A speaker uses Franklin the Turtle's exclusive club to argue the U.S. acts like a bully that excludes its own citizens and breaks rules it demands others follow. Project 2025 would create two Americas: one for elites, another for people of color, nurses, and women. A U.S. official even faked a Franklin book cover to brag about killing Venezuelans.
Chapters
There's a story from Franklin the Turtle, a Canadian kids' book series, where Franklin and a few friends discover a small hideout, the perfect spot to form a secret club. Excited by the idea, Franklin limits the club to just 4 members, himself and 3 buddies, since the space is so small. They make it an exclusive group, which inadvertently leaves out some of his other good friends. Franklin gets so excited with his club meetings and secret passwords that he forgets about the friends he excluded. At the best of times, America is a a nation obsessed with itself. Its news sources only point inward, so people grow up without any real sense of how the rest of the world sees them. Sometimes that view is positive, but far more often, the world sees a country that can't or won't see past its own clubhouse door. When bad things happen to the US, it tells its citizens, "That happens because the world doesn't like freedom." Such a simple story for a complicated world. The truth, of course, is much less flattering. What people dislike are bullies. Countries that take what isn't theirs. Countries that break rules they expect others to follow, like not killing people in international waters because they might have drugs on them. And then, as predictably as the plot of a bad movie, the US acts surprised, hurt even, when other countries decide to cut America out of the loop. Alliances cool. Trade deals move forward without them. In that Franklin story I mentioned, those left-out friends aren't stupid. They realize they've been excluded, so another character, Beaver, responds by starting her own club and pointedly does not invite Franklin, which means Franklin is now the one left out. Only then does he understand what his choices meant. It would be nice if the people running the US today would have that kind of foresight, but they don't. And honestly, we shouldn't expect them to. Their prime motivation, the literal point of Project 2025, was to create two Americas: one One for people like them, and one for everyone else. Not in the club: brown people, Black people, nurses, women, anyone who doesn't fit the tidy fictional story they tell about themselves. Which is why it was especially ironic that the American Secretary of War today used a Franklin book cover, a fake one of course, to brag about killing Venezuelans. The United States is on a deeply dangerous path. What it hasn't realized yet is that the world Americans already closed ranks and shut them out of the global clubhouse. Because if the best example the US can find to justify international war crimes is a character who was created to show kids how to do the right thing, well, that tells you everything you need to know about how little they remember about doing it themselves.
