How to shorten/rewrite an oratory speech without losing it's depth? (urgent)

For reference, I was up late a few nights ago with a ~1500 word goal and 1200+ words written. I figured "what the hell" and got the rest of it out. What I had failed to realise in my insomnia-addled adderall and caffeine induced frenzy was that not only had I abandoned my format, structure, and roadmap, but that I had also made it 20 minutes long. I've managed to rewrite it a little bit, but it's still around 15 minutes long and I've got no clue how to start over or edit it without it losing some of its key points. I had a plan and everything, but I decided to abandon it when I went all out, and now that plan is beyond my recording. I wanted to follow a format- something like harm explanation solution or something akin to that, but I just got lost. Also, the more I re-read it, the more I notice how I barely use any transitions. I haven't got a damn clue how to fix that either. At this point, I don't know if I should edit it or just flat out rewrite it.

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For reference, this is what my speech looks like right now:

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The myth of Cassandra; a story so riveting yet so tragic that the world continues to revere it. A priestess of Apollo in the city of Troy, known for her remarkable beauty and gift of foresight, chosen by Apollo to be an oracle, but after rejecting his advancements, she was cursed so that none would ever heed her sights into the future.

As tragic as the legend of Cassandra is, it’s an even bigger statement that it attests to itself continuing to stand as an allegory today. From the profound blindness of the state of the world, willing or unwilling, to the voices warning the world of things to come that continue to be ignored, the irony of the stance of the story itself couldn’t be stronger. We live in an era of divide bigger than the Civil War. An era of mind-rotting ignorance, unparalleled misinformation, impeding decline so severe that experts abroad are calling our country “underdeveloped”, and a government so regressive that the Canadian government and the National Human Rights Campaign have declared America to be in a “state of emergency” as a “do not travel” zone, it’s impossible to ignore the undeniable contrast from the America we imagine.

Americans today are made to cope with all that in addition to a state of democratic erosion, violent extremism, and a boring and growing descent into fascism that began under an ignorant people throughout history and the future. This decline has been growing quietly, but one thing it hasn’t been is short-lived. A government not built to withstand the years of widespread pluralistic ignorance has only served as a detriment to the people. Today, the remaining people trying to warn the world of the future destined to come are having an increasingly harder time to have their words be heard. Today, fascism is spreading like a plague among the U.S. and world, and if this Trojan horse of hatred and disrepair continues to be ignored, it will be our plight. So first, we can construct our own symbolic effigy by examining the harms of continued restriction and censorship of facts and information and its correlation with the past. Then, we’re going to break open the path of those correlations and what they cause, and lastly, we’re going to build up the fortitude of our minds by seeing the real modern-day effects and the paths to avoiding them.

Examining modern-day censorship isn’t a simple task. The United States may pride itself on having “free speech”, but it’s certainly far from free. According to journalist Raymond Garcia of the American Library Association, the number of book bannings in the U.S. have increased extremely starting in 2021. Coming from an average of just over 300 books being challenged in 2020, that number rose to over 1200 in 2021; and as of March of this year, a record 2571 have been targeted by extremist censorship legislation. One major cause of this has been political scapegoating, which can be defined as the practice of singling out a person or group for unmerited blame and consequent negative treatment. Today, it’s used to pander to uneducated voters and get votes based on hyperbolic “issues” based in bias and fear mongering in order to distract from real voting issues that require critical thought.

Book bans have emerged from these issues, beginning with topics like “critical race theory”, and the human rights of queer and transgender teens that have been reduced to buzzwords and -isms in order to distil factual info and real groups of people into a dehumanised concept that causes reactionary voters to explode into anger and fear of something that they have and will never research. These are just some of the consequences of a regressive, ageing government making critical decisions impacting younger generations, which feeds into a positive feedback loop of sensationalist media spreading misinformation and fear. This only causes a chain reaction of hate, ignorance, and echo chambers that continue to perpetuate throughout the uneducated populace as they erode our democracy and only have the possibility for a disastrous outcome.

These continue to feed into the country’s rapid decline, but the overall gravity of the situation is what’s really dire.

You see, these events aren’t unique to today. Each of these effects have correlations to points in time that can no longer be deemed coincidences.

On the 6th of May, 1933, the first book burning of the Nazi regime took place at Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, Germany, after the German union declared a nation-wide “action against the Un-German spirit” as a movement to “cleanse” any unsavoury literary information by fire. This was a research institute founded upon the creation of progressive and rational data, medical procedures, and information that had it not been destroyed, would have brought the human rights progress index forward several decades. While founder Magnus Hirschfield was abroad, Nazi groups raided the institute, stole over 50,000 books, images, and rare publications as well as thousands of other works from surrounding libraries, schools, and universities filled with information about reproductive health, sexuality, the early beginnings of research surrounding the LGBT community, contraception, intersexuality, gender affirmation surgery, and patient information and testimonials. They then gathered all of these items and burned them in front of a crowd of 40,000 people.

