George Takei is using his family’s personal story and his fluency in Spanish to warn Hispanic voters about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his views on immigration.
The Star Trek icon shared his concerns in a Facebook video that is closing in on 12 million views as of Thursday (28 July).
Takei says he made the video to give some personal and historical perspective on how Trump’s words and plans ‘can have very real and terrible consequences.’
Takei reminds people that in 1942, anti-Japanese hysteria led to the forced relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast including his family.
‘When I was a little boy, politicians used fear and racism against people of Japanese descent in this country,’ Takei says.
‘We were targets simply because we happened to look like the people who happened to bomb Pearl Harbor. They said we were all spies and saboteurs, that none of use could be trusted.
‘When Trump today says Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, it is his way of similarly dehumanizing whole groups, so that he can set his plans in motion.
‘I still remember the day armed guards marched up our driveway with bayonets ordering us out of our home. I remember my mother’s tears as we took with us only what we could carry. And we lost all that we had worked so hard for.’
For the next four years, Takei’s family was kept in a camp behind barbed wire fences with armed guards – held prisoner in their own country.
Takei says Trump wants to ‘forcibly round up 100 times the number interned in 1942.’
He points out that Trump hasn’t yet explained “who can stay and who must go ‘ and that ‘back then, they simply said, “A Jap is a Jap.”‘
Takei says today Trump tells his supporters that a ‘Mexican is a Mexican.'”
He points to as proof Trump’s accusing the judge in the ongoing Trump University trial of being biased against him simply because the judge is of Hispanic descent even though the judge was born in Indiana.
‘He is playing on the same fears and ignorance that once led this country to intern my family.’
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