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Feb. 24, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:39
Larry Elder | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 39
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Time Text
He said, do me a favor, go home to your wife, talk it over, and call me tomorrow.
I said, I'll do that, but I'm not going to change my mind.
And she said, what do you think about talk radio?
I said, I know nothing about it other than it seems shallow, glib, and stupid.
She said, it is.
You'd be good at it.
Hello and welcome to the Sunday special.
This week I am super happy to welcome to the show Larry Elder, who is actually the first guy who ever interviewed me on radio.
Of course, world famous radio host.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
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All righty.
Well, Larry, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
So for folks who don't know, I mean, and very few people do, Larry was the first radio show I ever did.
I was 16 years old.
I was going to UCLA.
Larry was a host at KBC at the time in Los Angeles.
Right.
And I had written a piece in the Daily Bruin about basically being discriminated against by the Daily Bruin.
And Larry had me on his show to talk about it.
And we've been friends ever since.
So it's been nearly 20 years, which is insane.
But Larry, in his own right, is one of the great voices in talk radio for decades, and a full decade and a half before I ever met Larry.
I mean, I used to listen to him on the radio.
So, Larry, for folks who don't know you, why don't you tell your story, because obviously it's a unique one, how you go from growing up in the inner city, the stage from South Central, to becoming one of the bigger voices on the conservative-slash-libertarian right.
Well, it certainly wasn't planned.
I'm born and raised in L.A., as you pointed out, and I'm a lawyer.
Went to college in the East Coast at Brown.
I went to Michigan for law school, and then I worked for a big law firm in Cleveland, Ohio.
I stayed there for about two and a half years.
I did well, but I was kind of restless and bored, and it seemed to me like it was too small of a platform for me.
I wanted to get into commentary some sort of way, but I didn't know how to do that.
So I left the firm and I started a business.
Not because I wanted to be a headhunter, which is what I did, but because I thought I could make more money doing that than practicing law.
And I did.
And then I was able to spend some time and start writing columns.
Didn't have a deal, didn't have a syndication.
I just wrote columns and sent them to the local newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Akron Beacon Journal, the two biggest newspapers in Northeast Ohio, which is where I was living.
And every now and then one would get published.
And finally, one that I wrote about 30 years ago where I argued that racism was no longer a major obstacle for black America.
And to say that now still raises eyebrows, let alone 30 years ago.
So, the Plain Dealer published the article.
I get a phone call from the producer of a radio show.
Do you really believe that racism is no longer a major problem in America?
I said, yeah.
He said, would you come on my guy's show tonight and talk about it?
Now, Ben Cleveland is about 50% black, so virtually every caller was a black person, and they were not happy.
And I got called an Uncle Tom, bootlicking Uncle Tom, a foot-shuffling bootlicking Uncle Tom, bug-eyed Uncle Tom, a coconut, Oreo, the Antichrist, and that word that you really call a black person when you really want to cut him, Republican.
And I said, this is a waste of time.
I'll never do that again.
I get back to my office.
The station manager calls me and he says, you were amazing.
I said, I was?
He goes, oh, you were funny.
You have a good speaking voice.
You took difficult positions.
You defended them effectively without losing your sense of humor.
Have you ever thought about doing talk radio?
And I said, no.
And he said, I've got a guy going on vacation next week.
Will you sit in for him?
And I said, no.
And he said, why?
And I said, I don't like it.
I don't like being yelled at.
I don't like yelling back at other people.
It reminds me of conversations with my little brother Dennis.
I said, I'm not interested.
He said, are you married?
At the time, I was.
He said, do me a favor, go home to your wife, talk it over, and call me tomorrow.
I said, I'll do that, but I'm not going to change my mind.
So I went home and I talked it over with my then wife, Cindy, and she said, what do you think about talk radio?
I said, I know nothing about it other than it seems shallow, glib, and stupid.
She said, it is.
You'd be good at it.
And so I said, really?
And she said, yeah, you're always moaning and whining and giving your opinion.
You might as well get paid for it.
So I did that week, and after 20 minutes, I heard angels singing.
I mean, the Red Sea parted.
I mean, it was magical.
And I said, I gotta do this.
And so it took me two years to write and cajole and meet.
And ultimately, I met Dennis Prager by accident.
Dennis had me on his radio show.
He praised my performance, and I said to Dennis, if you really think that I'm that good, could you please recommend me to management?
I've been trying to get into radio for a couple of years.
Dennis said, I'd be happy to, and did so.
George Green heard me, and after one night, he made me an offer.
He said, he gave me a two-night audition.
He didn't call it that, but I knew that's what it was.
And he said, after the first night, do you want this job?
I said, yeah, I think I do.
He said, okay, go out tonight, relax, stay the course, and don't speak so damn quickly.
I've heard that myself a little bit.
Yeah, you're the only one who speaks faster than I do.
And that's really what started it.
And I started 1994, I think it was, and I've been on radio ever since.
So what formed your political viewpoint?
Because obviously, taking the position as a black person in America, that racism is not the key factor in American life, or even a key factor in American life, it's a pretty controversial position.
Where did you get that from?
Because it's a pretty rare position.
I got it from my dad.
My father and I didn't get along.
My father and I had a huge fight when I was 15 years old and we didn't speak for 10 years.
And when I say didn't speak, Ben, I mean did not speak.
Not like, hi dad, and that's it.
I didn't say a word to him.
And I graduated from high school and I was able to then go to college on the East Coast and law school in the Midwest.
So basically I had avoided my dad for almost 10 years.
My mom and my dad were still married in the house.
So when I would come home for vacation, for summers, I would just make sure I'm not around when he's not around.
And that was pretty easy because my dad worked long hours.
He had a cafe.
So now I'm, fast forward, I'm 25 years old.
I've now graduated from law school.
I have this big job with a big law firm making a boatload of money.
I'm 25 years old and I should be living large.
But then I can't sleep.
And I know it has something to do with my dad.
Not that I ever thought we'd be buddies, but I called my secretary and I said, cancel all my appointments.
I'm flying to LA.
I'll be back in a couple of days.
I didn't tell my parents I was coming because I didn't want my father to prepare for this summit.
So I get to the airport, get a cab to the restaurant.
