Larry Elder defines conservatism as resistance to sudden change, advocating for state-level decisions on abortion and marriage while criticizing the Obama administration's foreign policy hypocrisy regarding Iraq and ISIS. He disputes systemic racism narratives, attributing black community struggles to welfare-induced family breakdowns and highlighting Hollywood's bias against conservatives. Elder argues that raising taxes harms job creators, opposes affirmative action entirely, and suggests Donald Trump would improve economic conditions compared to Clinton or Sanders. Ultimately, the dialogue seeks common ground between classical liberals and libertarians despite divergent views on economics and social justice. [Automatically generated summary]
We've spent a lot of time talking about the left around here, but this week we're going to be diving into the right.
My guest is conservative radio talk show host, lawyer, and writer Larry Elder.
Larry has written several books on conservative principles with a focus on government and racial issues.
Much of his work is very similar, actually, to the ideas we talk about here on The Rubin Report, including religion, the role of government, and personal responsibility.
According to his biography, Larry uses facts and common sense to arrive at his conclusions.
That sounds familiar, right?
Now, if I use those same precepts as a liberal, can we both be right at the same time?
Can we both be wrong?
Is the answer somewhere in the middle?
Well, that's exactly what we're going to try to find out.
As I discussed with Don Lemon last week, the media talks so much about the left-right divide in this country that it's easy to forget that there are decent people on both sides of the debate.
This is one of the reasons I've taken the left to task so much on this show.
The further off the deep end they go, the less we'll be able to find compromise with people we disagree with.
Just because I may have different views on abortion than Republicans doesn't mean that they hate all women.
Just because I may have different views than Republicans on guns doesn't mean that they're a bunch of rednecks.
And just because Republicans aren't for legalizing marijuana doesn't mean they aren't fun to hang out with.
Alright, well, that one might be true, but I think you see my point.
Maybe the best way to start a conversation about political ideology is to actually define the terms.
This is something I've done with a few guests so far because I often think we're all talking about different things while using the same words.
Fear not, I have Google, and according to the Oxford Dictionary, here's the definition of conservatism.
"Conservatism is the holding of conservative principles, the tendency to resist great or sudden change, especially
in politics, adherence to traditional values and ideas, sometimes
opposed to liberalism."
Alright, so I think we have a nice jumping off point there.
Basically, conservatives aren't big on change, and when they are, they want to go about it slowly.
I think this concept has been conflated with the concept of right-wing politics, so I even googled that.
According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, in liberal democracies, the political right opposes socialism and social democracy.
Right-wing parties include conservatives, Christian Democrats, classic liberals, nationalists, and the far right, racists and fascists.
You can see how these two concepts have morphed into the Republican Party in America.
We have an ideology that doesn't want to change the system too quickly, coupled with a political affiliation that is focused on economics and some level of moral authority.
Interestingly, classical liberals are also included in that group, and the more and more I've been talking about this stuff, the more I've been considering myself in that category.
I'm going to touch on that more in the next couple weeks.
Now that we've laid out some basic terms, I think we have a solid jumping off point to discuss all the issues of the day.
From abortion to economics to foreign policy to guns, can we find out where we agree instead of just yelling over each other?
I think we can, but the only way is to be brave enough to talk to those we don't actually agree with.
If we refuse to talk to those that we don't see eye to eye with, we'll just end up taking an eye for an eye.
My guest this week is a lawyer, a writer, and host of the aptly named Larry Elder Radio Show.
And maybe by the time this show is over we can move you.
That's not going to happen.
But that's what it's all about.
Why I've wanted to have you on the show, because I find there are some people in the public space that I disagree with, but that I'd like to sit down and talk about some of the ideas, and I consider you in that space.
I appreciate it.
But before we get to the politics, I'd like the audience to know a little bit about the history of the people I'm talking about.
I know you were born in LA.
Give me a little Larry Elder history to Born and raised in L.A.
I don't consider it to be a four-letter word, but I really call myself a libertarian.
I believe in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives the federal government a small number of things to do, Dave.
Mint money, put together an army, deal with the borders, a handful of other things.
That's it.
