Arnold Schwarzenegger has one word for those who exhibit hate for others: losers.
Schwarzenegger, 75, said a tour of Auschwitz months ago spurred his message, and he described feeling a “tremendous weight” that reminded him of the “horrors” that occurred at the concentration camp where Nazi soldiers killed around 1 million Jewish people and other groups during the Holocaust.
The former governor of California made a statement Monday in a more than 12-minute video on YouTube addressing those going down a path of hate in a recent uptick in racist and antisemitic ideals.
“Throughout history, hate has always been the easy path, the path of least resistance,” Schwarzenegger said. “Let me be clear, you will not find success at the end of the road. You will not find fulfillment or happiness because hate burns fast and bright.”
The “Terminator” actor used his father, a Nazi soldier, and the other “broken men” who he grew up with around in Austria after World War II, as examples of the path of hateful rhetoric.
“They fell for a horrible loser ideology,” he said. “They were lied to and misled into a path that ended in misery.”
Through his experience, Schwarzenegger empathized with others who fall “into a trap of prejudice” through how they grew up or through “big tech’s algorithms that push you to the extreme.” But he said those paths are for the “weak.”
“It breaks you,” he said. “That’s why there’s never been a successful movement based on hate.”
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Within the last decade, hate crimes in the U.S. have increased. In 2020, hate crime reports spiked to their highest level in 12 years, largely triggered by a surge in crimes against Black and Asian Americans, according to an FBI report released in August 2021. The number of hate crimes reported in 2021 decreased by nearly 1,000, but only a fraction of agencies reported numbers during that year.
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