 Irish Singh, as a stand-up comedian, writer, and activist, he's based in Chicago, you may have seen him on the Trump The Insul Comic Dog special on Hulu. He was kicked out of a Trump rally in Muscatine on January 24th with his friend and fellow stand-up comedian Taylor Williams. They raised a banner that said, Stop Hate, and he called out Trump for his support that he's receiving from white supremacists. It was on C-SPAN, and we used the footage and then Triumph The Insul Comic Dog heckled Irish Singh for heckling Trump. And welcome to my show, Irish Singh. You join us. Thank you very much for having me. You're in Chicago today, right? I actually am driving back to Chicago tonight. I'm in Iowa City. You're in Iowa City. The rally in Muscatine was a cold day. I remember this, and we saw Donald Trump, and we were warned beforehand that people are entitled to heckle Donald Trump, and that when somebody starts heckling him, everybody should start screaming Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and drown out the heckler. And we look up. Stay on brand. Yeah. Stay on brand. And I look up, and there is a guy with a turban on his head. That would be you? That would be me, in fact, yeah. Are you a heavy-set guy? Oh, sure. Yeah, I'm a little bit heavy-set, yeah. And you were being thrown out. You were holding a white sheet. Usually at a Trump rally, they're white sheets, but there are three holes in them. Nothing written on them. No. Different kind of white sheet, yeah. And I don't think, yeah, good. Okay, so you disrupted a Trump rally. Mm-hmm. Why? Oh, I mean, there are so many reasons, but the reasons that really, with the last draw from my friend Taylor and I, were these robo-calls coming from the American Freedom Party, which is a declared white supremacist party. And did you get a robo-call from a... I didn't personally, but I had a number of friends who were getting them on Facebook. They were getting them on their phones, and then they would post it to Facebook. Yeah, I got a robo-call yesterday from Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio. And he was actually on the line. That's how robotic he is. I just wanted to shoehorn that joke into the conversation. That was a good one, yeah. And you were a stand-up comedian. Yeah, I am. And you were wearing a turban. And your name is Aarish Singh. So are you a member of Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah? What Arab terrorist organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization? What Arab... Because you had a turban on your head. So what Arab terrorist group are you a member of? I would never be part of any organization that would have me as a member. But I would be a member of Aarish Singh. So you're a member of Haganah, you're a Jewish terrorist. Yeah, a little bit, yeah. Wait a second. Yeah. My terror group is based in the Catsfields. Aarish Singh. Are you Arab? No, I'm not Arab. Okay, now. South Asian? Yeah. You're what? South Asian or Indian? How do you want to... Okay, your parents are from Punjab, India. And you would be Sikh, correct? Yes, that's my religious cultural background. And so as everybody at the Trump rally said after they found out that you were Sikh, so you're an Arab. Yep, they have their Trump geography down. All right, so you had a turban on, right? And there weren't... There were no black people at the Trump rally. There was actually a few people selling those hats on that side, yes. Nobody wearing a turban, there were people who had their brains operated on, so they were wearing some kind of stuff wrapped around their heads. But a lot of lobotomy patients, but no Sikhs. Do Arabs wear turbans? Do Muslims wear turbans? For Muslims to wear turbans, it's usually often like a very religious kind of person who will be doing it if not a very common mainstream thing. It's even less so in the U.S. It's very uncommon to see that. If you run into someone in the U.S. and they're wearing a turban, they're almost always a Sikh. Or they're doing a mind reading act. Yeah. But at a Trump rally, they would automatically assume you're a Muslim, right? Well, I mean, I guess so, but I don't know. You have to be by their assumptions, you know, like that. I mean, I think that's the situation for Sikhs or Sikhs in America. Both pronunciations are actually acceptable, but these... You know, that's American, you know, to be yourself. You have to, just because other people are wrong, you don't have to back away and have to worry about them mistaking you for someone else. That's how I feel. So says you. Yeah, so says me. I'll have things go under the Trump administration. Okay, so your parents are from Punjab, India, and they... Yes. And they moved to America when? They moved here in the 70s. And you were born in America? Yeah, I was born in Chicago. You were born in Chicago. So why do you have this thick Punjabi accent? I mean, I can barely... I don't know. I can barely make out what you're saying. Yes. So you're an anchor baby, basically, right? Yes. I'm not quite, but my