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In a new video for ATTN:, former California governor and Republican Party member Arnold Schwarzenegger called out US President Donald Trump on his response in the wake of the Charlottesville violence that left one dead and 19 injured.
The actor-politician opens the clip by saying, “There are not two sides to bigotry. There are not two sides to hatred.” The video comes at a time when Trump, and by extension the Republican Party, have been severely criticised for their equivocal, blame-both-sides take on the incident.
After the powerful opening lines and stressing on the need to beat hate with “louder, reasonable voices,” Schwarzenegger ‘helps’ the president write the speech he believes Trump should have given.
As the President of the United States and as a Republican, I reject the support of white supremacists. The country that defeated Hitler’s armies is no place for Nazi flags. The party of Lincoln won’t stand with those who carry the battle flags of the failed Confederacy.
After ending his impassioned speech, Schwarzenegger asks a bobblehead of the president, “Was it that difficult?”, to which the bobblehead obediently nods.
He then proceeds to address neo-Nazis, white nationalists and neo-Confederates in a blunt manner.
Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause.Schwarzenegger
Following this, he describes the Nazis as men who had supported a failed ideology and recalls his early years in Austria that was full of “broken men” who had come back from the war, and that these idols the neo-Nazis look up to “spent the rest of their lives living in shame. And right now, they are resting in hell.”
Schwarzenegger ends the video with a plea to the hate groups operating in the United States to choose a life that is not hateful and to invest their freedom in “something good” instead. To those who claim to have merely been “hanging out” in the rally, he says, “Go home. Or better yet, tell them they are wrong to celebrate an ideology that murdered millions of people. And then go home.”
The video comes across as an attempt at damage control after the flak that Trump has received in the past few days for asking the anti-hate protesters to share the blame with the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.
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