Originally by Julia Garnett at msmagazine.com
With Donald Trump set to take over the White House next year, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the next conservative president looms large. But what if Project 2025 has already arrived? Republican state legislative supermajorities never needed Trump in power to begin enacting parts of the Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda.
“Project 2025 is Tennessee 2024,” said Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones. “We have been the tip of the spear in experiencing some of these rollbacks that would be expanded nationally under this proposal.” Jones believes Project 2025 is just a new name for a collection of older hateful ideas.
Many Project 2025 policies have been implemented at the state level across the country in the form of abortion bans, anti-LGBTQ+ bills, book bans and more. Despite the hate, equality-minded activists in local communities have used small wins as motivational fuel to continue the march of justice onward.
As a young queer person living in Tennessee, seeing crowds of strangers fight for my rights helped give me the courage to publicly speak about my identity and continue to work within the movement. Now, as the nation heads towards another Trump presidency, the stories of hope amid oppression are vital lessons in how to turn loss into various forms of resistance.
On March 27, 2023, worlds were shattered in Nashville when a school shooter entered Covenant Elementary School, killing three students and three adults. After this tragedy, we expected an immediate legislative response: common-sense gun reform.
Instead, our eyes were opened to the incompetence of many state officials in the face of grieving mothers and desperate students. Those of us pushing for reforms were shocked to see that even with one of the victims being best friends with the governor’s wife, nothing changed. In acts of frustration and fear, young people organized.
Students walked out of school and marched to the Capitol to call for change. Three democratic legislators—later coined the Tennessee Three—joined in this act of resistance: Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. Jones and Pearson were expelled from the house for this and had to be reinstated days later.
The Tennessee Three quickly attracted national attention to the realities of the statehouse. They continued to use their platforms to inspire change across the country and to protest the actions of the Tennessee supermajority.
In the following months after the shooting, masses of moms sat at every legislative session to plead for change. When that didn’t sway the minds of politicians, they ran for office.
Shaundelle Brooks, a mom and a staunch advocate for gun reform after losing her son to a 2018 mass shooting, ran and won an open seat against her conservative challenger. Gaining 54 percent of the vote, she prevented the Democrats from losing further ground in the state legislature.
Despite Tennessee Democrats failing to flip any seats this election cycle, the movements of change and conversations have started. Activists and organizers have worked to find bipartisan areas of agreement on reforms to increase the safety and well-being of communities. Change on a local level will take time, and building connections across the aisle will render us stronger in a country where hate seeks to divide.
Lack of gun reform is only one shortcoming of Tennessee’s conservative supermajority. Anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is also on the rise. The ACLU tracked 40 discriminatory bills in 2024 alone. These bills contribute to the deaths of our LGBTQ+ community members: More than one in 10 young LGBTQ+ people attempted suicide in the past year.
When state legislators tried to pass a ban on pride flags in public schools, Nashville activists began rallying outside the capitol in solidarity with LGBTQ+ students. Community members held pride flags inside the Capitol and risked arrest with protest. Many gathered for weeks to call attention to the hate caused by anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and were pleased to hear eventually that the bill would not pass.
Win or loss, peaceful civil disobedience has been a core structure in fighting for an inclusive future and will continue to be necessary in the coming years.
As this year’s youth honorary chair of National Banned Books Week, I’ve witnessed my fair share of fascist policies. Over the last several years, conservative school board members, county commissioners and state legislators have worked to remove inclusive material from library shelves across school districts nationwide.
In Tennessee, the statewide obscenity policy prohibits any book with “depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct [or] excess violence” from school libraries. Books are disappearing.
I’ve witnessed students, parents and educators spend hours at school board meetings to exercise the power of their voices to defend diverse library material. Working alongside passionate community members, I’ve been able to help prevent the removal of books like The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky and A Place Inside of Me by Zetta Elliot from our school libraries.
With this work, I’ve continued to advocate for increased student representation in the review process of books, serving as the first student on my high school’s review committee for challenged materials in 2023.
I’ve also worked on national Zoom panels to ensure that education on fighting book bans is disseminated to communities, so we can fight for change together. In the end, we aren’t going to win every fight against censorship, but every voice joining the movement is another ray of hope in this ongoing fight.
On the abortion front, Tennessee imposed a total abortion ban in 2022 after the fall of Roe. In response, a group of women sued after being denied medically necessary healthcare. Because of this lawsuit, Tennessee now must allow abortions in certain instances when the health of the mother is at risk.
Women from this court case also ran for office this year to use their platforms and voices for change. Despite their losses in the election cycle, these women helped further a movement of Democratic candidates running for office in unprecedented numbers that will continue in the midterms and onward. After all, when one woman steps up to run for office, she shows so many others that it’s possible.
While Trump’s return to the White House is discouraging, we cannot afford to despair or stagnate. There are still spaces for collective action, particularly at the local level, and we must continue conversations across the aisle.
In these moments of darkness, we need to create our own hope by bridging the gaps fueled by hate. The future of change relies on our ability to keep an open mind and refrain from vilifying what we cannot understand. At the end of the day, when we can become everything the hateful are not, we have already won. Our love, our light and our acceptance will be our revolution.
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