Creators Cannot Remain Silent

On the ethics of political neutrality in the age of rage

Photo by Spenser H on Unsplash

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 on their ownership of their bodies.

Hundreds of thousands of disabled and elderly people are on the cusp of being subjected to intentional mass murder, not through active killing but passive withholding of food and healthcare. The general attitude seems to be, “Why bother to waste bullets on them when they can just be allowed to expire on their own?”

In a different time, a time when most politicians and citizens were simply making good-faith efforts to better the country in the way they thought best, creators could make an argument that we weren’t necessarily ethically obligated to share our opinions on “the issues.”

Yet in the age we currently occupy, the age where oligarchs buy elections, most politicians are out to fill their pockets by any means necessary, and a large cohort of citizens wants nothing more than to inflict as much pointless cruelty as possible, I would argue that creators have a moral obligation to speak out. We can no longer afford to remain neutral.

Mightier than the Sword

Creators, especially creators with a large following, have the unique opportunity to mount effective campaigns of dissent.

Take Taylor Swift, for instance. She’s long avoided the political scene in favor of writing catchy songs about her fraught love life. Yet when she came out against Trump and endorsed Harris, people took notice. In a single day, with a single tweet, she got over 35,000 new voters to register.

Sure, Harris didn’t win, but imagine for a second if Swift had not been one of the few major creators to openly choose a side. Imagine what might’ve been if a substantial percentage of previously “politically neutral” creators had been brave enough to do the same thing she did, regardless of the fact that they would likely lose followers and revenue.

Maybe, as a small creator, I’m not the right bearer of this particular message. After all, I’m not under the impression that I’ll lose many followers. Most MAGA cultists aren’t going to like my work anyway. In both my fiction and creative nonfiction, I am an unapologetic atheist, feminist, and freethinker – and it shows in all my writing, perhaps especially in my fiction. Maybe I don’t have a lot to lose because most of my followers already agree with me — and I don’t have that many to begin with.

At the same time, ethics are ethics and morals are morals. And there is no way to argue that avoiding losing followers and income takes precedence over disrupting the rise of an authoritarian, theofascist police state and maybe even a looming genocide.

That’s why we cannot shut up and sing. We have to try to reach everyone we can, deprogram them from their MAGA indoctrinations, wake them up to the ways in which history is about to repeat itself if it’s not stopped right here, right now.

How we do it – whether we write the themes into our fiction or paint them into our portraits or work them into our songs – is up to us. But we must do it all the same.

Otherwise, we might as well go ahead and count ourselves among the hordes of people who fall into the history books’ “why didn’t anyone do anything” category.

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