I got in at 1.30.
We close at 2.30.
And I came there with these two big bags.
My dad hadn't talked to me in 10 years.
He sees me.
He's, of course, surprised.
And he said, should I put your bags in the back, Larry?
I said, no, Dad.
I'm only going to be here for 5 or 10 minutes.
I want to tell you something.
He said, OK, wait till we close.
I sat there for an hour.
And I said to myself, Larry, don't tee off on this son of a bitch.
Just give him the highlights.
Don't just wail into him.
And so my dad sat down, and I wailed into him for almost 20 minutes.
You see how I can go?
And I talked for 20 minutes about every spanking, every whipping, everything he ever said to me, everything he'd ever done to me that pissed me off.
And I gave him everything.
And I was exhausted.
I'd run out of ammo.
My dad goes, is that it?
Ten years because of that?
And I went, yeah.
And my father said, let me tell you about my father.
And Ben, for the first time I saw my father cry.
I did not think the man had the ability to summon tears.
I didn't think he could do that.
I knew my father was an only child.
I knew we had no relatives because, on his side, because we never got any gifts for Christmas.
Aside from that, I knew nothing about my father.
I met his mother once when I went to the South, but I knew nothing at all about my dad.
And didn't care.
I didn't like him.
My brothers didn't like him either.
So it wasn't like I was curious about him.
So he said, let me tell you about my father.
When we're sitting in these two stools in my dad's cafe.
He said, your last name Elder?
I said, yeah.
He said, that's not the name of my father.
I said, what?
What is your father's name?
He said, I have no idea.
You never met your father?
No.
Who was Elder?
He was in my life the longest.
My mother had a series of boyfriends, each one more irresponsible than the other one.
Elder was a drunk, seldom worked, and when he did, he'd take home the money, give it to my mother so that she would keep it so he wouldn't drink it away, and then come Wednesday or Thursday, he'd want it.
If she didn't give it to him, he'd kick the crap out of her.
If ever I tried to do anything, he'd kick the crap out of me.
And he was in my life, my dad said, the longest.
How long was the longest?
He said, four years.
I said, what after that?
Series of boyfriends.
I'm now 13 years old, my dad said.
I came home from school, eighth grade, and I was making too much noise for my mom's then-boyfriend.
My mom sided with the boyfriend when he and I were fighting, and she threw me out of the house, age 13, never to return.
Athens, Georgia, Jim Crow South, at the beginning of the Great Depression, I defy you to find somebody with a hand dealt like that.
My father goes down the road, Ben, he picks up trash, does anything he can do.
Ultimately, he becomes a Pullman porter for the trains.
They were the largest private employer of blacks in those days.
And so he was able to travel all around the country, which was eye-opening for a little black boy from the South, and he came to California one time on a run.
And it was sunny, and people seemed to be less racist.
He could walk into a restaurant and get served.
And my dad said to my mom, maybe someday I'll relocate to L.A.
Pearl Harbor, my dad joined the Marines.
He was the first black Marines.
They were called the Montford Point Marines.
People don't know about them, but they were every bit as influential as were the Tuskegee Airmen that everybody knows about.
There were 20,000 Montford Point Marines from 1942 to 1949, and Congress gave them the Congressional Gold Medal a few years ago.
My dad got his posthumously.
Anyway, he was stationed in Guam, became a staff sergeant, was in charge of the cooking facilities.
He could cook anything.
He could look at a cake and tell you what was in it.
So he goes to Chattanooga, where he had met and married my mom, and knocks on doors, all these restaurants to get a job as a cook.
And they told him, "We don't hire." To his face.
He goes to an unemployment office.
Lady says, "You went through the wrong door." He goes to the hall.
He sees colored only, goes through that door to the very same lady who sent him out.
He came home to my mom and said, "This is BS.
I'm going to L.A.
I'm going to get me a job as a cook and I'll send for you.
Comes out to L.A., walks around for two or three days.
I'm sorry, you have no references.
And my dad, of course, told them that he was a World War II vet.
He cooked for the service.
I'm sorry, you have no references.
My dad even offered to work for free.
Just give me a written reference.
They wouldn't even do that.
They treated him the same way in L.A.
as they did in Chattanooga.
They were just a little more polite about it.
He went to an unemployment office.
One door.
Sat there in a chair for a day and a half.
Lady calls him up.
I have a job.
Don't know if you're going to want it.
My dad says, I'm sure I'm going to want it.
What is it?
And she says, cleaning toilets with a company called Nabisco Brand Bread.
My dad did that for 10 years.
Took a second job cleaning toilets at another bread company called Barbara Ann Bread.
Cooked for a family in Pacific Palisades on the weekends and went to night school two or three nights a week to get his GED.
The man never slept, Ben.
An hour here, two hours here.
You do that week after week, month after month, year after year.
And you come home with a household full of three rambunctious boys and see what kind of mood you're in.
The man was tired.
And so we talked for eight hours.
I asked him everything I could ask him.
He asked me about my life.
The man got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and I got smaller and smaller and smaller.
By the end of the eight hours, I'm crying.
And I said, Dad, I am so sorry.
And he said, Larry, don't be.
Just follow the advice I've always given you and your brothers.
Hard work wins.
You get out of life what you put into it.
"Larry, you cannot control the outcome, "but damn it, you are 100% in control of the effort." And before you moan and whine about what somebody did to you, go to the nearest mirror, look at it, and say to yourself, "What could I have done to change the outcome?" And finally, he said this, "No matter how good you are, how hard you work, "how moral you are, sooner or later, "bad things are gonna happen to you.
"How you deal with those bad things "will tell your mom and me whether or not we raised a man." So I wrote a book about it called Dear Father, Dear Son.
The reason for the title is because after this eight-hour conversation, My father writes me a letter.
He never wrote me a letter in his life.
And it said, Dear Son.
I wrote him back and I said, Dear Father.
I never called him Father before.
And so then we began this relationship that lasted 35 years and arguably even closer than my mom and I were.
My mom and I were very, very close.
So I was able to salvage my relationship with my father and have 35 really good years.
And the book is called Dear Father, Dear Son, Two Lives, Eight Hours.
And it's on paperback, also called lot like me.
