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Adam Dashevsky: Welcome to our podcast, “Yo, Is This Fascist?” I’m Adam Dashevsky
Jessica Weislogel: I’m Jessica Weislogel.
Yinchu Sun: Hi, I’m Yinchu Sun.
Adam: So we wanted to begin by first discussing just who we are and where were from to show any bias that we might have throughout this discussion. I’m a white Caucasian male from the east coast, from the Philadelphia area. I’m also Jewish and tend to have liberal beliefs.
Jessica: I’m Caucasian female. I’ve been in Columbus my whole life and I grew up pretty liberal, so.
Yinchu: I’m an international student from China. This is my first semester at OSU.
Adam: Alright. So, uh, today were going to be discussing a lot about the current sitting president Donald Trump and discussing his fascist tendencies. So, on the next slide, we have this famous poster of some of the signs of fascism, and were going to discuss some of them, and discuss the relation between how they connect to discrimination against certain races, types of people, their own beliefs, and just discuss in Trumps presidency how he has attempted to split our country.
Alright, so our first thing we wanted to discuss was some of the powerful and continuing nationalism that Trump has shown and caused his supporters to show. So, we have a quick video.
What we were discussing was Trump supporters on a bridge and this is a video of them the other day.
*Video plays*
So what are your guy’s first reactions when you see that display of support for a President elect?
Jessica: I mean, we can already tell that he’s rallied his supporters behind him in the name of patriotism for the US, and maybe it’s my bias, but its turned into more nationalism instead of patriotism because of the violence that they have been, um, like some of the violence, like what we just saw, you know blocking the bridg. They blocked the Biden tour bus. Its like they’ve been doing all this stuff, and that’s not just a love for your country, that’s doing something on purpose to cause harm in a sense, ya know.
Adam: Yinchu, have you ever seen support like that for someone?
Yinchu: No. For me this is very crazy behavior. I also think you’re influenced by the justice of some kind and also real influence normal people’s lives.
Adam: When I saw that video the first thing that I thought of was just like Trumps disapproval of the peaceful protests that were happening, yet, we completely support a bunch of, I’m not going to say they’re all white people, I don’t know, but I’m going to assume, make an assumption that there is a lot of white people on that bridge and those cars that were just in the road. I don’t think they were told to leave. I think they were fine, but there was tear gas being thrown at people who were peacefully protesting the killing of a Black man, and I just, when I saw that I was just like in shock, like that we allow some things happen in this country protest wise and it’s fine, and then some things are labeled as different.
Alright, disdain for human rights. We’ve definitely seen a lot of this. So I guess to connect with what I was just saying. This picture right here was just taken when, um, during the pandemic there was a peaceful protest going on outside the white house by this Saint John’s Church , which I believe is near the white house, and Trump wanted to do a photo op in front of it so they used tear gas and physical force to move the protestors out just for this man to hold a bible in the creepiest was possible in front of a church. And also, uh, just like the fact that he’s trying to strip away on of the most important rights we have, which is freedom of speech. I just think his hatred of that is a little scary that if people are protesting in Washington DC they deserve the right to be able to do that, they can’t just have their right taken away so the president can take a photo op. I just found that a little weird.
Jessica: Yeah, and the fact that he used the military (meant to say police) even, you know, to discontinue that protest. And the military (police) has been turning all of these protests into riots, you know, throwing the tear gas and the rubber bullet, these protests were peaceful and then, especially the one here in Washington DC when this happened, it was completely peaceful and Trump sent out his military (police) just to go get a photo op.
Adam: Yinchu, have you experienced any similar style of protesting in your life?
Yinchu: No
Adam: I thought this was just like a crazy us of um wording just to incite violence towards a certain demographic of people that he literally was making a speech and crossed it out just so he would remember not to call it the Corona Virus or Covid-19 by the proper scientific term, he’s like oh no I’m going to put the whole blame on this country even though I failed to handle it.
Jessica: Right, and he still continues, like his supporters still continue to blame China for it when China had nothing to do with how he handled like should have handled it. It got here, it was going to get here no matter what, and it was how he handled it.
So, the fact that he didn’t do anything about Covid or barely anything besides place a travel ban on China for, you know, at the beginning, that’s all he did, which that obviously didn’t do much because it was already here by the time he did that, and so it, because he didn’t do anything it affected the minority populations a lot harder than any other population.
Adam: Yinchu, I’m very curious about your perspective on this specific situation just because it’s so easy for me, as a white male to be like, that’s like one of the most racist things I’ve ever seen. It’s not directed at me so how do you feel personally when you see that?
Yinchu: So actually, in China we just see him as a joker. He’s a very funny man. We don’t take him serious. But what I want to say is there are so many Asian Americans, not only Chinese, they are living Americans, so what he said has very bad effect on these people. Some racist men attack the Asians because they cannot figure out who is Chinese or who is Japanese or Korean. I think, what he did just to blame and to let other people ignore it. He didn’t do anything to help to stop this pandemic.
Adam: Yeah it was just a scapegoat, he was literally just looking for someone to blame, and it’s crazy that he said the Chinese virus. It’s not the random citizens of Chinas fault that the virus happened. Like it’s one thing if you blame their government’s handling of it, but don’t blame the entire country. Not every single person played a role in spreading it to our country.
If we go to the previous slide we can talk about the ICE. These types of pictures you can imagine you see in a history text book like yeah we used to do this as a country and its crazy that we did it.
Jessica: It makes me want to cry just looking at this photo. There are people, especially kids in cages like this. It’s awful.
Adam: Yeah its crazy that how we treat people in our country, or people that are trying to flee their country due to fear that they’re going to die. The fact that were punishing them like this and like separating families, which, the mental told that has effects on kids. Awful results of treating people like less than human.
Jessica: So, Netflix actually has a documentary called Migration Nation and I only watched the first episode, and ICE even didn’t want it to be released because it showed stuff behind the scenes that they did not want getting out. Basically it was showing how ICE has a quota now for the amount of illegal immigrants that they end up arresting, and if they’re not meeting that quota they start having to arrest people called collateral, they call them collateral. They might not be there for those specific people, but if they find out that they are also illegal immigrants, they end up arresting them as well so that they can meet their quota, and those people are called collateral. There was one ICE worker who she was saying under the Obama administration we rarely took any collateral if at all. Our quotas have been going up under the Trump administration.
Adam: Yinchu, how has your experience been as someone that’s come to a country and started living ina new country?
Yinchu: I’m not very experienced with this, but I think if the people are good then no criminal record I think they would be more way or measure to deal with them. This picture shows, it’s very like concentration camp, like what Hitler did.
Jessica: I agree with that it looks very concentration camp.
Adam : I think we’ve sadly come up on out time, but guys thank you so much for this conversation.
Jessica: Yes, thank you.
Yinchu: Thank you.
Adam: I think it was very beneficial, and we’ll see you guys next time.