George Takei Explains Why Latino Voters Should Resist Donald Trump [Video]
George Takei has released a new video that’s going viral, and it’s a call for Latino citizens to register to vote and stop Donald Trump from becoming president.
In the video, George Takei speaks in Spanish and explains how Japanese citizens were put in internment camps after the Pearl Harbor attack during World War II, according to Mic. Takei and his family were put in an internment camp during this time.
Takei argues that Trump’s plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants could be similar to the internment of Japanese people, and he says that many Latinos who are here legally could end up victims of his plans as well.
“Many don’t know that I speak and understand Spanish,” Takei wrote in a caption for the Facebook post. “In fact, I grew up with many Mexican-American neighbors in L.A. This message, regarding my own personal experience with racial demonization, is addressed in Spanish to my Latino fans and their families and friends. I hope I did the language justice.”
The video has been viewed nearly four million times at the time of writing. George Takei is famous for his role as Sulu in the Star Trek series, but he has become a social media personality in recent years.
“When I was a little boy, politicians used fear and racism against people of Japanese descent in this country,” Takei says in Spanish in the video. “We were targets simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Takei urges Mexican citizens in states like Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado to vote against Donald Trump, because those are “swing states.” He also says that states like Arizona and Texas could even be in contention.
“Donald Trump is a dangerous man,” Takei says. “But your votes can ensure he never comes to power, and history does not repeat itself. It’s important most of all that you register to vote if you have not already and that, along with all people of good conscience, you vote resoundingly against Trump in November.”
This isn’t the first time George Takei has spoken out against Donald Trump. In March, George Takei wrote a Facebook post where he made fun of the way Trump answers questions during interviews. In response to being asked “What’s 2+2?” Takei’s Trump gives a long and winding answer.
“I have to say a lot of people have been asking this question,” Takei wrote. “No, really. A lot of people come up to me, and they ask me. They say, ‘What’s 2+2’? And I tell them, look, we know what 2+2 is. We’ve had almost eight years of the worst kind of math you can imagine. Oh, my God, I can’t believe it.”
George Takei made a similar joke in May when he posed a hypothetical situation where a man who’s coached baseball is trying to convince a football team to make him coach simply because he keeps saying he can do it.
“Have you coached football before?” one team member asks, Takei wrote. “‘That doesn’t matter,’ the man says ‘I’m going to be the best coach ever. We’re going to win. We’re going to win and win, because we’re champs.'”
Takei also appeared on MSNBC in May to say that Donald Trump is an indecisive man who doesn’t know what he’s doing and that he just makes a bunch of contradictory decisions seem decisive when he says them.
Donald Trump was made the Republican nominee for president during the Republican National Convention this week. The convention has been very contentious, and many people tried to stop Trump from becoming the nominee.
[Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images]
