed about was not being able to steal more land fast enough.

The Real Grievance was that Land Theft Was on Pause

Here’s the part they won’t teach you in school and distract with well funded fireworks shows. The Royal Proclamation of 1763, passed by King George III, recognized that Indigenous nations were sovereign and owned the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. This wasn’t generosity, it was damage control after the Seven Years’ War. But it really meant colonists couldn’t just run around with rifles and manifest destiny their way across Turtle Island.

That document super pissed off the Founding Fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and such weren’t revolutionaries, they were actually just real estate investors with violent tendencies that leaned towards scorched earth tactics to get their way. The Proclamation was like zoning laws for thieves. So they got mad enough to write 1,458 words of dramatic colonial fan fiction about freedom and being equal while holding human beings in chain, forcing labor, and planning how to divvy up the West after they un-alived all the “savages”.

When they wrote the line in the Declaration of Independence that says “merciless Indian savages,” they meant people like my ancestors, Lakota, Cherokee, Shawnee, Muscogee, and countless more, who dared to defend their homes and cultures from violent settler immigrants and their relentless encroachments.

Canada recognized Royal Proclamation as part of it’s constitution in 1982 and the land rights of Indigenous citizens (to an extent), but the U.S. has always ignored this proclamation and has instead based all of it’s land ownership laws instead on the Doctrine of Discovery, which is the 1493 papal decree that gave Christian Europeans the divine right to claim any land not ruled by other Christians. This colonial doctrine was codified in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), where the Supreme Court declared that “discovery” by Europeans gave them ultimate title to Indigenous lands, reducing Native nations to mere occupants without ownership. This notion just solidifies our perspective that sovereignty has never mattered in the eyes of U.S. law, and settler colonialism remains the foundation.

(I've wrote about this before in my previous Substacks, but it’s important.)

Slavery: The Economic Engine of the Founding Fathers

The other thing missing from the Declaration? Any mention of the enslaved Africans who were literally building this country while being beaten, sold, raped, and worked to death.

The truth is that U.S. Independence meant an economic explosion in the business of slavery. Once they kicked out the Brits, there were no more restrictions on how big, brutal, and profitable the system could get. Cotton, sugar, rice, all booming industries built on stolen labor and the bodies of Black people.

From 1776 until the Civil War, the enslaved population ballooned from under a million to nearly four million enslaved humans (men, women, elderly, children and babies) and with that, so did the profits. By 1860, enslaved people were worth more than $3 billion, more than the value of every railroad, factory, and bank in the U.S. combined. And if you take that value with inflation today, the value of enslaved and abused humans were over $100 billion USD. Commodities like cotton, hand picked from the fields by Black hands, made up 60% of U.S. exports and powered the global economy. Northern banks, insurance companies, and shipping firms got filthy rich underwriting and insuring that system. Enslaved peoples weren’t just free labor, they were financial collateral, used to secure loans and expand empires. So when people talk about America being built on hard work and elbow grease, let’s be honest about whose work they’re really talking about.

Enter the Northwest Ordinance

11 years after writing the Declaration of Independence, in 1787, the newly formed U.S. government passed the Northwest Ordinance, a sterile-sounding name for one of the largest land-grab legislations in history. It opened up massive territories like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, all for white settlement. And spoiler alert, those lands were already full of Indigenous nations who had been stewarding those spaces for countless generations..

The Ordinance pretended to be “orderly” and “moral”, it even banned slavery in those territories (not out of compassion, but so that white settlers didn’t get nervous, think of it like the start of white suburbia). Meanwhile, it laid the groundwork for displacement, removal, broken treaties, and outright warfare against Indigenous communities because of greed. It’s the legal ancestor of the Trail of Tears, Indian boarding schools, and today’s pipeline projects and selling off of National park lands to the fossil fuel and lumber industries (aka the billionaires).

From 1776 to 2025, Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Let’s fast-forward to today, exactly 249 years from the date of the Declaration of Independence. And guess what? Colonialism has never ended. It just got better PR, state controlled media, an army of red Chinese hats, and a shit hairpiece in the lead.

We’ve been hearing about Project 2025 for a while now, it started as a little-known (but very real) blueprint being pushed by right-wing think tanks and Trump’s allies. But this isn’t just a policy proposal. It’s a modern-day Declaration of Authoritarianism. And with Trump’s political momentum and court-packed backing, it’s already a reality.

