I’m going to guess that a few people here aren’t going to like these words of Sean Sherman, known as The Sioux Chef, and they won’t much care for the rest of them either. That’s okay. It’s offered as an opinion about Fourth of July that you almost never hear from anyone especially on the day itself. But it is an opinion that is far from his alone. The entire essay appears at his substack.
It’s titled:
The Fallacy of Freedom and the true White Supremacy Agenda from 1776 to Project 2025
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.
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. [...]
Okay, I’ve already greatly exceeded fair use, so you’ll have to read the rest of his essay at Sherman’s terrific substack. I hope you do. Because, when stripped of all the commercialization and other hype (which, of course, it never is), the holiday is touted in the classroom as a time of remembering and celebrating the past. But our remembrance is, as Sherman says, subject to collective amnesia. And in the paragraphs that continue from the above, he lays it out, clearly, unambiguously, accurately.
Needless to say, adding Sherman’s take to the signage and Ranger presentations at National Parks is obviously not what our Outlaw Prez has in mind when he says he wants to purge from those spaces anything he deems negative being said about the U.S. past.. That sort of grotesque, jackass censorship should be expected given all the deeply negative stuff he and his crew of lickspittle misfits are imposing in the U.S. present.
There’s a lot of talk about the Kid Killer Bill bringing down the Republicans all by itself because it is so ferociously inhumane. Certainly true a decade ago. A lot harder now with this consolidation of power and decapitation of opposition steaming ahead with the Supreme Court’s blessing. Even so, bringing them down is going to be the easy part compared to repairing the damage they’ve already done, here and abroad. It’ll take a generation.