The reason we changed the title is because people thought it was a collection of letters.
And the publisher realized that that turned off people.
It's really a, it's a novel.
It reads almost like a novel, but it's a book of memoirs.
Well, it's an amazing story.
And it does lead to the question, which is, I mean, your dad, obviously an enormously tough individual just from the story.
And you're a tough guy too, in the sense that you've taken an enormous number of slings and arrows over the years to take this position.
Why do you think it is that so few folks in my, not just the black community, the Hispanic community, a lot of various minority communities tend to not move along those lines, tend to, tend to not suggest that the first indicator of success is is individual decision-making, but the first thing that we have to overcome as a society is institutional racism or some sort of miasma of discrimination that is preventing people from achieving their goals.
It's a complicated question, but it starts with the family.
And I know it sounds counterintuitive because my father had no family.
But if you don't have a family, a role model inside the house, a father inside the house, you're in trouble, out of the gate.
And 70% of black kids today are born to unwed mothers.
And the number was 25% in 1965.
And what we've done with our welfare state and the so-called War on Poverty, which Lyndon Johnson launched, is to incentivize women to marry the government and allow men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.
And the black kind of victimhood mentality is a phenomenon of the civil rights movement going from demanding equal rights to demanding equal results.
And that's what we have right now.
People are demanding equal results.
Results have to be earned.
Rights come from God.
And so people like Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP and this whole cabal of organizations telling black people that they're victims is a huge part of the problem.
How do you think that conservatives should go about speaking to black folks, obviously?
Because that's been a serious issue.
Every time somebody tries to engage with the black community, there are folks on the left who particularly start calling those people racist and suggesting that they're pandering.
Right.
And that's because nobody really wants to tell the truth.
Cory Booker just the other day said he wanted to have an honest dialogue about race.
No, you don't.
If you have an honest dialogue about race, you don't want to hear it.
To me, the most dangerous race hustler in America is not Sharpton.
He's bad.
Not Jackson.
He's bad.
Not some of the yahoos you see on cable television.
They're all bad.
But it's Eric Holder.
Because people listen to Eric Holder.
He's sophisticated.
He's got degrees from Columbia, undergraduate and law school.
Works for a very prestigious law firm.
Was a respected to the left AG.
He says the most outrageous things and gets away with it.
For example, he gave a speech in which he talked about pernicious racism.
This is around the time that Donald Sterling lost his team.
You remember he was taped by his girlfriend and made some disparaging comments about blacks and ended up losing his team.
And Eric Holder said, that kind of blatant racism, that kind of blatant bigotry, we got that.
That's not the problem.
The problem is the pernicious racism.
And he gave three examples, none of which hold up.
The first example was the push for voter ID.
Polls show that about 80% of whites want voter ID, and about 70% of Hispanics do.
About the same number of blacks do.
And there was a study recently by researchers from Yale, from Stanford, and from Penn, and they looked at the research paper that purported to show that voter ID suppressed black and brown votes, and they trashed the methodology these other researchers used and said there's no evidence whatsoever that these voter ID laws suppress black turnout.
Furthermore, 2008, when Obama got elected, for the first time in history, despite all these alleged voter suppression efforts, the percentage of eligible black voters who voted exceeded the percentage of eligible white voters who voted.
So it's nonsense.
The second one he gave is that black kids are expelled at disproportionately high rates compared to their percentage of that given school.
And it's true.
They are.
Uh, Jesse Jackson some years ago sued the Decatur School Board, which was all white, because they kicked out a bunch of black kids who were fighting after a football game.
Turns out the kids had missed collectively like three, four hundred days of school.
Anyway, they kicked them out.
In comes Jesse Jackson, accuses the school board of racism, files a lawsuit.
School board defended itself by pointing out that at other school districts where the school boards are primarily people of color, black boys are still disproportionately kicked out.
And they mentioned Oakland, which was primarily a school board members of people of color.
San Francisco, also the majority of the school board members were people of color.
And yet the black boys were kicked out far more compared to other people when you look at their potential in that given school.
So it's just a lie.
And the lawsuit was thrown out.
The third thing that Eric Holder said...
Is that black criminal defendants who commit the same crime will get a longer sentence than white criminal defendants.
And that's true.
But the U.S.
Sentencing Commission says the reason for that is that judges take into consideration on the time of sentencing your criminal history and other factors, for example, whether or not you have a working history, whether or not you show remorse, all those factors.
So even the U.S.
Sentencing Commission, to which Eric Holder referred, said you can't conclude one way or the other whether or not bias is operating here.
There could be all sorts of factors to explain this.
So that's the best you can do.
And this is the front runner guy who's articulating the racism in America.
All you could do is come up with voter ID and this expulsion stuff and the sentencing stuff.
He didn't even say they were disproportionately arrested.
Didn't even come near saying that.
It's a lie, and he said all these things, and people sat there and they politely listened to it, and it seemed respectable, and nobody challenged it, except for me.
I wrote an article about each one.
I wrote one about the expulsion rates, I wrote one about voter ID, and I wrote one about sentencing.
All right, so Larry, I want to ask you about a philosophy that seems to have taken over the Democratic Party almost wholesale, and that is the philosophy of intersectionality.
As a precursor to that, I want to get your opinion on the legacy of Barack Obama, because it's my opinion that intersectionality really became a thing under the Obama presidency.
People tried to blame President Trump for the rise in increased racial tensions in the United States.
But if you look at the polls, what the polls say is that Americans were pretty optimistic across the racial spectrum before Barack Obama became president.
Barack Obama became president, and then things started to sink pretty quickly.
And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Americans elected President Obama under the auspices of he was going to be a great uniter, somebody who tried to get us beyond race.
He, in his own persona, was unification of black and white, considering his father was black and his mother was white.
This is what he ran on.
And then instead of coming forth and saying, listen, We can all call out racism together when we see it, but not every problem is a race problem.
A lot of problems are just people problems.
And maybe we should do that.
Instead of him doing that, he decided to build an intersectional coalition around himself and then suggest that people who disagreed with him were inevitably racist.
I want to get your opinion on Barack Obama's impact on sort of the race debate in the United States.
You know, I was in the Boston arena in 2004 when Obama gave that speech for John Kerry.