We’re witnessing in real time:

• The dismantling of federal agencies (goodbye EPA, hello climate collapse)

• The erasure of LGBTQ+ rights

• The shredding of reproductive protections

• The militarization of ICE into a obscenely funded domestic Gestapo (to use at the every whim of our senile orange fascist in power)

• The purge of civil servants and installation of loyalist lapdogs in every corner of government

And now, with the passing of Trump’s so-called “big beautiful bill”, we’re seeing the final lock click into place. Buried under patriotic soundbites and media distraction is a sweeping expansion of executive power, funneling billions into ICE and border militarization, stripping regulatory checks, slashing judicial independence, and giving the President unprecedented control over federal agencies. This bill isn’t governance. It’s a coup for a fascist regime.

It’s not just about deportations, weak borders, or who’s eating the pets, it’s about remaking America into an ethno-nationalist surveillance state where dissent is punished, history is rewritten, and democracy is reduced to a media stage prop.

Let’s be clear: this bill, alongside Project 2025, is a direct threat to the very idea of the U.S. Constitution. It paves the road toward the collapse of the so-called “great experiment” in democracy and replaces it with a Christian nationalist, corporate-backed, climate-denying police regime.

Billions are being shoveled into ICE and border enforcement, not to solve real problems, not to reunite families, but to criminalize brown and Indigenous bodies and feed the beast of white supremacy with new uniforms, newer cages, and the newest surveillance tech to match.

This was never about “securing the border,” it was always about securing a vision of America where white Christian men call the shots, everyone else obeys, and the only history that matters starts in 1776 and ends with them in power. Forever…

So What Does Freedom Mean Now?

Freedom as absolutely nothing to do with grilling fucking hot dogs under a flag stitched with violence, stolen land, and stolen bodies. “Liberty” for billionaires and prison for the rest of us is a more accurate description of where we are now. We have to stand together and stop pretending this country started with democracy when it was actually born with genocide in one hand and slavery in the other.

So let’s flip the script.

Let’s talk about creating a modern day model and Declaration of Interdependence. One where:

• LANDBACK: Indigenous nations get their land back. (I say start with the Black Hills and all National Parks and move from there)

• Black communities receive real lasting reparations—not as guilt payouts, but as overdue justice with free education (not Eurocentric education), healthcare, housing justice, and of course healthcare.

• Borders get abolished as colonial scars. People deserve to move, live, and thrive without ICE at their door. All Black, Indigenous and People of color should get special passports enabling them to live and work in any fucking country in the Americas they choose.

• Food, water, and housing become basic human rights, not just luxury items.

• Education Sovereignty to take the place of whitewashed textbooks and patriotic gaslighting.

And while we’re at it, let’s declare independence from Project 2025, Trumpism, and every system that treats human beings like collateral damage.

We can make this Project 2026.

Still Here. Still Fighting.

They tried to erase us. But here we still are.

They can label us as criminals by creating new laws in their favor, but we’ve always lived through those lies and propaganda.

We’re still here. We’re building food systems from the soil up. We’re making art, making beautiful babies, making real fucking change. We’re cooking with ancestral knowledge. We’re planting seeds that outlive evil empires. We’re tired of eurocentrism and we want to celebrate our diversities globally.

We survived smallpox blankets, forced removals, plantation slavery, boarding schools, and we can survive Trump and his billionaire cronies, ICE raids and spineless politicians. We’re not going anywhere.

So while they light up the sky tonight and pretend we live in the world’s greatest country, free and independent, let’s remember our warriors and leaders who found their voices, fought with every bit of strength they had, and died for all of us.

Action Steps (for those not too busy watching fireworks):

• Vote like your life depends on it—because it might.

• Fund mutual aid.

• Support Indigenous and Black-led orgs (like NATIFS.org, for example just saying)

• Push for sanctuary policies in your city.

• Call out white supremacist policies wrapped in “freedom” branding.

• Teach your kids real history.

• Teach yourself if you didn’t get it in school.

• Organize.

• Show up.

• Speak up and Don’t look away.

Now is not the time to feel hopelessness, now is the time to rise up as community and fuck up some Nazis.