A man who appeared to be wearing a Korean War Veteran's Association uniform is seen taunting and shoving a young black woman from a Donald Trump rally in Louisville, Kentucky, in a video that has gone viral on social and broadcast media.
"Get out of here!" the elderly man shouts at the woman, his face close to hers. "We don't want you here!"
He wasn't the only one to shout at and push the woman, who was identified as Shiya Nwanguma, a student at the University of Louisville who turned out to peacefully protest against Trump.
"I was called a n----- and a c--- and got kicked out," she said of her experience, according to a video posted on Facebook. "The people at the rally, they were pushing and shoving and cursing at me and yelling at me, calling me every name in the book. They're disgusting and dangerous."
A young Marine recruit, Joseph Pryor, was discharged from the Marine Corps' delayed entry program after the racially charged exchange was caught on camera.
The elderly man wasn't immediately identified. Local TV station WLKY reportedly interviewed the man, but didn't name him, only identifying him as a 75-year-old from Cincinnati. It also wasn't immediately clear whether he was a veteran.
While the man appeared to be wearing a hat and shirt associated with the Korean War Veteran's Association, his age, if accurate, suggests he was too young to have served in the Korean War. (He would have been about 9 years old when the conflict began in 1950.)
Regardless, association membership is open to all veterans who served in Korea up through the present day, KWVA spokesman Fred Lash told Military.com.
Robert McGeorge, president of the KWVA in Ohio and commander of its Cincinnati chapter, told Military.com on Friday he was not aware of the incident and had not yet seen the video.
Larry Kinard, president of the national organization, said he has seen the video but didn't know who the individual was.
"We're looking into it. We don't know who he is but we're trying to find out," he told Military.com.
Kinard, who lives in Texas, would not say what the association would do if they determine the man is a member and violated its code of ethics.
"All we can do at this point is identify the person, find out where he is, and see what his situation was," he said.
The organization's code stipulates that members won't engage in unlawful or unethical conduct, will be responsible to the organization for their actions, will respect the rights of others in regard to politics, sex, race, religion, and ethnic background, will conduct themselves with proper decorum and dignity and will do nothing to dishonor the KWVA.
The veteran in the rally video told WLKY that his is not a racist and that he was pushed first. He told the station the rally was chaotic and got out of hand.
Military.com was unable to contact the veteran or Nwanguma.
There have been numerous incidents between Trump supporters and his critics, some of whom have appeared at his rallies to protest comments he has made that they consider anti-immigrant.
Last October, a video posted by The Commonwealth Times, a Virginia Commonwealth University student paper, showed a Trump supporter shouting and spitting in the face of a protester.
A month later, in a video broadcast by CNN, a Black Lives Matter protester is seen being kicked and pushed as he was forcibly removed from a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama.
During a Trump rally in Las Vegas in December, some of his supporters began yelling racial slurs, with one man calling for a protester to be set on fire. One supporter reportedly yelled "Sieg heil" and rendered a Nazi salute as the protester was escorted out, NBC News reported at the time.
As Nwanguma and other protesters were being ousted from the Louisville rally, Trump could be heard from the stage saying "Don't hurt them," but continuing: "See, if I say, ‘Go get them,' I get in trouble with the press, the most dishonest human beings in the world."
-- Bryant Jordan can be reached at bryant.jordan@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bryantjordan.