Welfare, health care, abortion, same-sex marriage, doctor-assisted suicide, all the social issues that the Supreme Court takes up, in my view, they shouldn't take up in the first place.
That should be done on a state-by-state basis.
That's what I think most conservatives believe as well.
Well, that's one of the funny things to me and why I've defended somebody like Rand Paul, who a lot of people would say, as a liberal, I shouldn't be defending.
So on issues such as legalizing marijuana or gay marriage, a libertarian, because you don't want the government in your bedroom, you shouldn't care about those issues.
Right, okay, so then that's the state's rights issue and sort of, so you would say that the Supreme Court is legislating from the bench or something to that effect?
I don't like Rand Paul because of his position on foreign affairs and defense.
A lot of libertarians, and I don't think being a libertarian leads you to being an isolationist, although most libertarians are, for reasons that I think are kind of confusing.
But Rand Paul is one of those guys who attacked George W. Bush for the Iraq War.
I think we were justified in going there.
I think that the reasons for going there were legitimate.
And I think a lot of liberals are hypocritical on this issue, too.
You talked about how you chastise people on the left for being hypocrites.
I'll give you one big one.
The argument against the Iraq war is that George W. Bush foolishly wanted to impose our values on another culture, had no idea what the aftermath would be if we get rid of this bad guy, right?
However, Obama comes into office.
He joins with the British and the French in bombing Libya, getting rid of Qaddafi.
Why?
Did he threaten us?
No.
They did so for humanitarian, civil rights reasons.
Hillary recently at a debate was asked about why she did that.
She said, well, so they could have free elections.
Where was the left?
Same thing with regard to Egypt.
We get rid of Mubarak.
He was a thug, but they're all thugs.
The Muslim Brotherhood comes in there, and Obama backs them.
Right, so I'm with you on the hypocrite part because, listen, I was, there's plenty of video, I was against the Libya thing because at the very least, at the very, very least, if we're going to have a military action, we should have congressional approval, right?
So then instead of calling it a war, they called it a kinetic military action.
Well, listen, we don't have congressional authorization right now, so I would assume by a lot of standards on the left, Obama is probably a neocon to them, right?
I mean, so I'm with you on some of this in terms of that we all sort of pick our sides and then our values suddenly change depending on who's in power.
We gave him 15 months to thoroughly declare what he did.
In that 15 months, in my opinion, he got rid of it.
And I'm not the only person that said that, Dave.
The National Intelligence Director, our top spy, his name is James Clapper, he's in office
right now under Obama, has publicly said he believes that Saddam Hussein did in fact have
stockpiles of WMD, got rid of them during the 15 month run up to the war.
The Israeli Mossad feels the same way and there are several other American officials
that have said that.
So I don't believe George W. Bush got the intelligence wrong.
We have 16 intelligence agencies.
All 16 said at the highest level of probability that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Obama had the same CIA director who served under Bill Clinton, George Tenet.
He said the likelihood that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons and biological weapons was a slam dunk.
And the same people that called George W. Bush a moron wanted him to go, So all 16 of you guys say that he's got this stuff, and you say he's got it, George?
I'm just not feeling it, so I'm not going to do it.
So when you say that this is one of the cases that part of the problem, and I think this is a through line through everything we're going to discuss for the next hour, is that I don't know who to believe anymore.
That's become a thing.
So James Clapper, who you just mentioned, he's the same guy, the same CIA director, who sat in front of Congress and said that we're not spying on Americans.
Remember, and he was scratching the top of his head, because as they say in Seinfeld, when you're lying, the higher up you touch on your face, the bigger the lie is.
And he says, we're not wittingly spying on the American public.
Well, I have my own issues with government, but my problem with the Iraq War is that Republicans failed to say what I've said and defend it.
Even Jeb Bush has not defended it properly.
He was asked when he first started running, what do you think about the Iraq War?
Well, Jeb, I mean, honestly, if you can't even defend what your brother did, how can other people do it?
And so I think Americans have forgotten why we went there.
At one time, 73% of the American people supported this war.
You have to remind people of why you've gone to war.
Remind people what the reasons are.
And people have forgotten, and now they have this vague idea that George W. Bush overreacted and went in there and deposed somebody because he just didn't like him, and that's why we were there, and let's not do that anymore.
