By Cindi Branham
I think it goes without saying that every one of us, and many we love, will be negatively affected by another Trump administration as they enact portions of Project 2025 focused on “The Other.”
“The Other” is anyone who doesn’t look like, worship like, or behave like the White christian Nationalist men who will infiltrate our government.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said not long ago that he expected the court to be looking at cases to include a national ban on abortion with no exceptions, birth control, and biracial marriages. He doesn’t see the irony in that declaration for his own biracial marriage. He included in that warning same-sex marriage, federal protection of their rights and safety and the ability for LGBTQ+ couples to adopt.
If you don’t think you’ll be affected, you may be guilty of Clarence Thomas self-blindness syndrome. Whole categories of people will suffer under Project 2025 rule. Everyone’s voting rights, financial freedoms and rights and freedom from harassment and injury will be in limbo.
Hate crimes and organized hate groups are on the rise. A Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) 2024 report documented 595 hate groups and 835 anti-government extremist groups. They also acknowledge an uptick in the number of white nationalist groups, which are increasingly motivated by conspiracy theories and theocratic beliefs.
We also learned this week that the Russians are paying American propaganda spreaders $400,000 a month to push Russian and Republican talking points (there’s a fine line there).
This tells me that there is more support for Trump’s tactics and his Project 2025 than we want to admit. There’s a perfect storm bringing an ugly situation together after November 5th.
With a Trump win, these groups will be empowered to carry out more attacks, both violence and in the subtle denial of our rights.
I don’t consider myself removed from any of these threats. I’m a woman (not a minority but a category the white nationalists want to take back to the Middle Ages). I’m also of Arabic descent and if you know my Facebook name and the name I use legally, my maiden name is Cassis. My grandparents were Lebanese Christians who came to this country around the turn of the last century for a better life. That’s a common motivation that persists today, isn’t it?
Today’s undocumented immigrants, the ones who are keeping – at a minimum – agriculture, construction, hotels and kitchens running around the country – are to be rounded up, placed in detention camps and deported. If you doubt that a Trump administration will do this, just look at their history of separating parents from children.
Imagine how this will affect our economy – currently strong – and how Trump will falsely blame that on the Biden administration.
A Hispanic friend has shared horror stories of families in our community where a working parent goes to work and doesn’t come home that night – or any night – because they were arrested and placed into the deportation process.
This is a community that takes care of its own, but a non-working mother with literal babies and no income is placed into a state of unimaginable desperation. Don’t kid yourself or me: those freed up jobs aren’t being given “back” to whites. They’re jobs whites won’t do, and another immigrant will fill the void.
Project 2025 will make this process faster and more wholesale, with mass roundups (Trump has recently referred to them as “bloody,” foretelling that extreme force will be used). It will create numerous internment camps across the country, with the intent of holding these people for processing back to south of our border, whether they’re from Mexico or not.
It’s obvious that Black and Brown people will be targeted. “Make America Great Again” could be replaced with make America White again; it’s a transparent slogan. Gains of the past 70 years have made some groups of Whites very uncomfortable, and my money is on those groups being a large part of those in hate groups being watched by the SPLC.
LGBTQ+ Americans will also be open targets for Nationalists. We’ve all seen the ugliness these people can inflict on segments of the population they don’t like or feel slighted by, from violence to discrimination in everyday rights.
Project 2025 instructs the next conservative president to ignore the 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, where the court found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in banning sex discrimination in the workplace, also bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Done away with, how’s that for a catch-all to discriminate against anyone you don’t like?
President Biden has directed every federal agency to implement Bostock not just in the workplace but in health care, education, and other aspects of life. This would include discrimination in home ownership, which we all know is the path to generational wealth in many demographics that have been refused loans to buy a home. It will become lawful to deny loans again.
Project 2025 also calls for banning transgender individuals from the military and promises to roll back much of the progress made in areas of equity – for all target populations.
On foreign policy, Project 2025 instructs a new conservative president to dismantle and U.S. Agency for International Development programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, such as what it dubs “the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda.” This is the program that the U.S. uses around the world to protect LGBTQ+ outside our borders.
Yet it calls for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to protect the rights of those who discriminate against target populations. This is an absolute weaponization of the DOJ against all who are perceived as enemies, often just because of their skin color, DNA and life inclinations.
Project 2025 threatens religious freedoms, and the chants of “Jews will not replace us” by white, male neo-Nazi and fascist groups in Charlottesville and targeting of Muslims tell us all we need to know.
Over the weekend of September 7, after denying that he knew anything about Project 2025, Trump began outwardly embracing certain features of the plan when he agreed with its elimination of the Department of Education. He also circled back on how pleased he was with himself for ending Roe v. Wade. No mention of his recent “take it back to the states” experiment.
We see you. All of you.