I didn’t actually expect Arnold Schwarzenegger and Snoop Dogg to be friends – although you never know which celebrities run with each other over in Hollywood, as this story about Steve O and Mike Tyson doing coke in a toilet proves. But I don’t think I ever expected to see Snoop calling Arnie out for being a racist in a bunch of Instagram videos.
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That is exactly what has happened as you can see below though. The issue has arisen over the fact that Schwarzenegger granted an early release to a guy called Esteban Nunez who had been sentenced to sixteen years in the slammer for the murder of college student Luis Santos. Schwarzenegger cut this to seven on his last day as governor of California and Nunez was released last Friday.
Why? Because Nunez’s father was former State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, who was a political ally and good friend of Schwarzenegger’s. Snoop is mad though because there was another black man named Ryan Jett convicted of the murder alongside Nunez and Snoop is arguing that Schwarzenegger is racist because he’s letting the black man serve out his full sentence, whilst allowing Nunez to go free. Here’s what he had to say:
A video posted by snoopdogg (@snoopdogg) on Apr 11, 2016 at 10:36pm PDT
Hmmmm. I think I gotta disagree with Snoop on this one. Although it’s obviously outrageous and probably completely morally wrong that Schwarzenegger reduced his friend’s son’s murder sentence (he even admitted as much), I don’t think you can really call it racist or white privilege. Sure, it’s rich people in power getting what they want and that’s not right. So it’s more like classist or something.
In fairness to Schwarzenegger, there are a couple of other defining factors in the early release, with the prosecution alleging that Jett was the one who stabbed Santos and it being noted that Jett also had a previous conviction. Both of these circumstances would traditionally lead to a longer sentence for Jett; however the fact that Schwarzenegger admitted he only looked into it and sorted it out because of the influence of his friend is still pretty despicable. Just not racist.
For more weird stories about Arnold Schwarzenegger, check out this conspiracy theory that he was involved in the disappearance of Lord Lucan.