parents have already had citizenship. Your parents... Okay. And you're an American citizen? Yes. Mm-hmm. And you went to the Trump rally wearing the turban? Yeah, indeed. And you went there with the purpose to interrupt Donald Trump? Yeah, and to protest, yeah. I mean, the interruption that I made was specifically in reference to these outrageous robocalls where they were saying, we don't need more Muslims in this country. We need more smart, educated white people. And that just didn't really phase into the news, and that people in Iowa were calling ordinary white Iowa people. A lot of white people in Iowa, that's just the composition of the state, but they were outraged at this thing that's happening. Mm-hmm. And he's been walking over that state for the last six months acting like, I can just say whatever kind of incredibly authoritarian racist stuff I want to do. Yeah, you guys will just have to take it. You'll play Iowans, so... Well, I mean, if we have smart, educated white people being brought into this country, that doesn't bode well for Trump's re-election, does it? That's a very good point. Yeah, you may not. Okay, so... Not going to the face. So you walk into the rally. Were you wearing the turban as you walked in? Yes, yes. I mean, I wear the turban regularly. Yeah, that is what I do. Do you wear it regularly to get attention or because you're a practicing Sikh? I'm a practicing Sikh. I mean, I've gotten more into the past. I've always identified culturally and intellectually with the religion. It's a modern religion. It had a lot of tenets there about the dirty things like standing up for other people, that you should give service for other people, regardless of whether they're your fate, anything that can lead to enlightenment. You don't have to convert people. All these things identified very strongly. Only in the last few years have I become more identifying with the rituals of it. And how related is the Sikh religion to Hinduism? I'm not a theologian, but the way I kind of look at it is it came out of this period of intellectual ferment in India, where there was both in Islam and Hinduism, this kind of moving towards a personal relationship with God, not through trying to get away from some of the rituals, meaningless rituals. So I think it involves elements of both, and it takes elements of its own and brings it in. If you look at it, just if you're talking in terms of like religious history, comparative religion, that's how it works. And how old is the religion? I'm not 500 years. Oh, it's a young religion. So would you say it's kind of like Protestantism in that it's a it's a it branched off from? Sure. You can make a comparison. People, some people talk about it being similar to that period in religious history in India being like the Reformation. I think that though, like more in terms of the enlightenment to a degree, I think it's shedding. It was anti superstition against superstition when it started out. You know, it has created its own rituals, its own superstition. It's just like any other religion that has all its own problems. But the things that I identify with very strongly are the progressive nature of the tradition. Okay. So you walk into the Trump rally and they know you're going to hackle, right? Because they see the turbid. No, no. Actually, so you kind of just by luck, we came really late when it happened. Pretty much everybody was seated. If anybody wanted to say anything to me, they would have had to stop, you know, looking at Trump speak and listening to him, you know, talk about whatever nonsense he was on. Were you getting dirty? Did you get dirty looks from people? I mean, we just walked right in and then we went to the back of the hall and then we came out where you see us in that footage and then throw the banner. We really weren't hanging around people too much that were there for it. All we had to deal with was the security check from the Secret Service and that's really not a partisan group or anything for nobody. Somebody asked me if I had one of those knives jokingly because some six do carry the coupon, but I was not, you know, that's not something I do. So. Yeah. So, is this the first time you've heckled Donald Trump? I went to one of his valleys. I used to be a writer here in Iowa City, an editor for magazine and I was looking to maybe do a story and I went to a rally of history in the summer and it was very bizarre, but I didn't heckle or anything like that. So you heckled Trump and you get thrown out. Were you roughed up? Were there black brown shirts, jackbooted thugs kicking you? Did they spit on you? He already had the police being a servile as they needed to be already. I mean, they were basically taking me out. I really don't understand how easy it is for them to just not have to hire their own security. They seem to be relying on the local police forces when they do things. I was escorted by the police. There's one guy who came up from the stairs and shook his fist at me and said, if you don't get out of here, you