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George Takei, Cards Against Humanity partner to slam Trump in attack ad

'As Americans, it is our duty to resist fascist dictators wherever they rise up in the world.'

 

Aaron Sankin

Tech

Posted on Oct 11, 2016   Updated on May 25, 2021, 8:05 pm CDT

“As Americans, it is our duty to resist fascist dictators wherever they rise up in the world,” intones iconic Star Trek actor and social media superstar George Takei on a new ad from a super PAC created by the people behind the wildly popular game Cards Against Humanity. “This November, we are not going to elect one here.”

Entitled “Dictator” the two-minute ad narrated by Takei is part of a campaign created designed to, as founder Max Temkin told the Daily Dot earlier this year, “drive Trump nuts.”

In the ad, Takei charges:

Donald Trump says that he alone can solve America’s problems. At his rallies he whips his supporters into a violent frenzy and says that people who have criticized him will suffer when he’s president. Trump blacklists members of the media that write negative stories about him and says that when he’s president, he’ll restrict the rights of the free press.

He openly calls for the U.S. to commit was crimes and says that we should torture and kill the innocent children of suspected terrorists. Regarding waterboarding, he said that, even if it doesn’t work, they probably deserved it anyway. A veteran told Trump that American soldiers wouldn’t follow that order and Trump said, they’re not going to refuse me. If I say, do it, they’re going to do it.

Dictators around the world love Trump. He is praised by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un’s state run media. Back in 1990, Trump’s wife told her lawyer that he keeps a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.

Trump surrounds himself with yes men, sycophants and fools. There is nobody in Trump’s inner circle that will tell him no or correct him on the facts. Now Donald Trump gets classified national security briefings and he has repeatedly asked why the U.S. can’t use its nuclear weapons.

Since Donald Trump launched his campaign for the presidency last summer, Takei has been a vocal opponent of the former reality TV star’s nativist rhetoric. Takei, who was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp as a child, has used his massive social media following to slam Trump on issues like his call to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and bragging about how his wealth and fame allow him to sexually assault women with impunity.   

Cards Against Humanity’s campaign against Trump began over the summer, when the makers of the famously offensive card game launched a fundraiser that let customers decide, through their purchases, where the money was directed.

“Today, we’re letting America choose between two new expansion packs about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump,” the project’s website reads. “At the end of this promotion, Cards Against Humanity will tally up the sales of both packs, and depending on which pack gets more support, we will donate all the money in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

To date, the effort has raised over $400,000.

Prior to founding Cards Against Humanity, Temkin spent years working on political campaigns. That experience, Temkin believes, gives him some insight into Trump’s Achilles’ heel.

“Trump takes himself terribly seriously, and that’s hilarious. He is an egomaniac with zero self-discipline, and many campaign sources have reported that he spends large portion of his days brooding over bad press and shouting at his staff about it,” Temkin said in an interview earlier this year. “I’ve been on the other end of that campaign… working for distractible, thin-skinned, obsessive candidates and those elections are a nightmare. They hemorrhage staff and lose media cycles to trivia. Our goal is to drive Trump nuts with that stuff and capture as much of his attention as possible. Making jokes and doing funny things for attention is kind of our superpower, our team is really, really good at that.”

Temkin’s super PAC, the Nuisance Committee, is named after a subversive operation his grandfather created after being shot down while doing Allied bombing runs over Germany in World War II. Stuck in a POW camp and unable to fight the Nazis, Temkin’s grandfather joined with other prisoners to disrupt the camp’s operation however they could. “They formed a group called ‘the Nuisance Committee’ to covertly disrupt operations in the camp and force the Germans to divert increasing resources away from the front lines and into the prison,” Temkin said. “They came up with little protests, pranks, and daily annoyances that drove the Nazis insane. So that’s the name we’re going with.”

This ad, which the Nuisance Committee hopes to run on a number of popular podcasts, is only the latest in a series of the super PAC’s anti-Trump efforts. 

In September, the group spent $20,000 on a 90-foot billboard reading “If Trump is so rich how come he didn’t buy this billboard?” that also directed readers to a website slamming Trump for not paying federal income taxes.

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*First Published: Oct 11, 2016, 4:00 am CDT