And he brought the house down.
I was with my producer.
And people were cheering, there's no blue America, there's no red America, there's just United States of America, yeah!
There's no black America, yeah!
And I said to him, this guy's going to run for president, he's going to get elected.
He didn't say a damn thing, but he said it well.
And so, Brahma gets elected, and you're absolutely right, I believe that people voted for him in large part because they thought that He was going to put the nail in the coffin that America is a racist society.
Finally, we can now move on.
A number of people, I think, pulled the lever for him because of that.
And he proceeds to do just the opposite.
Before he became president, he gave a speech as a senator at a church in Atlanta.
And he was talking about how much racism there is in America.
And he said, the generation of MLK, the Moses generation, has quote, gotten us 90% of the way there, close quote, to realizing MLK's dream of a society where people evaluate you based on content of character.
And I thought that was reasonable, 90%.
10% of Americans believe Elvis is still alive.
8% believe if you send him a letter, he'll get it.
7% of adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
25% of adults say they're not sure.
So you can't get much below 10%.
And then he said, my generation, the Joshua generation, he said, has to get us that additional 10%.
That was before he got elected, let alone reelected, let alone back-to-back attorneys general who are black.
So I would think that 10% has been worked into just a little bit.
When he ran in 2008, you wouldn't find him and Al Sharpton on the same plane together.
Second time he ran, Al Sharpton come to the White House something like over 70 times over the course of his presidency.
The first opportunity that Obama had to reconcile, to do what people thought he was going to do, was the Cambridge police incident.
You remember that.
The professor from Harvard had forgotten his door key.
He was on vacation, came home, realized he didn't have his door key, and he and the cab driver pushed the door in, broke into his own home.
A neighbor sees this, calls 911.
Don't you want neighbors to do that?
A cop shows up very politely, asks Skip Gates to come out of this house, and he cops a tude and says something like, I'll come out if your mama tells me to come out.
And instead of Obama going on television saying, look, Skip, I know you're a friend of mine.
You and I have been friends a long time.
But you have done exactly the wrong thing for young black boys.
Instead of being respectful, instead of responding to the request, you copped an attitude.
This is exactly why a lot of young black people are getting killed by the police, because they look at this as a confrontation instead of following instructions.
My father told me, whenever I'm pulled over by the police, make sure your hand's at 10 o'clock, your right hand's at 2 o'clock, you say yes sir, say no sir, make sure your paperwork is in order, And if you feel you're mistreated, get a badge number, write it down, and you and I will deal with it while we're both still alive.
That's what Obama could have said and should have said and didn't.
Instead he said, the Cambridge police acted stupidly.
And the cops then realized that he was not on their side.
And Obama fumbled around with that stupid beard thing to try and walk it back a little bit.
But also, he had several chances.
Trayvon Martin.
If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.
I don't even know what that even means.
And of course, Trayvon Martin was found not guilty, and the jurors said race never even came up.
There were no blacks on the jury, but there was a black alternate, and the alternate said he would have voted the same way, not guilty, and race was not a factor.
Obama gave a speech before the United Nations and invoked Ferguson.
Now this is while Ferguson was still being investigated.
This cop was assumed to have been a racist.
Michael Brown allegedly had his hands up, don't shoot.
And Obama mentions this to a United Nations address and says, we have our own problems, a place called Ferguson.
Ferguson turned out to be a complete farce, as you know.
And the DOJ comes in, exonerates the cop, but nevertheless says that the Ferguson PD is institutionally racist.
And their biggest takeaway was this.
67% of the population of Ferguson is black.
18% of those who are stopped for traffic stops are black.
18 point gap.
Ergo, racism.
The Ferguson PD, they had two or three blacks.
Outside of that, there were 50 whites.
If that's true, why isn't the NYPD even more institutionally racist?
25% of the population of New York is black.
55% of the traffic stops, though, are of black people.
of New York is black, 55% of the traffic stops are of black people.
That's a 30-point gap, yet the majority of New York cops are either women or people of color.
So how come that isn't more racist?
And the answer is you can't do it by numbers.
You have to do it by differences and offending.
And there's a report that came out in 2013 under the Obama administration by the National Institutes of Justice, which is a research arm of the DOJ called Race and Traffic Stops.
It And they looked at this.
75% of the black motorists admitted that they were stopped for legitimate reasons.
And the commission found that differences in offending and differences in driving counted for the difference.
Couldn't find any evidence of racism.
Uh, years ago, uh, in New Jersey, black motorists were being stopped disproportionately by the New Jersey turned, uh, New Jersey troopers, and they were yelling and screaming about racism.
Christie Todd Whitman ordered a study.
Study came back and said, the faster the car, The more likely it is to be a black guy, couldn't find any evidence of racism, didn't like the study, didn't like the conclusion, threw it out, hired a different person, different methodology, same conclusion.
Sorry, just not there.
These things have been measured and studied over and over again, every two or three years.
DOJ conducts something called the Police Public Contact Survey.
Have you been stopped by the police?
How are you treated?
Are you black?
Are you white?
Did anything happen?
Nothing.
No pattern.
It's just a lie.
And so people like Eric Holder, the NAACP, Barack Obama have been perpetuating this BS lie and in my opinion they do it because they want that 95% monolithic black vote without which they cannot succeed.
And if blacks started thinking of themselves as individuals and not as an aggrieved group and started looking at things like the crappy public school that I'm mandated to go to, job-killing laws like minimum wage, they would rethink their assumptions with the Democratic Party.
And their Democratic Party is definitely afraid of that.
And that's why they have to malign people like Larry Yilders, Uncle Tom's, and slam other people as racist because you cannot get 95 percent of people to think a certain way unless you lie to them.
Well, speaking of that, one of the ways that this has been intellectualized is in this philosophy of intersectionality.
And the philosophy has been put out there basically that historically a lot of groups in the United States, specifically black people most of all obviously, have been victimized by the power hierarchy.
The hierarchy was set up for that end and then the only way to fight back against that power hierarchy and institutions of power is to band together in groups that can then get together themselves and then attack that hierarchy and tear it down from the inside out.
The only way, if you are on the top of the power hierarchy, if you're a white male, for example, the only way that you get out of this unfortunate situation is by acknowledging and reading Ta-Nehisi Codes, apparently.