know, I'm going to keep shaking this fist at you. I guess I don't know. He said it wasn't intimidating. He looked like a really goofy, strong supporter you could imagine, just a very skinny tall man and just shaking his fist at me. Were you scared? No, I think what actually happened is both me and the officer next to me may have rolled their eyes at the same time. I did point out, hey, this guy is threatening to assault me. He was just like, you know, just get out of here. The sooner you get out of here, the better everything will be. They were just really... They didn't do anything to me, these police officers, but it was just kind of silly how much they fell in line with this kind of stuff. Everybody had a role to play. Sure. And you were the protester and you got thrown out and you didn't resist, right? No, I didn't. I resisted this guy shoving me the way he did when you can see in the footage. He was just almost trying to slap me out of the place. Was that a cop? I didn't resist. No, that was some sort of Trump organizer or something like that. But he wasn't physically violent. He was just shoving you? Yeah, I mean, he was shoving me pretty hard. And I turn around and kind of tell him to back off, but that's the extent of it. I didn't resist arrest her. I wasn't arrested, but I didn't resist them taking me out of there. You weren't arrested and then you were taken out and did the cops talk to you on the way out? Oh, yeah. You know, they took our information. They did all of that. Then they got the... What do you mean they took your... What do you mean they took your... They wanted our license. Licenses, Taylor and mine. And we gave them to them. Wait a minute. Why do you have to give them your license? I don't know. I was just totally down to... I was not going to try to be in any way uncooperative about it. For one thing, I actually had to do a comedy show in the evening in Minneapolis, so I did have to. I couldn't stick around there. And the other... I really didn't know... My friend Taylor Williams is from Muscatine. I didn't want to cause any trouble for him. So I was just down to cooperate. I don't know if they really had the legal right to do that or not. Is it against the law to heckle a presidential candidate? I don't. I'm not sure. That's a funny issue. They called the school groundskeeper over and they were like trying to talk real fast, trying to intimidate us and being like, you want to charge these guys. And they really couldn't come up with the charge that they were going to give me. The police asked the groundskeepers, the people who were sponsoring the event, if they wanted to charge you. Someone actually... Taylor told me to see someone who works at the school. He came over. The police said, do you want to charge him? He said, well, I should charge them with inciting a riot. But then you'd have to charge Trump with that, too. Yeah, exactly. That's already what they were going for. And then one of the officers, I think, said, we could charge him with trespassing. I vaguely remember that. And I don't know if that would actually hold up or not. I have to figure how I would react if people started showing up at Trump rallies. Not Trump rallies, I'm sorry. Bernie rallies and being disruptive. I guess I would... I'd like them thrown out. Sure. I totally understand that and I totally understand people taking me out of there. This isn't something... We both felt that the circumstances were ridiculous, that the kind of politics he was bringing out to Iowa, the things that he was seeing in previous protests of Trump, there was a protestor of me who was thrown out for doing only a silent protest. I find that kind of outrageous. All right, so a lot of people like me saw Donald Trump in the debate on Saturday night and kind of fell in love with him for the way he went after Jeb. Sure. Is there any part... Again, I'm not on his hit list yet, so I'm not as frightened. Are you frightened of Donald Trump? I keep thinking, well, what I've been doing since this is... I didn't do anything immediately after the caucus. Once he didn't win that, I did come out and start doing comedy routines based on what he said to me. Was he wearing one of those hats? And no, he never will. And it was a very odd statement that he made. Some people thought he was talking about my turban. He was trying to insult me. People caught on to that. He was talking about his campaign hats, the overpriced campaign hats, which he's invested $400,000 of his money into, which he tried to work in a quick plug for that. So I disproved him on both counts in this comedy routine, and I've got one of his hats now, and I share that I can. Are you scared? Are you scared? Are you scared? I should probably get another patron from the ruling class to back me up, if we lose the kind of rights to do something like this, to have the most basic confrontation with someone who's got just huge wealth. That's all that rides behind him. I inherited wealth. But as a Sikh, are you scared? I'm scared. That he's going to get