This weekend I got on a bus to DC with a bunch of friends, comrades and co-strugglers, to stand in protest against the Heritage Foundation’s malicious plan for all of us in their Project 2025 blueprint for what they want to do on ‘Day '1’ of a Trump presidency. Several people spoke, including me, and I’m sharing my words from Saturday (slightly edited for clarity and with links added), about how their plan is part of white supremacy.
Hello! My name is Jessie Daniels, and I am a writer, professor and activist. Today, I want to talk to you about how white supremacy is part of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
We are living in authoritarian times, in which the easy thing to do is retreat into numbness, through substances or the balm of Netflix and Chill. For those of us who are awake to these multiple, simultaneous threats we can see what is happening.
Alongside the strongmen who want to destroy all of us are the nice white ladies who help them implement their fascist regimes, here and around the world. In the U.S., a majority of white women have voted for the Republican party for decades. And, white women are at the vanguard of bringing the Heritage Foundation’s misbegotten agenda to the world, like Sharon Slater who leads the dangerous “Family Watch International.” In Uganda, after Slater met with the PM, the Ugandan government installed anti-LGBTQ legislation. This isn’t, as many people claim, these women “voting against their own interests.” Their votes and activism are in the service of whiteness and upholding white supremacy.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a hologram, a fantasy steeped in the hallucination of whiteness that obscures the way that their sad, binary gender regime upholds white supremacy.
Let’s be clear about what the Heritage Foundation’s vision is for all of us.
It is a gender regime that works in service to the eugenicist and white supremacist goals. Under their white supremacist gender regime, women/femmes and anyone with a uterus are only useful as baby-making machines and men, and able-bodied folks who are considered eligible for “service” and overwhelmingly from the poorest neighborhoods, are only useful as killing-machines. And all of us, are only afforded the rights of citizenship if we go along with the genocidal policies of the State.
What the far right wants to make us feel powerLESS and like their bleak vision is our inevitable future. IT IS NOT!!!
We can resist, disrupt, and refuse to obey in myriad, creative ways — from puppets to performance art, from TikTok videos to digital wheat-pasting — we will NOT go quietly into the future they have planned for us.
Our acts of resistance to this grim, far right vision of how we express our gender and sexuality, is how we find a path to the recovery of ourselves and how we reaffirm our values of dignity, empathy and solidarity.
Our resistance to the far right’s agenda for us here and in Uganda and in Palestine, are not different struggles but the same one.
A WORD OF CAUTION: We don’t want to work so hard against one, orange-tinted dictator only to open the door for a different, blue-tinted dictator. Right now, something like 70% percent - SEVENTY PERCENT - of young people 18-34 are not willing to vote Blue because of the US-supported genocide in Palestine.
I want so much more for us than this false choice. We DESERVE so much more than this. AND WE WILL GET IT.
Thinking about how we win, I look to those co-strugglers who have won before - against the closet and the repression of McCarthyism, against the APA’s definition of us as “sick,” against the obstruction of the FDA in an earlier pandemic.
I can think of no other group of people that I would rather struggle alongside of than a bunch of dykes & Drag Queens, trans folks in the legacy of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Pay-it-No-Mind Johnson, Black folks and chingonas, immigrants and indigenous folks, and all you fabulous people here today.
Watch the full video of the action here.
Thank you for sharing you speech and for your bravery in attending this event.
Awesome speech!