See, the problem with all of this is that, in order to escape poverty and get to the middle class, this has been studied by the left and by the right, and they agree.
If you look at the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation, they're diametrically opposed on many issues, but on the formula to get from poverty to the middle class, they all say the same thing.
Finish high school first.
Number two, don't have a kid before you're 20.
Number three, get married before you have a kid.
And they phrase it a little bit differently, but that's what all three of them have said.
And if you argue, as Obama did, that a kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in jail, that is the number one problem facing America.
And if slavery and Jim Crow had this effect, how do we go from having 25% black out-of-wedlock birth in 1965 to almost 70% now?
I would think that anybody would argue we're less racist today than we were in 1965, so you can't attribute it to that.
In fact, during slavery, a black child was more likely to be born under a roof with his biological mother and biological father than today.
It is the number one problem facing this country, not racism.
Take a magic wand and wave it over America and remove every smidgen of racism from the hearts of white America.
50% inner city dropout rate in some schools.
70% of black kids born outside of wedlock, as I mentioned.
25% of young black boys have criminal records.
The CDC just said that a young black man is 10 times more likely to be the victim of a homicide compared to a white person.
And the number one cause of preventable death for young white men are accidents, like car accidents.
The number one cause of preventable cause of death for young black men is homicide, almost always at the hand of another black person.
Chicago, A third black, a third white, a third Hispanic, 70% of the homicides are black on black, and about 75% of those, Ben, are unsolved.
And we're talking about intersectionality?
Get out of here!
Get out of here!
So let's talk about Republicans and their take on these issues.
Because one of the big problems that you see with a lot of young people and a lot of minority groups and a lot of minority folks is they have a lot of problems specifically with President Trump.
I want to get your take on how President Trump has handled racial issues.
To be perfectly frank with you, I am not completely comfortable with President Trump on issues of race.
Who's completely comfortable with Trump at all?
I mean, come on.
I don't think Trump's completely comfortable with Trump.
He may be the only person who's completely comfortable with President Trump.
But the rap on him, he's obviously been called racist by a large number of people who are running.
My opinion of that is that he is a man who says many ignorant things because he is not the kind of person who says non-ingorant things.
But obviously he shot himself in the foot on a lot of these issues with things like Charlottesville, with his casual kind of winks and nods at the alt-right during the 2016 election.
What's your take on Trump on race? - Well, first of all, you have to understand that as a Republican president, he's gonna be called racist.
If Donald Trump had not gotten elected and somebody else Republican had, Mike Pence, whoever might've been running, he or she would be called racist.
Reagan was called racist.
Maxine Waters called George Herbert Walker Bush a racist.
George W. Bush was called a racist.
So they're always called racist.
Donald Trump is on a whole other level, I will give you that, but they're always called racist.
So the idea that Donald Trump is being called a racist should not surprise anybody because that's how they roll.
He hasn't helped any by some of the comments that he's made.
But that said, I had a caller the other day who told me I was, quote, always defending that racist in the White House, close quote, black caller.
And I said, all right, let's cut to the chase.
Tell me the number one thing that Trump has done that you consider to be racist.
Number one thing he's done or said.
He said, he says that black people are lazy.
I said, you're referring to a book that was written by a disgruntled, fired ex-Trump employee.
Even one of the liberal fact-check organizations couldn't confirm that comment.
Is that all you have?
He said, well, the 1975 consent decree that he entered into where he admitted that – well, he didn't admit anything, but he was accused by the FHA of discriminating against would-be black and brown tenants.
Now, he had black and brown tenants.
He didn't want it to lease to a certain category that he thought couldn't pay their rent.
And he was sued, and they entered into a consent decree, didn't admit any guilt.
It lasted for two years.
He was 28 years old at the time.
He took over from his dad's business.
It was his dad's business practices that he was following.
And after 1975, go on YouTube and you'll see pictures of Trump with Jesse Jackson, Trump with Al Sharpton, Trump with John Johnson, the editor of Ebony Magazine, Trump with all these local black leaders.
So if the 1975 Assent Decree didn't bother them, it shouldn't bother me either.
It doesn't.
I don't know any large landlord who hasn't been sued.
And by the way, the Washington Post just settled a lawsuit claiming racial discrimination by a disgruntled longtime ex-employee who got fired.
CNN is right now fighting a lawsuit by a group of people claiming discrimination, as is the New York Times.
So bring me somebody with clean hands and we'll talk.
That's all the guy had.
And, you know, the comment about the good guys on both sides, he didn't say that.
He was referring to the battle over whether or not Confederate monuments should be in the public square.
That's what he meant.
And he's a sloppy speaker, and so it's easier for somebody to take that word, those words, and interpret it as saying there were good Nazis and bad Nazis.
He didn't say that.
And he's renounced David Duke many, many, many times.
I don't know how many more times you have to do that.
Doing something about illegal immigration, to me, is a Big boon to black people.
George Borjas is a Harvard economist where you went to school and he says he's probably done more research on the impact of legal and illegal immigration than anybody else in the country.
So there's no question that unskilled illegal immigrants take away jobs from inner city black and brown people who are unskilled and puts downward pressure on their wages.
Donald Trump wants to do something about that and that makes him a bigot?
The other thing is this.
Inner-city parents want vouchers.
They want to say, I don't want to send my kid to Larry Elder's alma mater, Crenshaw High School, where kids right now, only 3% of kids can do math at grade level.
What responsible parent would send their kid to a school where only 3% of the kids there can do math at grade level?
Nobody would.
But if you don't have any money, you don't have any options.
If you live across the street from Crenshaw High School, your kid's going there, whether you want to or not.
And by the way, it's a Crip school, meaning the Crips run it.
I know that because Ice-T went there 10 years after I did, and that's why he chose the school, because he wanted a school that is run by the Crips.
Who would send their kid to a school that's run by the Crips and where only 3% of kids can do math at grade level if they have an option?
The Democrats are whetted at the hip with the teachers union, don't want to give you an option, don't want to give you vouchers.
Republicans do.
So, if the route to the middle class is to get an education, and the Republicans are giving me a better route to that, why am I going to call this guy a racist?
