‘I refuse to believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist’

A Columbia student created an event yesterday to protest the DNC.

In the aftermath of the election, Dan Burkhardt, a senior, is organizing a protest to be held tomorrow from 10am to 1pm at the Democratic National Committee in Washington D.C.

Setting up a Facebook event, the computer science major plans to go to DC on Friday and protest. But rather than standing proud with a placard, and shouting the same chant, Dan will deliver stories of those directly affected by the outcome of this election.

He said: “My plan is to stand on the public sidewalk with a megaphone and read these stories to DNC HQ so they can hear our voices. We need them to hear the cost of this election. And I need to vent my anger at the completely unnecessary undoing of all that we have accomplished over the last eight years.”

An avid Obama supporter, Dan joined the 2008 to repudiate everything about the Bush Administration, the wars they started and their regressive social agenda. Yet during this election, he was undeniably unhappy with the nomination of Hillary Clinton, and now that we have a Republican POTUS, he’s calling for reform.

Since the Facebook event, Dan has also been attempting to register interest on Reddit too.

We caught up with Dan to talk about his feelings about the election and his plans going forward.

Talking to The Tab about why he created the event, he said: “I made the event out of the deep sense that we Democrats need to hold our own party accountable for its completely unfair primary process and demand party reform.”

He explained that he feels let down by the DNC, especially the leadership of the party. Going further into this, Dan mentioned that it’s not all about Trump supporters being racist, reiterating that’s not the reason he’s confused.

He said on hearing the election results, it felt “as if everything that has been accomplished, all of the progress we made over the last eight years has been pretty much for nothing.

“As I spent the day reflecting, it has become clear to me that Democrats need to do some real soul searching about the leadership of our party. I refuse to shut my eyes and believe that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, or a bigot or whatever else.

“That simply cannot be true.”

Instead, Dan believes that we witnessed an anti-Hillary vote this election. Far less was it about Trump supporters, according to him, it was protests against Hillary Clinton instead. Explaining, he said: “It cost us everything. It is clear that the DNC never intended to hold a fair primary process.

“We know without a doubt that the DNC always favored Clinton over Sanders because of the hacked emails. We also know that there was no primary challenger that could have emerged the way Obama did in 2008, when there was an actual fair and open primary process.”

Dan has a number of clear goals for his campaign, sighting them as:

Party reform

Transparency and accountability for our primary process

Everyone who weighted the process for Clinton to win the primary has to go

Taking back the Democratic party from the ground-up

Speaking about the campaign in general, Dan expressed his concerns saying: “This campaign has been a nightmare for so many people I love. I’m scared for my friends who are immigrants. I’m terrified for my Muslim friends. I’m terrified of an autocrat with fascist ideas in the white house and control of the military. As a veteran I am shaken for the young people who are probably going to be unnecessarily killed or injured in whatever military entanglements he leads our nation into.