elected? Are you scared that he's going to get elected and that the country could move really far to the right and make it difficult for people? Sikh, I'm already scared. I've been scared for the last 15 years. I've been scared for all those people in this country who've been attacked and hate crimes. I'm also scared for Muslims who've been attacked. Anyway, anyone who's been done this. I'm also scared about the fact that in 2012, we had a neo-Nazi killer, a murderer come into, a neo-Nazi activist, he came into a Sikh Gurdawara in Wisconsin and killed six people. He was shot, I think, a total of 10. That didn't faze the media at all. That should have been the last time there was ever an issue for Sikhs to be afraid. We were the victims of a terrorist attack in our own country. It's just absurd. People want me... I should have to clarify to these people at a Trump rally that I'm in fact a Sikh. These people should have known from 2012. That should have been national news. That should have been covered in every paper. The way... Forget about me. We've been in this country. We're citizens. We've been in this country for 100 years. Our first temple in this country was in 1912. We've been around forever. We have a history in this country. And we should be treated that way. It's that simple. I'm not scared of... No, I'm not scared. She made that video. Do I look scared? No, but again... You're not frightened about the future. You're not frightened about the future. You don't feel that we're one terrorist attack away from you're not being able to do what you did at the Trump rally. I'm afraid of the politics that have grown from the Tea Party and other groups. There have been more right-wing extremist attacks in the US than any jihadi attacks. I'm scared of how that's been... And hate crimes... Hate crimes against Muslims are up this year. And Trump is epiphenomenal to that. Having him out there, having him say things like there were thousands of Muslims cheering in Patterson, New Jersey when the towers went down and having a huge platform, that scares me. That specifically scares me. Whether he wins the election, whatever it's emboldening those kind of politics that does frighten and worry me, but it also frightens and worries me for my background. And South Asians in general aren't being proactive about it. You should be out there and standing up to it. It's that simple. So he's... You get used to him and all of a sudden he becomes amusing and you forget how dangerous he is and how dangerous speech can be. Sure. Words and language have consequences. Well, alright, this has been interesting. Do you plan to disrupt any other candidates' rallies? No. I just plan to keep doing comedy routines where I just proved that little sound bite he gave me from there and then asking everyone how completely inappropriate it is to have someone with this big of a platform saying that there were thousands of Muslims cheering at 9-11. And that's an attack, not just 6 in Muslims, but in South Asians in general in this country. And then there are values. In other terms of a pre-treat, it's a pre-solid comedy routine. Yeah. If I can work in a plot. Great. Well, Irish Sang is a stand-up comedian, writer, and activist. He's also getting a master's in linguistics. They completed. Oh, you have one? Yes. And what are you doing with it? Well, I was teaching for a while with that at this university. These days I do more writing stuff. I used to work in a magazine. I do copy editing work, that kind of thing. And I would assume you're a fan of Noam Chomsky's? A fan of Noam Chomsky's? Yeah, I definitely draw a lot. I'm even a fan of his comedy. After when people were really worried about how 9-11 and what our response would be the operation we declared after that was enduring freedom. First, we declared the operation infinite justice. But that sounded like we were jihadis when we said that. Then second one was enduring freedom and Chomsky's remark was a lot of the world has been enduring what we call freedom. Yeah, I think he's a good... Sometimes he's dry in his prose but he works in some good one. Yeah, and you studied at BU, right? Yes, I did. Did you ever see... He teaches at MIT. Did you ever see him speak? Oh, yeah, I met him a couple times. Yeah, definitely. Great. And how's the comedy going? Very well. I work with a festival out here, Green Gravel Festival in Iowa City. There's a witching hour. I help book a lot of stuff with in Iowa City but I'm doing comedy in Chicago and it's going very well. All right, well I'm glad I got to have you on the show and I'm proud of you. Yeah, thank you very much. Well, yeah, anytime somebody does what you're doing it's important and you're a great American and on behalf of all my listeners, thank you. Thank you very much. I love how you look at political comedy. I think it's very important. Great. And how do people contact you? You can reach me at comedianarisharish at gmail.com or I'm on Twitter at arisharish and then it's also ish. Arish ish. Thank you, Arish. Thank you.