How does that make him a racist?
If that's racism, he needs to go back to racism school.
All right, so I want to ask you about your sort of libertarian philosophy.
So you started off as a libertarian.
Still am.
Still am.
Small l. Right.
You weren't a member of the Libertarian Party.
Never have been.
Right.
So you've never been a member of the Libertarian Party.
You know why?
Because of their position on foreign policy.
Basically, libertarians believe if you leave people alone, they'll leave you alone.
And if life were like that, wouldn't that be wonderful?
But it isn't.
We have a group of people called Islamofascists that are determined to start a caliphate, and they believe that you have three options if you're not a Muslim.
You can convert, you can pay a tax, or you can be killed.
And believe it or not, there are probably about 10% of Muslims, 1.25, 1.5 million or so of them, that believe this philosophy.
If you look at polls that show How people felt about 9-11?
It's scary how Muslims in France and Muslims in Britain felt about 9-11.
We've got enemies.
There was a funny exchange in a program called 24 a few years ago.
William Devane played the Secretary of State, and he had a son who was an activist, anti-war activist, a peace activist, anti-nuke activist.
And he had this conversation with his son.
His son was trying to convince his father that what his father was doing was immoral.
And he said, spare me your fifth grade Michael Moore logic.
America has enemies.
We have enemies.
And the Libertarian Party seems to believe that if we just mind our own business, other people will mind their own business.
That's a bet I'm not willing to make.
One of the things that's been fascinating is watching as the Republican Party, and conservatives more generally, have moved in a more libertarian direction on a variety of issues.
One of the issues where you were way ahead of the curve was on drug legalization.
So where do you stand on drug legalization, particularly as we look at the heroin epidemic that's currently occurring?
Do you think that drugs should be legalized as far as opioids?
Where do you draw the line?
I've always felt that the drug problem, and there is a drug problem, should be dealt with as a public health problem, not a criminal justice problem.
It's also a libertarian problem.
If I want to destroy my body and put stuff in it, I own my body, not the state.
I should have that right to do it.
We ought to be counseling people about appropriate behavior and that sort of thing, but criminalizing something like this has always bothered me.
Milton Friedman's felt the same way and made the same argument.
So the counter-argument kind of push back and I have to admit I'm very torn on this issue because on a libertarian level I agree with you.
The counter-argument I think is somewhat compelling which is that there are obviously drugs like opioids that actually rob people of the capacity to reason.
These are lifelong addictions and so treating it as a public health problem as opposed to something that actually affects the ability to act in a libertarian way.
Libertarianism assumes that people have the capacity to make reasonable decisions and if you're basically allowing an enormous percentage of the population or even any percentage of the population to be turned into mental or reason-based invalids.
They can't reason anymore.
Is that a decent counter argument to that?
I don't think so because the downside is even worse.
The drug epidemic has also caused an increase in street crime.
It's been estimated that about 50% of street crime is directly or indirectly related to people robbing and maiming and stealing in order to get money for drugs.
People going into prison and you come out, you can't get a job now because you've had a record.
There's a lot of people who are going to get a job now because you've had a record.
The amount of money that society loses because of the theft, the higher cost of insurance premiums because of all the theft related to drugs.
You know, there are lots of other unintended consequences because of this war on drugs.
And so, no, even though some people will misuse their freedom, as they always will, The idea, Thomas Jefferson used to say, if people misuse their freedom, the idea is not to take it away from them, but to better explain to them how they can better put their freedom to use.
That's what we should be doing.
Okay, so with all that said, how do you grade the Trump administration on their approaches?
Because it's been kind of fascinating.
It's a big government administration.
They've blown out the spending.
They've actually increased enforcement of drug issues.
They've not been libertarian.
With regard to labor.
So you mentioned earlier that you think that President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration is good for black workers in the United States because you obviously don't have a greater supply to pressing the wage base.
On a libertarian basis, should we care about that?
Should we care about, you know... Oh yeah!
Yeah.
I mean, Milton Friedman used to say you can't have open borders when you have a welfare state.
We've got a welfare state.
And the average illegal alien, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, cost taxpayers over the course of the illegal alien's life about 80 grand.
It seems to me we ought to have a say in that.
But putting aside the welfare state, if you're a libertarian on labor, then the idea of additional supply lowering the wage base Shouldn't really be a libertarian problem, meaning it should be a problem if taxpayer dollars are being expended to support people.
That's a libertarian problem, but it's not really a libertarian problem if people want to come here and work and then move around and then leave.
Should it?
Well, it is a libertarian problem because to me, you're not just bringing your work, you're also bringing your politics and your culture.
And it seems to me that we have a right to determine who comes into our country, whether or not that person or persons feel the way we feel.
Do they share our Our belief in a separation of church and state?
Do they share our belief in a limited government?
I don't want people who don't.
I believe the reason borders are porous right now is because eventually these illegal aliens turned voters are going to pull the lever for the Democratic Party.
If the Democrats believed that illegal aliens turned voters would pull the lever for the Republican Party, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
We wouldn't be talking about statehood for Washington, D.C.
We wouldn't be talking about allowing convicted felons to vote.
All of these things breed more Democrats.
We wouldn't be talking about college-free tuition.
If it weren't the case that the more likely it is you go to college, if you're studying humanities, the more likely it is you're going to come out more liberal than when you went in.
If college meant that you were more likely to come out as a Republican or a conservative, Democrats wouldn't be pushing this.
So this is all about votes.
So on a libertarian basis, to go back to sort of the Trump question, if you had to grade President Trump, where would you grade him so far in his administration?
Compared to what?
Compared to President Hillary Clinton?
Compared to President Larry Elder?
I mean, compared to... I mean, I assume that... I think we all have an objective standard in our head of how we would grade presidents.
So, for example, you know, you give George Washington an A, you give FDR an F, you give Ronald Reagan an A-minus or a B-plus.
So, on that sort of scale, where do you put President Trump?
I'd probably give him about an A-minus, maybe B-plus.
Far better than I thought he was going to be.
Far better.
I don't like the tariff stuff, but it hasn't been as bad as I thought it was going to be.
I do think that I underplayed, underpaid attention to China and what China was doing in terms of stealing our technology.
