The Golden Trident

By Addison Bruce

Photos courtesy of Jeenah Moon and Thomas J. Turney

Project 2025 is a 922-page mandate of the conservative agenda to dismantle the government, drafted by the Heritage Foundation. In a video posted by the Washington Post, Donald Trump says, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the Americans give us a colossal mandate to save America.” The idea of taking away rights of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people is extremely disgraceful. Trump has said that this mandate will “save America” but if that’s the case, why does he deny ever being related to it? 

There are potential implications of taking away women’s human rights and exchanging them for fetuses to have human rights. Politicians’ ideas are valuing a clump of cells with no consciousness, no brain, and no previous life experience and are killing mothers with families, emotions, and lives. A concept from the passage proves this mentality by saying that the “unborn children” are being protected from abortion saying, “Allowing mail-order abortions is a gift to the abortion industry that allows it to expand far beyond brick-and-mortar clinics and into — 459 — Department of Health and Human Services pro-life states that are trying to protect women, girls, and unborn children from abortion.” (pg. 485-486, par. 5)

 It is not protecting women and girls to force them to have a child that will kill them if carried to term. It is not protecting females if they are raped and forced to have a child. In 2022, a woman named Amber Thurman had to drive 6 hours away from her home in Georgia to get an abortion pill. Thurman had just found out she was having twins and did not have the financial stability to care for her 6-year-old son and two other children. 

These abortion pills worked to a certain extent and a complication occurred where some fetal tissue still resonated inside her uterus. She was weak, and bleeding, and her health was declining when she got herself to the hospital. Since she had taken the abortion pill, her life-saving abortion was illegal and her doctors refused to perform it. She sat in the hospital bed with sepsis and a failing organ, dying. After 20 hours of the doctors refusing to treat Thurman, she unfortunately passed away. She died leaving behind a 6-year-old and a life. 

A common argument used is not to abort the “child” but to put them into an adoption center. Who is going to take care of her son? Who is going to adopt the 117,000 children who are currently waiting to be adopted? Additionally, in 2022, a 12-year-old girl named Ashley (her last name is not public due to privacy) was forced to birth a child that was conceived by rape. Ashley was raped in her yard in Mississippi. By the time she had the baby, she was 13. Not only did this baby come from a sickening crime but also a sickening law. 

The fact that the people enforcing the overturning of Roe v. Wade purposefully overlook the “exaggerated” and “rare” cases of women and girls being raped but still birthing the child is rancid. This is real. Ashley’s family now includes a child born under the abortion ban and Thurman’s son and family lost her that day due to the abortion ban. As women, doing what is right for your life is never acceptable in our society. We will never be at peace if we are constantly being rallied against. Our bodies, our choices. 

Since I was little, my elementary school classes taught me equality and the importance of never being prejudiced toward your peers because of their ethnicities. Being taught that at a young age made me value things I didn’t have to worry about since I’m white. I could have never imagined that from 5th grade to 9th grade racism would be so normalized. Trump and the politicians that support him are openly racist, and there is proof of that scattered across every single thing they have ever been quoted on. A direct display of this behavior is on page seven hundred and eight in paragraph two of Project 2025 saying, “The avowed purpose of these initiatives is to implement policies that deliberately favor some races or ethnicities over others. The casual acceptance and rapid spread of racist policymaking in the federal government must be forcefully opposed and reversed. The next conservative Administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the Treasury Department.”

For centuries, any race that was not white was mistreated and discriminated against. It is so incredibly important to learn about racism, diversity, and equality because our generation can make a change. An example of what the Heritage Foundation is qualifying as critical race theory and favoring ethnicities over others is the George Floyd protests. In 2020, George Perry Floyd was pulled over and detained over giving a store clerk a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. The cops started to get aggressive and eventually kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Spreading awareness as small as protests or social media posts for something as big as what took place on May 25th when police killed Floyd was viewed as favoritism. Things like this murder happen every day. Floyd was murdered that day strictly based on a racial profile.

 

In July of this year, Sonya Massey was shot in the face by a police officer after she called for help around her residence. She thought somebody was soliciting around her property and instead of helping, one of the officers ended her life. Massey was mentally ill but there was nothing she did to threaten the officer. She was going to drain a pot of water. In 2017, Zoya Code was arrested because she was accused of attacking her mother. There is footage of two officers carrying Code out of her house by her arms and feet, dragging her knees and body against the concrete and flooring. She gets aggressively shoved into the ground and Derek Chauvin, the same officer who killed George Floyd, kneels on her neck for four minutes and forty-two seconds. 

