Democracy Now! was there Sunday when New Yorkers gathered at Trump Tower in Manhattan to protest the president’s response to violent attacks by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. These are some of their voices.
Transcript
DAVID BODEMER: My name is David Bodemer. I felt it was important to come out today and to come out every day and to oppose a president that condones white supremacy. He did not—it took him three days to denounce David Duke last year during his campaign. It’s very interesting that he made a big point in his campaign about naming radical Islamic terrorism, and also he made this huge show of denouncing MS-13, but he can’t come out and denounce white supremacy. I mean, that’s outrageous.
VICTORIA RICHTER: Victoria Richter, and I’m here because I’m very concerned about this administration. What’s going on is terrible. And what happened in Charlottesville, I thought that was part of United States history, not its current—but not what’s happening now. And it’s just disgraceful.
NICOLE SHIPPEN: I’m Nicole Shippen. I’m a professor of political science at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. Our students are very vulnerable, and we mostly have students of color. Most of them are immigrants. They’re from all over the world. And that’s what New York sort of stands for. Trump’s rhetoric and ideological claims really brought a lot of people out of the woodwork, people who used to be ashamed or could be shamed, and now they can come out, and they’re proud. And he was able to bring out a lot of those biases, a lot of those resentments.
JOHN VEGA: My name is John Vega. I am with Rise and Resist. The terror that I felt when I saw the burning torches, the pictures, and—I couldn’t actually believe that that was something that was happening this day and age. And then you’re thinking about—I was thinking about it, that a person was killed yesterday protesting Nazis in the United States. That clearly blew my mind, just that concept that what we fought for in World War II—we fought against the Nazis. Our grandfathers, our fathers, our grandmothers worked on World War II to stop this, and now we have to deal with that in 2017, that somebody is dying because of white supremacy and Nazism? That literally blows my mind. And I—it’s a hard thing to kind of shake.
PROTESTERS: We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger! We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger! We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger! We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger! We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger! We’ll be back, and we’ll be stronger!
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