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March 2, 2021 - Epoch Times

11:19

Larry Elder Q&A- “What do you think of Trump Vs. Mitch McConnell-”

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	You know, every week we like to respond to questions and comments from you.
	Here are several for this week.
	You know I'm old school.
	When Barack Obama got elected, I get the LA Times and the New York Times thrown into my house.
	So I bend over to pick it up, and both newspapers had colored photos of black parents hugging their kids, crying, saying things like, now that Barack Obama has gotten elected, I can truly tell my children they can honestly grow up to be whatever they want to be.
	You mean before Barack Obama got elected, the parents were lying to the kids?
	You were telling kids these kinds of things, but you didn't believe it?
	When I was seven years old, my mother sat me down.
	We went over an illustrated book of presidents, from the first president, George Washington, to the then incumbent, Dwight Eisenhower.
	We went over all the presidents.
	And when my mother closed the book, she looked down at me and she said, Larry, if you work hard enough, if you want it bad enough, you can be in this book.
	And it never occurred to me that I couldn't be president of the United States if I wanted to.
	It never occurred to me that I couldn't go as far as I wanted to go if I wanted to.
	The fact that Barack Obama had to be elected for black people in this country to sincerely believe a black person can become president blows my mind.
	I'm from L.A. L.A. had a black mayor who got elected four times, and that was late 60s, 70s.
	He also ran for governor of California, and almost won, ran twice.
	And when you become governor of California, you're automatically considered to be presidential timber.
	So I always felt, for a long time, that a black person could become president of the United States.
	But it took Barack Obama for a lot of people to feel that way?
	That to me is sad.
	I don't.
	See my answer for Jesse Jackson.
	Good question.
	Here's my answer.
	Because Trump has trashed Mitch McConnell and Mitch McConnell has trashed Trump, therefore I want higher taxes.
	Therefore I want porous borders.
	Therefore I want us to re-enter the stupid Iran deal.
	Therefore I want us to re-enter the stupid Paris Accord deal.
	Therefore I want lefties like Kagan and Sotomayor on the Supreme Court.
	Therefore I want porous borders.
	I want illegal aliens pouring in.
	Therefore I want Puerto Rico will become a state.
	Therefore, I want Washington to become a state.
	Therefore, I want to loosen the voting rules and regulations so virtually anybody, anybody, anybody who has a pulse could vote.
	Are you kidding me?
	I am still limited government, maximum responsibility to the fullest extent possible.
	A foreign policy that recognizes peace through strength and not strength through peace.
	So no matter what kind of issue there is between Trump and McConnell, we are still people who don't think like the other side, right?
	Well, of course I tried.
	When I was a kid, I would sneak my mom's cigarettes and go to the back of the garage and then smoke them and work my way up to smoking a cigarette.
	As you know, when you first start, you kind of throw up, you get dizzy.
	So I was getting dizzy, but I would gradually increase the amount that I would smoke.
	There was a place called Sportsman Park where they would have record hops.
	These were massive dances where hundreds of kids would come every Saturday to have a dance.
	I couldn't go because I worked for my dad, so I never went to a sportsman record hop except one time I asked my dad, Dad, can I please get the day off?
	I want to go to a record hop before I die.
	And my dad reluctantly gave me the day off, so I went to the record hop.
	So I wanted to go to the record hop.
	So I was excited.
	I go home.
	I decided to take a bath, and as an honor of my first record hop, I decided I was going to smoke a full cigarette.
	So I put towels underneath the door so the smoke wouldn't get in the house, and I got in the bathtub, hot bath, and I smoked the entire cigarette.
	First time I smoked the whole cigarette.
	The room started spinning.
	I got dizzy.
	I threw up.
	I woke up at 4 o'clock in the morning.
	I missed the record hop.
	I never smoked again.
	Do I ever talk to youth groups?
	I first saw Thomas Sowell when I would watch Firing Line, the show that Wade McBuckley had on PBS for 27 odd years.
	And Thomas Sowell came on the show and started talking about how he thought racism was not a major problem in America anymore, which stunned me since I'm 14.
	And he was opposed to affirmative action, which doubly stunned me.
	I kind of felt that given the fact that we got jacked over because of slavery and because of Jim Crow, they kind of owed us this.
	And he talked about how if you don't raise your game, you'll always be a second-class citizen.
	It's not fair to make other people who are white stand at the back of the bus because of something that their forefathers did.
	He talked about the small number of white people that have any real connection with slavery.
	Right now, only about five white Americans have any real generational connection to slavery, meaning that their ancestors owned slaves.
	Even during slavery in the South, only one out of ten people owned slaves.
	And most of those only owned one or two because they were expensive.
	Most white people have come to the country after that.
	So when you look at all the white people in America, only about 5% have any real connection to slavery.
	And he said stuff like that.
	So why should everybody else pay for something that their ancestors had nothing to do with?