And it was right that somebody finally did something about that.
I love the tax cuts.
They should have been steeper.
The idea that they eliminated state and local deduction and put a cap on mortgage interest deduction didn't help Larry Elder any.
But the idea that overall Americans got a tax break, I'm happy with that.
I'm happy with the Supreme Court justices that he's done.
I'm happy with what he's doing about sanctuary cities, or trying to do about sanctuary cities, and catch and release, and some of these other policies.
I don't like the visa lottery system, and I think we ought to have people coming in on merit, and so all the stuff he's doing on immigration I like.
I don't like the paid family medical leave, but his daughter said that in Cleveland in 2016 during the RNC, and I heard her say it, and Trump has since repeated it.
He's not a conservative.
He is a populist.
He's not a fiscal conservative.
He's not a social conservative.
He's a populist.
He's got a collection of views and values.
You add them all up, it's better than President Hillary Clinton.
When he ran, I said this, I said, if Donald Trump were a movie, he'd be the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And about ten days after that, I'm watching a news show, and Melania's on, and she says, if Donald were a president, he'd be the good, if Donald were a movie, he'd be the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And I said, where's my 10%?
The ugly is when, in my opinion, he said that George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq war.
However you feel about that war, he did not lie us into the war.
And I campaigned with Donald Trump, and I met him in Cleveland.
We campaigned at a black church.
And I said to him, There's one thing that you've said that I think you should apologize for.
And he thought I was going to say the John McCain thing, when he said John McCain was captured.
And I said, no.
I said, you said George W. Bush lied us into the war.
I said, I know you didn't like the war, but he did not lie us into the war.
That's what the left says.
That is one of the big stains right now on the Republican brand, that George W. Bush decided he wanted to be a wartime president, just fabricated all the intel so he could build a case for the war.
I said, we have 16 agencies at the time.
All 16 said at the highest level of certainty that Saddam Hussein had not only WMD but had stockpiles of WMD.
All 16.
George W. Bush kept the same CIA director, George Tenet, that served under Bill Clinton.
He told them that the idea that Saddam Hussein had WMD stockpiles was, quote, a slam dunk, close quote.
We've just gotten hit.
3,000 people had died.
George W. Bush looking around to find out what are the next level of threat.
If he had done nothing, I would argue that that would have been irresponsible.
And so for you to say that he lied into the war, my goodness.
It's the same nonsense that the people on the left are saying.
He went... But he never said it again.
And my watching of Donald Trump is, his way of apologizing is not to say the same stupid thing twice.
But he won't say, I'm sorry.
So with all of that said, you know, President Trump has given, I think, conservatives way more than we could have expected.
One of the reasons I didn't vote for either candidate at the top of the ticket in 2016 is because I did not expect him to govern as a conservative.
He didn't campaign as a conservative.
I remember.
I remember you and I had long conversations.
Oh yeah, and he's obviously done a lot better than... I couldn't persuade you.
I said he's not going to be as bad as you think.
I know, and you were right, and I was wrong.
Listen, I could not be more happy that I was wrong about his policies.
I don't think I was wrong about his character, and I think that has not changed.
I think he's the same person.
He's in his 70s.
He's not going to turn into a saint anytime soon or anything close to it.
Isn't it amazing we've had two divorced presidents?
One was Ronald Reagan, and then one was Donald Trump.
Not only was he divorced, he's been in three marriages, and the marriages appear to have overlapped some of the others, plus his other activities.
As my colleague Dennis Prager says, it shows you that God has a sense of humor.
Well, that is for sure.
The question that I still have, and I've said this before, I'm significantly more likely to vote for President Trump in 2020 than I was in 2016.
There is a math under which Trump's presidency ends up being, for me, a net loss.
And I'll tell you what the math is.
The math is that we get all this good stuff.
We get the tax cuts, we get the Supreme Court justices, we get the movement of the embassy in Jerusalem, we get We get a strengthening of our military, all the good things.
And I acknowledge all of them, and I'm very happy about all of them, which is, again, why I plan on probably voting for him in 2020.
But let's say that he himself is so toxic to a large percentage of the American people that, let's say, he loses in 2020.
He loses the presidency in 2020.
We no longer control the House of Representatives.
We lose the Senate in 2020.
And suddenly, you have a unified government under Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
And a lot of that is driven by backlash specifically to President Trump.
Is that a math that we should worry about, or is that basically just, at this point, what is is?
He's going to run.
He's going to run for re-election.
We're going to have to deal with it.
Much of the attack against Donald Trump I think is unfair.
I mean, 90% of the news against him is negative, and yet the economy is booming like this.
69% of people think they're going to be better off next year than last year, and still he's being hammered like this.
I think we need to call the media out for their unfairness.
When Obama ran in 2008, the ombudsperson for the Washington Post, her name was Deborah Howell, she's no longer there, she admitted that we had more pictures of Obama on the front page.
We had more flattering pictures of Obama on the front page.
More stories of Obama on the front page.
More flattering stories of Obama on the front page.
She admitted it.
So I really think that a lot of the fear that you have about Donald Trump is generated from the unfairness of the media and of his coverage.
And if we call him out on it and defend him when he needs to be defended, I think he can get reelected.
So right now he's riding pretty much where he always has in the low 40s in approval rating.
He has never surpassed.
50%, he's never on the lower end surpassed 30%.
He's higher than that in Rasmussen.
In Rasmussen, right.
Rasmussen is the outlier poll, but in the real politics poll average.
And even in Gallup, he's now up a couple of points since his State of the Union speech.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, he bounces around, but he seems pretty stable.
He has a ceiling, he has a floor, he doesn't tend to move around too much in between those things.
And in 2016, that didn't hurt him in the sense that everybody thought the election was going to be a referendum on Trump, it ended up being a referendum on Hillary.
And as you know, getting back to Rasmussen, he's now about two or three points higher than Obama was at this juncture of Obama's first term.
Right.
Again, I'm happy to acknowledge the Rasmussen polls.
I like the poll averages better just because better averages mean better data.
But as a general matter, his approval ratings aren't that high.
It didn't hurt him in 2016.
People just didn't show up to vote for Hillary Clinton.