During WWII, roughly ¾ of all books in Germany were burned and around 80% of school libraries and their books were purged; however, it was more than just books that were purged in the burnings of WWII. Historically, an erasure like this is referred to as “cultural genocide”, which refers to a purging of the information of a culture itself in an attempt to wipe out the growth of the culture, usually during, before, or after a genocide.

This isn’t just a speech about the past. This is a speech about the present and forward. We live in an age where state senators are holding book burning events and threatening to burn more books that they find “objectionable”, and most gravely, we live in an age where the fear of genocide is now a spreading concern.

Most genocides can be separated into ten stages. The first is classification, which starts when a group is divided into an “us and them”, usually shown through segregation, stereotypes, and a disconnect between two communities. For example: WWII’s Nuremberg laws and the distinction between Aryan and Non-Aryan or Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis.

Symbolisation precedes classification by assigning certain symbols or attributes, like the Khmer Rouge’s implementation of the blue scarf for those from the East bank. The yellow star of David on the clothing of the Jews or the pink triangle for homosexuals in Nazi Germany. Most of us already know of the third stage.

Discrimination—as defined by the Genocide Education Project, is when a dominant group uses law, custom, and political power to deny the rights of other groups. Residential schools in Northern America creating cultural genocide and ethnic cleansing towards the indigenous. Jim Crow laws of segregated America. The sterilisation of Uyghur Muslims in modern China.

Number 4, dehumanisation, is defined when one group treats another group as less than human. Members of a persecuted group may be compared with animals, parasites, insects or diseases. “Savages” for natives in the colonial Americas. “Cockroaches” for the Tutsis in Rwanda. “Vermin” for the jews in WWII.

After that is organisation. Genocides aren’t random, and are carried out when the oppressive power plans and organises forces to eliminate the victim. The Nazis’ and Khmer Rouge’s Gestapo–secret police– and SS units. ISIS as a whole. The Ku Klux Klan.

Polarisation—stage six—is when oppressors plant extremism, propaganda, assassination, and hate-driven fear mongering to incite violence and disparity between the groups. For example: the Nazis’ use of propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer to incite fear mongering and hate.

Preparation is the stage that follows, being enacted by euphemism-shrouded plans as “problems”, “questions”, or “solutions”, often disguised as “self defence”. The collection of a database of the names and information of every Jew/non-Aryan in the third reich and the construction of concentration camps and firing squads. Labour camps for Japanese-Americans. The Trail of Tears and “Indian removal act”. They build armies, buy weapons and train their troops and militias, and indoctrinate the populace with fear of the victim group.

Active genocide begins with persecution. Victims are identified and separated out because of their status. The starvation of Uyghurs in China’s labour camps. Armenian ethnic cleansing. Machete lashings and sexual violence of the Rwandan Tutsis. Concentration camps and medical experiments of WWII. Death lists are drawn up. Some members of victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is often confiscated. Oftentimes, they’re separated into ghettos, deported into camps, made slaves, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. This stage is when genocidal massacres begin.

Stage 9. Extermination. It should come as no surprise as to what this means. The identified hate group doesn’t kill their victims. They exterminate them, because to them, their victims are less than human. Gas chambers. Firing squads. Lynching. Lashing. Hanging. Forced suicide. Starvation. Adults and children alike, all subhumanly executed.

It’s not hard to see these things when you look deep enough below the surface. By now, you probably know enough about the genocides of the past, but like I said before, this isn’t a speech about the past.

You see, our modern day society has never been more advanced, and yet still today, we can still observe patterns that follow this so closely that they can’t be coincidences.

Stage one. Israelis- “the children of light” and Palestinians- “the children of darkness”. Transgender vs cisgender with the concept of “biological gender”.

Have you caught on yet?

Stage two. Colour-coded IDs for Palestinians and Israelis. A sign on IDs in the US if someone has changed their legal gender.

Stage three. The barring of trans people from bathrooms, sports, and any space that deems them as a threat. The apartheid in Israel, setting out land seizures, tariffs, and denial of citizenship for Palestinians.

Stage four. Israeli officials labelling Palestinians as “human animals”. The addressing of trans people as “freaks”, “demons”, and some other words I’d care to not repeat.