Like Floyd, she vocalizes as much as she can that she cannot breathe. He knew it could kill her and three years later, this tactic eventually claimed a life. The same year John Pope Jr., a 14-year-old boy was beaten with a flashlight, a headlock, and a knee to the neck all while being handcuffed. His mother, who was intoxicated, made the call to report a physical altercation between her and her son. When trying to explain his side of the story, Chauvin used the same tactic on another victim for 15 minutes straight. Unfortunately, he was Chauvin’s first victim but just like Floyd and Code, he verbalized how he couldn’t breathe and how badly they were hurting him. Pope was my age. The only thing that differs from him and me is the color of our skin. It is completely wrong that Chauvin and the police officer who killed Massey had people, whether it be their partners or boss, observing their behavior and it went unnoticed and unjustified until two lives were lost. 

So, was it the counterfeit dollar, the boiling pot of water, the accusation of attacking her mother, the call about a conflict between him and his mother, or the color of their skin that killed them? As a result, Chauvin got 22.5 years behind bars. He will be in his sixties when he gets out, while Floyd never even got to see fifty. No matter how much Chauvin suffers from being locked up, it will never equate to what Floyd went through on his last breaths. The fact that Chauvin gets to live to be old and not apologize for his actions is contemptible. Floyd’s brother, Philonise said in an interview with CBS News Miami, that he wishes Chauvin apologized for what he put his brother through. He states the sad truth, “that’s not going to bring my brother back.”. 

Men have always been put on a higher pedestal than women. No matter the actions or quality of what the men put out into the world and how much better women’s actions are in comparison, we will never be equal in society. The second any other gender, race, or sexual orientation gets the respect they deserve it is considered negative. Prejudice people can openly discriminate against minorities and that is completely unacceptable. Page five hundred eighty-seven, paragraph six says, “The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.” (par. 6, pg. 584) 

Part of this passage is directed towards transgender people being able to use the bathroom of their gender. An article by Anita Wadhwani, an investigative reporter for Tennessee explains the Tennessee law disabling trans students from using the bathroom they identify with. “It gives parents and teachers the right to sue a school district for monetary damages if transgender students use a restroom or locker room that doesn’t conform with their gender at birth.” The problem is, if you do not view the person who transitioned as their gender now, you will not treat them as so. This law is just a way they can be openly transphobic and bring the government into it as if they don’t already have power as a person who presents themselves as straight. Tennessee is a red state, meaning it is Republican-forward. 

Politicians want to bring the Bible into schools. If they want to specifically bring Christianity into the education system, what about the other religions? In America, we have freedom of religion. When you fuse the education system, one specific religion overwhelmed by white people, and human rights all in one mess, it will not end well. Everything about it is repellent and ludicrous, especially since the younger generation’s education is crucial to everybody’s future. Not to mention, right-winged politicians such as the members of the Heritage Foundation, Trump, and his supporters are giving such bad notions to other Christians who do believe in human rights. 

Trump is a “Christian” man and although he discusses bringing religion into school systems and the government, he cannot name a verse. This is the same person who cannot say whether he likes old or new testaments and still his supporters are actively rooting for him because he is a man of God. Trump is using religion as a gateway to spread hate and tear away anything progressive the less fortunate have achieved through the years. If Trump preaches about the Bible and goes as far as to make his own, called “God Bless the USA” which is blasphemy, then what separates him from the religion and what is now being pushed into schools? Eli Givens, a transgender woman in Tennessee explains how scary it is that her peers cannot use the bathroom strictly due to transphobia. 

Feeling uncomfortable or faking that discomfort just so you can dehumanize someone who made a change so they could be confident in their skin is pathetic and it shows how insecure you really are.   If you are still debating if human rights are worth it enough to not vote for the endorsers of Project 2025, you might want to take a look for yourself. Project 2025 is suggesting things that affect everybody such as working to take away overtime, planning to kill wild horses, taking away veterans’ benefits, and enforcing “biblically based marriage” which involves divorced couples. Complaining that you want the economy prices to go down and gender roles to come back is nothing compared to losing human rights. If you are in Generation Z or have family and friends who are, please vote against Project 2025 because it has a dangerous impact on our future. Project 2025 is just white men’s way to be elitist, sexist, racist, and homophobic. Why should we give white men more power than they already have? The purpose of the document is to convert the “free” country of the United States to a restricted and controlled one. Women, LGBTQIA+, and people of color’s rights depend on your vote this November, please get educated and in the wise words of Billie Eilish, “Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.”