ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER REFUSES TO BACK DOWN ON KIMMEL: I’M ABSOLUTELY STILL A REPUBLICAN BECAUSE THE PARTY FREED THE SLAVES
On Jimmy Kimmel Live this week, the Terminator and former California governor sat down with the late-night host and delivered a history lesson that clearly caught the room off guard. When Kimmel pressed him on whether he was still a Republican, Schwarzenegger answered without hesitation: “Yeah, I’m a Republican. Absolutely.”
He then defined what that means to him. “A traditional Republican is someone that admires the Republican Party for having freed the slaves.” Kimmel pushed back, claiming the party no longer gets credit for that. Schwarzenegger held firm: “This is the history. This is what I’m about. Someone that has given those slaves American citizenship and given them the rights to vote. It’s Republicans.”
When Kimmel suggested those principles sound like the opposite of what the modern Republican Party stands for, Arnold replied, “Yeah, but it doesn’t mean I have to change my philosophy.” He pointed to the Ronald Reagan philosophy of getting things done, citing Reagan’s creation of the California Air Resources Board and Richard Nixon’s establishment of the EPA as examples of Republicans who worked across the aisle when it mattered.
This is not complicated. The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s in opposition to the expansion of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was its first president. Republicans drove the Emancipation Proclamation, won the Civil War, and passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that abolished slavery, granted citizenship, and secured voting rights. In the Congresses leading up to the war, nearly all the slaveholders were Democrats. Democratic platforms of the era explicitly defended slavery and blocked federal interference with it
Democrats were the party of slavery, of the Confederacy, of the Klan, of Jim Crow, and of the longest filibusters against civil rights legislation. The notion that the parties somehow magically switched identities overnight is a convenient myth that erases the record. Southern Democrats largely stayed Democrats for decades after the Civil Rights Act. The realignment of the South was gradual, driven by voters and generational change, not a mass defection of politicians swapping teams to adopt the other side’s sins.
Eric Daugherty put the modern parallel bluntly after the clip: Democrats were and still are the party of slavery or indentured servitude. Now it takes the form of illegal alien labor. History never changed. Open-border policies deliver a steady supply of low-wage workers who cannot easily leave or demand better conditions, while the same political machine that once defended the old system now frames any enforcement as cruelty
Schwarzenegger did not flinch. He owns the party’s actual founding record and refuses to let the current narrative rewrite it. Hasta la vista to the idea that you can shame someone out of basic history.