That's kind of how people have given the Cliff Notes version of what happened, and it's unfair.
So what would you say to the people that would argue that ISIS wouldn't exist right now if we hadn't toppled Saddam?
Because he at least had, for all the horrible things he was doing, and the Ba'ath Party was doing terrible things, and they were executing people and throwing gays off roofs and, you know, using mustard gas on the Kurds and all that stuff, but at least he was keeping a sort of lid on the actual craziness that we're seeing right now.
So in a way, you're sort of blaming both sides, right?
In that, or I guess I would blame both sides.
I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I would blame both sides here in that we went to the wrong war, and then by Obama leaving the way he did—even though most of the Americans very clearly didn't want to be there anymore, and when he ran for president seven years ago, his whole thing was, we're going to get out as soon as possible—but that then created the breeding ground for this, because we didn't leave in a sort of— I'll go halfway with you.
I think the intelligence was good, and I think the problem was when Obama came in, he wanted to get out so quickly that he did not realize what the aftermath would be.
And I'm not the only one who said this.
Robert Gates has written a book, Scathing Attack, the most scathing attack on a sitting commander-in-chief by a former cabinet member I have ever read.
And he even recently, just a few days ago, Dave, said that Obama's national security and foreign policy advisors are dangerously naive.
They see the world through this prism that they want, which is why the Benghazi thing
happened.
The reason the Benghazi thing happened is Obama's running in 2012, GM is dead, GM is
alive, Osama Bin Laden is dead, and Al-Qaeda is on the run.
Therefore, Benghazi was not thoroughly defended because they thought that the Libyans were
happy with us because we got rid of Gaddafi.
And so, in my opinion, the Obama administration sees the world through their prism of this
ridiculous idea that if we are nicer to people and reach out with an unclenched fist, they
will reach out in kind.
The world doesn't work that way.
We have bad people who hate us and we need to deal with it.
Right, so I'm with you on that part for sure, because look, if you think back to the big speech that Obama gave in Cairo, which was that everyone was saying, this is the reset, this is that we're going to be different, we're going to try to deal with people less with bombs, more with discussion.
I mean, the Middle East especially, but most of the world We're in more of a precarious place now than— I don't think any part of the world is better off with Obama in.
I did not believe, as you just now pointed out, that we should have gone to war in Libya.
I don't believe in doing anything unless it's consistent with our national security interests.
When Jimmy Carter, for example, threw the Shah of Iran under the bus in the 70s, what was that all about?
He did it because he wanted freedom.
He wanted to liberate the people who were behind bars, the same people we now call terrorists.
These are the ones that Obama forced the Shah to let out of prison, and they ultimately toppled the regime.
What's that all about?
It's not our job to impose democracy.
It's our job to make sure that countries are not Our enemies, our countries, are doing things that are consistent with our own national security interests.
Most of my people have been here longer than most of the other people in this room, yet most people don't have a hyphen.
You know, I'm an Italian-American, Greek-American, Romanian-American.
It's an absurd term.
It's a term that Jesse Jackson almost single-handedly crammed down the throats of our media.
And after Jackson began to talk about why blacks should have some connection to Africa, all of a sudden, New York Times, LA Times, all of the media began using that expression.
Yeah, I mean, I personally don't use the term African American that much because one time I had a guest on the show and I referred to her as African American.
And I remember reading one time, Dave, somebody was given a description of some suspect who had done some crime, was running away, and he was described as an African-American.
How do you know where he was from?
Could have been from Africa, could have been from Jamaica, could have been from Canada.
Because I know you really rail against Jesse Jackson and these guys on the left that use, and I want to talk a lot about identity politics, so the guys that use these phrases, what are they going for there?
The goal is to tell black people that we're victims, that discrimination and racism remain major problems in America when in fact they don't.
And they want black people to vote for the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party gets 95% of the black vote.
Uh, and the reason they get it is because blacks are convinced that the number one issue facing the country right now is social justice, racist white cops, uh, discrimination, systemic racism, microaggression, whatever new word they come up with, and it's a bunch of nonsense.
