Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Capitol Insurrection Speech” (January 10, 2021)

“I would like to say a few words to my fellow Americans and to our friends around the world about the events of recent days. I grew up up in Austria. I’m very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 by the equivalent of the Proud Boys.

Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States. The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol—they shattered the ideas we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy, they trampled the very principles on which our country was founded. . . .

I grew up in the ruins of a country that suffered the loss of its democracy. I was born in 1947, two years after the Second World War. Growing up, I was surrounded by broken men drinking away the guilt over their participation in the most evil regime in history. Not all of them were rabid anti-Semites or Nazis, many just went along, step-by-step, down the road. They were the people next door. . . .

I’ve never shared this so publicly because it is a painful memory, but my father would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit us and scare my mother. I didn’t hold him totally responsible because our neighbor was doing the same thing to his family, and so was the next neighbor over. I heard it with my own ears and saw it with my own eyes. They were in physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies and in emotional pain from what they saw or did. It all started with lies, and lies, and lies, and intolerance. . . .

President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election, and of a fair election. He sought a coup by misleading people with lies. My father and our neighbors were misled also with lies, and I know where such lies lead. President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever. The good thing is that he will soon be as irrelevant as an old tweet.

But what are we to make of those elected officials who have enabled his lies and his treachery? I will remind them of what Teddy Roosevelt said: ‘Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.’ John F. Kennedy wrote a book called Profiles in Courage. A number of members of my own party, because of their own spinelessness, would never see their names in such a book, I guarantee you. They’re complicit with those who carried the flag of self-righteous insurrection into the Capitol. . . .

We need to hold accountable the people that brought us to this unforgivable point. And we need to look past ourselves, our parties and disagreements, and put our democracy first. . . . May God bless all of you, and may God bless America.”—Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Capitol Insurrection Speech” (January 10, 2021)