Providentially perhaps, last week I happened to watch the Netflix three-part series on Arnold Schwarzenegger as I was reading the eye-opening book by Mary Nicholas and Paul Kengor, The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman’s Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption. The latter provides a useful framework for understanding the former.
To be sure, Schwarzenegger is no communist. Like the early Bella Dodd, however, he has been a dupe of what is arguably a communist conspiracy. More alarming still, the man who recruited him to that conspiracy is now running for president: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The question remains whether Kennedy, like Dodd, has seen the light.
Schwarzenegger has always meant well. I believe he still does. The first two parts of “Arnold” show him at his ingenuous, flag-waving best. Through sheer self-actualization, he gleefully conquers the sport of bodybuilding and the madness of Hollywood. In 1990, he described the political philosophy that guided his quest in the introduction to a PBS series hosted by Milton Friedman.
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