The number one problem domestically facing this country is the breakdown of the family.
And President Obama said it.
I didn't.
A black kid, or a kid, not just a black kid, a kid raised without a dad, is five times more likely to be poor and commit crimes, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in jail.
So you're far more likely to end up in jail without having a dad than you are because of a white racist cop.
Well, I would say that because black people in most cases, in many cases, were descendants of slaves, that racism as an institution, that a certain amount of it just exists.
That's right, and where's the evidence of a lack of social justice?
When a black suspect is killed by a cop, believe me, the media's on it, people are watching it, and justice will, for the most part, occur.
In Baltimore, where Freddie Gray was killed, Freddie Gray died in a van, I shouldn't say was killed, died in a van, you have a city that's 45% Not black.
I'll tell you something else, too. There was just a study, University of Washington, and it turns out cops were more
reluctant, more hesitant to pull the trigger against a black suspect than a white suspect, probably because of the
fear of being accused of racially profiling and the fear that the civil rights establishment was going to come down
on them.
So if anything, whites are more likely to be shot by a cop under certain circumstances than a black person. And in the
last 30 or 40 years, the number of, percentage of suspects killed by cops who are black has declined 75%. However, the
percentage of whites killed by cops has flatlined.
And so, if anything, people are more concerned about shooting black people for fear that they're going to be called racist.
And almost every one of these incidents, whether it's Eric Gardner in New York who died because he was selling loosies and resisted arrest, whether it's Tamir Rice in Cleveland who was twirling around the gun, whether it's Michael Brown in Ferguson who had just committed a strong-arm robbery, almost every one of these incidents involves somebody resisting arrest.
Why don't you just do what the police tell you?
My dad said when I get pulled over, have my hand at 10 o'clock, have my hand at 2 o'clock, say yes sir, say no sir, make sure my paperwork is in order, and if I feel the cop is mistreating me, get a badge number and deal with it later on.
If Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Obama and the whole group of them told black people to do that, we'd have a lot fewer of these things to deal with in the first place.
So a black person with an SAT and a GPA of X will get into a school faster and easier than a white person with an SAT or a GPA of X. And if going to school is a route to the middle class, you can make an argument that blacks have an easier route to the middle class.
If you're talking about blacks, about poverty, The poorer you are, the more accessible loans and grants are for you.
The problem, the biggest burden that black people have, in my opinion, again, is the percentage of blacks, 75% of them, that are raised without fathers.
And that has every other social negative consequence connected to it.
Crime, not being able to compete economically in the country, being more likely to be arrested, That's the number one problem facing the black community.
And when I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism, I always say, give me an example and almost nobody can do it.
1890, 1900, you look at census reports, a black kid, believe it or not, was slightly more likely to be born to a nuclear intact family than a white kid.
Even during slavery, a black kid was more likely to be born under a roof with his biological mother and biological father than today.
What's happened is we launched this so-called war on poverty in the 60s.
Where literally Lyndon Johnson sent people knocking on doors.
I lived in the 60s, and people knocked on doors, apprising women of their availability to welfare, provided there was no man in the house.
And we went from 25% of blacks being born outside of wedlock in 65, to 75% right now.
And you look at how much money that we spent on welfare, and the lines are parallel.
It was a neutron bomb dropped on this country, not just on the black community, but on people
in general.
At one time, only about 5% of whites were born outside of wedlock.
Now 25% of whites are born outside of wedlock.
I was in college in 1970, and there was a report called the Moynihan Report, the Negro
family, a case for national action.
It was written by a liberal, by a man who became a Democratic Senator from New York.
And at the time, 25% of black kids were born outside of wedlock.
He said, my God, this number is horrific.
If we don't do something about it, it could get even higher.
Well, fast forward, 25% of white kids are now born outside of wedlock.
It is the number one problem in this country.
And what we've done, in my opinion, is we've economically incentivized women to marry the government We've allowed men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.
We don't have the conversation because the left would then have to look in the mirror
and go, "Jesus H. Christ, look at what I've done."
And they don't wanna do this.
I've had a radio show for almost 25 years.
I've invited Jesse Jackson on 50 times, 60 times.
I've invited Al Sharpton on that number.
