ARTISTS MUST PROTECT THE FIRST AMENDMENT

By Will “Topiltzin” Sanchez Owner/Artist/Activist

Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth,
judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31:8-9

Have we forgotten our history? Oh how we have abandoned ourselves, I pray my eyes have deceived me, or that my mind has left itself. To witness that creatives have become collaborators in the bastardization of the First Amendment. To come to this conclusion, I must surely have been transported into an alternative reality where somehow, someway we have been fooled into standing aside as it has happened under our very watch. There is plenty of history to lay a firm foundation of proof that the fact will be artists in every format will be the first casualty in this war on Free Speech. 1,304,705 million soldiers have died to defend this document prior to us, because they knew that any government that can silence its critics, has the license for any kind of atrocity. Slowly, since 2019, we allowed the powers that be to erode our rights with semantics, flowery words and pregnant sentences. With the exposure oft he  documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 by Elon Musk after his purchase, followed by an admission letter of Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August 2024 to be in full cahoots with the government to censor Americans on their social media platforms. Most recently, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov was arrested, facing criminal charges, in France and Musk's banning of X in Brazil during September 2024 for simply allowing people's opinions to be read makes the struggle for our bastion of light of utmost importance.

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Yet, artists remain silent, or worse still, make use of this contemptuous act because it fits their political narrative. There is no "narrative", only just or unjust, no middle ground, only right or wrong, no misinformation, only truth or lies. It is not the place of any authority to discern the information we are permitted to receive so that we may make an intelligent decision for ourselves. Because more than likely  the outcome is not unbiased, but construed for the purposes of those in power to bring forth the result wanted. Once accomplished, the first act is to remove those who do not comply, which is you, which is I,which is all other creative thought driven beings.

I, as an artist, have always cast a critical eye to the governmental role in our lives, its past transgressions against its citizens, and passionately spoken out against such tragedy. For we are the eternal outsiders,  thinking differently, in both how we conduct ourselves and our perspectives on society. How dare we abide without compunction, what consequences can we accept as we have turned our back from being the nation's cultural envisionists into its propaganda flagbearer. Once we go beyond the threshold of compliance, this gives them the opportunity of coercion, of which we have been tested for continuously ever since the pandemic. No, even I say no, for we expect, our country requires and the world needs the First Amendment.

We must unequivocally stand up, we must raise our voices unapologetically and we must go forward fearlessly to bring back that which they have stolen from us as a thief in the night. Our right to be, and the freedom to say it is so.