Authors who write fiction, memoir, and other supposedly “politically neutral” fare frequently hear a common refrain: Stay out of politics.

We’re warned that if we fail to maintain a facade of political neutrality, keep our mouths shut for the sake of pleasing everyone, we could be chasing off potential readers.

“Nobody wants to hear” our opinions about current events. We just need to shut up and write.

Musicians, actors, artists — lots of public figures hear the same thing. Shut up and sing. Shut up and act. Shut up and paint. For those in need of a payday (which is virtually all of us), this is often pretty sound advice.

After all, everyone remembers what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they (correctly) called George W. Bush an embarrassment. They were some of the first victims of modern cancel culture, ironically weaponized by the selfsame conservatives who subsequently spent over a decade bitching about liberal snowflakes doing the same thing they’d been doing since the age of McCarthyism.

However, though the reality is that being politically vocal can and probably will shave members from our audiences, creators can no longer sit on the sidelines, at least not morally, anyway.

Silence is Violence

As of the writing of this article, Christian Nationalist domestic terror attacks have skyrocketed. Political dissidents are being assassinated. Sieg Heil has become a feature of official state functions.

The United States has unleashed a secret police force full of untrained, masked bounty hunters tasked with rounding up innocent people and sending them to concentration camps, all to fill the coffers of the for-profit prison industrial complex. People aren’t just ignoring this. They’re laughing at it and buying merch.

Pregnant women are being left to die from preventable causes by the thousands, with more joining their ranks every day. Human corpses are being zombified to serve as incubators for the state. In terror that they’re next, hordes of panicked young women are rushing to undergo major abdominal surgery to maintain their slipping grip…