	And I was flabbergasted by that.
	So I began reading his books.
	He'd written about 40 books.
	David Mamet, the playwright.
	Called Thomas Sowell, America's Greatest Contemporary Philosopher.
	Not economist.
	Philosopher.
	Because he writes a column in about 300 newspapers.
	He's been writing it now for 20 or 30 years.
	He's written about 30 or 40 books.
	If you guys don't know him, go on YouTube and you'll see him and check him out and meet him.
	So, I'm fast forward now.
	I'm doing talk radio.
	And I'm on C-SPAN. My show in those days was four hours.
	They put the entire four hour show live on C-SPAN. So anybody in the country could see it.
	I get a letter from a man named Thomas Sowell.
	Dear Larry, my wife and I watched you.
	You were amazing.
	I just want you to know how thoroughly impressed we were with you.
	If I can do anything for you or me.
	That's like getting Larry from Elvis.
	You know, he's still alive.
	And Thomas Sowell invited me to his home.
	He lives in the Bay Area.
	He's so secretive.
	I mean, you should see the mail I get, death threats I get.
	Imagine the death threats he got 30 years ago, saying this kind of stuff.
	So in his office at Stanford, he doesn't have his name on the door.
	He's had so many death threats.
	He won't even give you his address.
	When he asked me to come up and visit him, he picked me up from the airport.
	He wasn't going to give me his address.
	So we went to his house for the weekend together.
	It was just probably one of the best weekends I've ever had.
	He's also a photographer, and you can go online and see some of his work.
	And he said if he could do it all over again, he would have been a photographer full-time.
	And I said, Tom, honestly, your pictures are wonderful, but there are a lot of good photographers.
	There's only one contemporary, greatest American contemporary philosopher in that show.
	Anyway, he's an amazing guy.
	He does a lot of work about Most people think minimum wage is just something that needs to be done because you don't have a minimum wage.
	Bosses are so cheap and so honorary, they won't pay you jack.
	Turns out that before the minimum wage, a black teenager was more likely to have a job than a white teenager.
	Why?
	Because a black teenager would market for lower wages.
	I worked for less money than this white kid would.
	His cost of living was lower, so black kids were able to market their skills lower than a white kid.
	All of a sudden, the law comes in, designed, by the way, by white racists, because they were tired of these unskilled black teenagers taking jobs away from other white teenagers.
	So all of a sudden, they put in a minimum wage, telling people, you've got to pay here.
	Well, this guy won't work here.
	Sorry, you've got to pay here.
	Well, if you're going to pay here, you can get some white people to do that.
	And so for the first time, white teenagers began to have more jobs as a percentage than black teenagers.
	It had the opposite effect that most black people today, left-wing people today, think it has.
	So you have Hillary and Obama all raising the minimum wage, having no blooming idea how much damage this is doing to the very people they claim that they care about.
	He also talks a lot about family and about the relationship between the welfare state and single-parent households and how much damage it's doing.
	He's where I've gotten a lot of my data and my information, and he's just an incredible guy.
	So Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L-L is his name.
	Well time does not permit us to talk about all my buddies growing up, but I had one close friend named Paul.
	Paul was an extraordinary athlete.
	That's one of the reasons I liked him so much.
	I was not a good athlete.
	He was not good in academics.
	I was good in academics.
	We had kind of a bond that way.
	He was the quarterback of the football team, the starting shooting guard of the basketball team.
	He was the best pitcher of the baseball team, an extraordinarily gifted athlete.
	But he had an attitude.
	His parents were divorced.
	His mother was an alcoholic, which I didn't realize until later.
	He rarely saw his father.
	And as a result, Paul had difficulty with authority.
	One time he came late to the practice, as he often did.
	This time the coach chastised him in front of the other players.
	Paul took off his jersey, balled it up, and threw it at the coach's face.
	And the coach started him the next game because coach wanted to win.
	But when all of the college coaches came to scout Paul, and they came, Duke, Notre Dame, Marquette, UCLA, USC. The coach, because he wanted to maintain his credibility with college coaches, told him the truth.
	And the coach said that Paul was a coach killer.
	Bye-bye Notre Dame, bye-bye Duke, bye-bye UCLA. He ended up going to an undistinguished college not known for basketball.
	And rather than double down and transfer to a good school where he could maybe get into the NBA, Got angry, started talking about the white man, the devil, smoking dope, and told me all this stuff.
	And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	Paul, you and I had the same classes.
	Went to the same school, same teachers.
	We had the same opportunity.
	You lived six blocks away from me.
	How come I'm okay, but the white man held you back?
	That's BS. It's an excuse.
	Look in the mirror and take personal responsibility.
	We are no longer friends.
	Not because of me.
	So, keep your cards and comments and letters and questions coming.
	And remember, we've been demonetized now by YouTube, so go to LarryTube.com if you want me unbridled, unabridged, uncensored, LarryTube.com because we've got a country to save.

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