You look at how he's performing in the polls right now in some of the swing states.
He pulled a rabbit out of the hat in 2016, just statistically speaking.
And that's an amazing thing.
We're still analyzing what happened in 2016.
I think another underestimated thing that happened, not to change the subject, is people didn't see it coming.
That's 100% right.
They're ready now.
They are ready.
Every person under a rock who's eligible to vote who's going to vote left-wing, they're going to find him or her.
Totally agree.
I mean, if you look at the statistics, my contention has been that there is a myth that both Democrats and Republicans have been living under, and it's skewing the political process.
The myth is that President Trump was a transformational candidate in 2016.
If you look at how he performed, he actually performed in percentage terms within one to two points of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush in virtually every state, meaning that he actually performed like default Republican It's just that Hillary did not perform like default Democrats.
He got a lower percentage of the white vote than Mitt Romney did.
He got fewer absolute votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
And he won Wisconsin because no one showed up to vote for Hillary.
Because number one, she's terrible.
And number two, everybody thought she was going to win.
So Democrats did show up in the last midterm.
Republicans did too, and Democrats blew out Republicans, which makes me skeptical, more skeptical, I think, of his chances in 2020.
But again, because Democrats have reacted too strongly to Trump, they're tacking all the way to the left with candidates who are saying insane things legitimately every day.
So I don't mean to make you a prognosticator, but if you have to put odds on Trump.
But that's a saving grace that they're overcorrecting.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the base of this party.
I don't mean she's a leader, but I mean her ideas are the base of this party.
Medicare for all, getting rid of ICE, $15 minimum wage, college free tuition, this new Green Deal.
This is what this party has become.
Part of it is a response to Trump, but part of it is just a normal insanity of people on the left who are emotional and don't look at facts.
So I think that's a real gift.
The other thing is this.
As with Ronald Reagan, people underestimate Donald Trump.
I remember watching the State of the Union speech.
I thought it was a good speech.
Not a brilliant speech, not a great speech, but a good speech.
But because people think of him as a doddering idiot, they're going nuts.
Oh my God!
Great speech!
Great speech!
So, the fact that he's underestimated, I think, is a real secret weapon that he has as well.
All you have to do is behave.
All you have to do is stop tweeting as much.
All you have to do is look more reasonable to people.
That's not a difficult stretch.
I mean, I've been saying to people in the White House, if he just is quiet and points fingers at the Democrats, just go like this the entire election cycle, and he should be okay.
He should be fine.
With all of that said, you know, he...
He's funny.
He's entertaining.
He is entertaining.
I mean, who watches a town hall the whole thing?
I'm watching this whole thing.
He's cracking me up.
He's entertaining.
He's having fun.
And the economy is doing well.
People feel safe.
Where in the world are we worse off because of Trump?
Not in the Middle East.
Not China.
Not Korea.
Where are we worse off?
And the answer is nowhere.
The country is better off in the last two years because of Donald Trump.
And so I think when people calm down and when there's a binary choice, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker versus Trump, Trump wins.
OK, so let's talk for a second about the expansion of executive power.
Because as a libertarian, this is something that's been happening under both parties.
Both parties.
President Trump has continued that trend.
The amount of spending under President Trump has increased, it has not decreased.
So size and scope of government continue to increase with a Republican administration.
And of course it didn't surprise you because when they campaigned in 2016, neither Hillary nor Trump said a damn thing about the entitlements.
Even Obama said the entitlements were unsustainable.
And I said this at the time.
I said no matter who wins, four years from now, eight years from now, the debt's going to be much, much higher because no one wants to rein in Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid.
That's the third rail.
And one of the things that Trump did, one of the reasons he got elected too, is because unlike other Republicans who always at least talk about the entitlements programs, he didn't say a damn thing about them.
And so people that were worried about that went, oh, okay.
And so he pulled over some squishies, some independents, some so-called conservative Democrats because of that.
Had he gone out and said what I would have said, which is we have to privatize Social Security, we have to go with health savings accounts for Medicare, and we have to get rid of the federal government's taking of money and giving it back to you for welfare.
We should get rid of all of that.
That's what I, as a libertarian, believe.
And I would never get elected because of that.
Donald Trump understood that.
People don't want to hear about cuts.
You give somebody something once, they don't want it back.
You ask people who argue that government is too big, and then you put down specific programs.
You want to cut this?
Cut this?
And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The government's too big.
Taxes are too high, but raising taxes on rich people?
Not a problem.
So I want to get your opinion, because this week the president declared a national emergency on the border.
It's my opinion that, as a constitutional conservative, that this is not what the executive branch was designed to do, was basically declare legislative proposals, even if I agree with the thing he's attempting to do.
Where do you stand on the national emergency declaration?
I think that he had no choice.
If he's sincere in believing that the border presents a national security crisis, and I believe he is sincere, because the border crossings are down doesn't mean it's not a crisis.
The fact that we've ignored it for 30 years doesn't mean that because it's not as big a deal as it was 30 years ago, it's not a major problem.
So I think if Donald Trump believes that this is a national security crisis, as commander-in-chief, it seems to me he should have the ability to do what he needs to do to defend the country.
If that means declaring a national emergency to moving some money around, I'm okay with that.
This is not a phony crisis.
I know that the left believes that it is, but I don't think it is.
I had a real problem with what Obama did with DACA.
I mean, here's Obama bragging that he's a con law professor, teaches at University of Chicago, I'm sorry, I can't use an executive order to do all the things you guys want me to do, liberals.
I'd love to do that, says Obama, but I can't.
And then he gets pressure, and then all of a sudden he does exactly what he said he couldn't do.
That bothered me a lot more than what Donald Trump is doing.
What Donald Trump is doing is for national security, at least he says so with a straight face.
Obama could not make that argument regarding DACA.
Okay, so in one second, I have one final question for you.
I want to ask you specifically, you mentioned that libertarian ideas, if they're the right ideas, they may not get us elected.
We may not have libertarianism any time in the near future.
Not popular.
I'm going to ask you about how we bridge that gap in just a second.
If you want to hear the answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
Subscribe, go over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Larry Elder, it's always a pleasure to see you, and it's great to have you on the Sunday Special.
Thanks for stopping by.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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