Stage five. Israeli explosives and blockades following a convoy along the Gaza strip. 583 discriminatory bills and counting such as Florida’s implementation of legal kidnapping of children under queer adults and felony charges for getting gender-affirming care under the age of 26, and several “anonymous tip lines” to “report transgender activity” in many different states.

Stage six. Hate speech, crimes, groups, and propaganda at a never seen before high, with disgusting and blatantly false media like Turning Point USA spreading like wildfire, statements like Florida republican rep. Randy Fine's “if it means erasing a community because you have to target children, then, damn right, we ought to do it!” and CPAC speaker Michael Knowles vehemently ranting that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

Stage seven. The eerily familiar “grand plan” and “Greater Israel Project” to annex surrounding nations like Lebanon and Jordan along with Palestine to create a “superior” ethnostate. The agenda of a “trans problem” and a collection of names and information to form a trans database.

Stage eight. This is where the line ends for us in America, but in Gaza, all outside travel, aid, and resources have been completely cut off, leaving over 2 million people with no access to medical care, anaesthetic, food, water, and power, leaving doctors to have to resort to doing surgeries not only without anaesthesia, but completely outside and without antiseptic, and leaving any hospital that remained without any power to run life support or NICUs.

Stage nine. 1 million people in Northern Gaza are forced to evacuate, facing the ultimatum of almost certainly dying or being victims of an ethnic cleanse, the use of white phosphorus bombs, and enough air strikes to constitute the same amount of damage as Hiroshima. Hospitals, neighbourhoods, schools, places of worship, all destroyed, children writing their names on their arms so their bodies could be identified, cats, dogs, adults, elders, and infants all trapped and suffocating under rubble, and fathers carrying around garbage bags full of the mutilated remains of their dead children.

And now, the tenth stage. Denial. Evidence is destroyed, victims and witnesses are intimidated, and propaganda continues to be spread—all creating an additional tax of survivor’s guilt.

Today, the U.S. and Israel both deny any wrongdoing, using the false veils of “protecting children” and “self defence”.

As of finishing this speech, the rising death toll in Gaza has reached over 7000, with over 3000- almost half of those deaths being children. To put that into perspective, the attacks of 11 Sep, 2001 killed 2977 people.

Meanwhile, politicians’ main targets are trans kids. This has caused the suicide prospect rate to grow to over 82% with attempted suicide rates reaching over one million people ages 10-18.

It takes no genius to see our democracy eroding before our eyes and that the rise of fascism, complacency, and sensationalism is ending lives at a scale the world hasn’t seen in a long time.

So now, I ask you: what side of history will you be on?

People are begging us to listen. I’ll say it now; we cannot afford to be complacent. This is affecting humans. This is affecting you. This is affecting me because I’m a part of that 41%.

I can count on a hand how many times I’ve almost taken my own life. I can’t, however, do the same for the amount of times I’ve wanted to, nor can I for the amount of times I’ve harmed myself when I was at my lowest. I am a queer child, and it seems to me that the word queer is making everyone overlook the word child. We’re always fairly regular people. All of the people facing this kind of violence are just people. People with hobbies and friends and loved ones and weird eating habits and quirky mannerisms, but all at once, they’re people that never asked for any of this.

I’ll save the flowery “friendship is magic” speech, but I will say this:

Unity triumphs over power. Change is best made by community. Protest and unrest across the globe isn’t for naught. The rise in awareness has reached the highest powers, as just recently, our outrage has been heard by the UN, who responded by voting for a ceasefire on the siege in Gaza. Unity works. So, here’s how you can help close the gate to fascism.

Number one: write letters, and write lots of them. Mail directly to your senators, your city office, your representatives- anyone you can think of that relies on you as a constituent. Number two: make calls. The more calls the better. Call anyone that can do something and hold your ground in your power as a constituent; they depend on your vote. Number three: show your support whether it be through acts of solidarity, active protesting, or signing petitions. Number four: spread awareness. The number one way to combat fascism is to make everyone aware of it. Tell everyone. Don’t ever shut up about it. Ensure that your words impact on whoever's ears they fall upon. People around us are in the centre of a wooden horse, and it’s our job to free them.

It was Dr. King who said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Today, fascism and genocide are the biggest threats to justice that the world has ever seen. It's imperative to remember these words, because those that forget history are doomed to repeat it. I’ve mentioned several points in this speech, from scapegoating and censorship to history and solutions, so let me repeat the importance of making a difference. I need you to imagine what you'd do if it were you trapped under the rubble? How'd you feel if you were me? Everyone here is in charge of making the world what they want it to become.What side of history do you want to be on? How will the world remember you?

I promise you: your time and consideration has been worth it, and I hope you feel differently than you did before.

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What are your tips/suggestions?