Maxine Waters, another loud-mouthed black woman around here who's running around talking about racism.
She won't come on my show either.
They don't want to deal with these issues.
Why?
Let's have a conversation.
If I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong.
Tell me how I'm wrong.
Give me your data.
Give me your facts.
Tell me what you got.
And I could quote the Brookings Institution, which is a liberal think tank, and the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank, and they'll both tell you that there's a relationship between crime and bad schools and going to prison and not having a dad.
So this is not just a liberal kind of thing or a conservative kind of thing, it's a real world kind of thing, and they don't want to have that conversation.
I've never heard a reporter ask Obama about the connection between the rise of the I've never heard anybody ask him that question.
Not one time.
And so, as far as I'm concerned, there's this desire not to have this conversation for fear that it then will cause you to rethink your assumptions.
A psychologist would call that cognitive dissonance.
This anxiety that you feel when you have had your assumptions challenged and you don't want to do it.
Yeah, so how then would someone like you or someone that believes in the things that you're talking about, how do you wrestle away a little bit of the narrative from the Black Lives Matter folks?
Because obviously you care about the same thing, right?
So, you know, I'm friends with another black conservative, David Webb.
You probably know him on SiriusXM, and he's a Fox News contributor.
And I had been doing a progressive show a while back, and I was on with someone, and they didn't know him personally, nor knew that I was friends with him.
Token, Bootlicker, Uncle Tom, Sambo, Sambo Tom, Coconut as in brown on the outside, white on the inside, Oreo, same concept, the Antichrist.
Because they've got to malign somebody like me.
I am a bigger threat to their whole ideology than almost anybody else.
A black guy who does not believe that he's a victim, a black guy who believes in hard work and personal responsibility, a black guy who doesn't believe in handouts, a black guy who doesn't believe in the welfare state, a black guy who doesn't believe in affirmative action, I am the antithesis of everything they stand for.
And therefore, I can't just be dealt with facts and rebutted with facts.
The only thing that connects black people to the Democratic Party, in my opinion, is this notion of social justice and this notion that racism remains a major problem in America.
Look down the list of things that black people like and support.
Blacks are more pro-life than whites are.
Blacks were more anti-gay marriage than whites were.
That's one of the reasons this proposition passed here in California, is because of the way blacks and browns voted.
Again, I didn't vote that way, but it's the way a lot of blacks and browns did.
Blacks want to be wealthy.
One of the reasons Donald Trump is getting about 25% of blacks, which is five times, by the way, the percentage that Mitt Romney got, is because of Donald Trump's swagger and his being proud that he's made money.
The Democratic Party is completely beholden to the teachers union and vice versa.
The union is adamantly opposed to vouchers, where the money follows the kid rather than
the other way around.
Inner city black women and fathers, and inner city black brown women and brown fathers want
They realize the schools suck.
I went to Crenshaw High School in South Central.
Right now, three percent, that's not a typo, three percent of kids can do math at grade level.
I'm going to send my kid to that school because I don't have enough money to send my kid to a better school?
It's an assault.
There's a program called the D.C.
Hope Scholarship program where every year.
Parents who subscribe to the program and it's four times as many people want to get in as there are seats will give
kids about 10 to $12,000 to go to a non DC government school and
every two years when it's over, Obama, the Democrats kind of try
to shut it down and the reason they don't is a bunch of black
parents go to the streets, have a press conference, start crying and so all my kids doing
I can't think of anything more damaging to a kid future is to
send him to a school where it's a crip school where the kids are
are not learning where a lot of them are not learning because
they don't care and where the whole level is now dumbed down
to cater to the lowest common denominator in a class.
And as a result, you have kids that have Poor SAT scores than they otherwise would if they had a chance to go somewhere else that challenged them.
And so inner-city parents want vouchers.
Young black people, when they're told about the benefits of privatizing Social Security, want to do it because 65 years old, Blacks die sooner than whites do.
And when you die, all your contributions to Social Security go poof, as opposed to being able to will it to your child.
When blacks are taught about this, young blacks want the opportunity to put their money into an account that they can control, so when they get 65 years old, they have real money.
So, privatizing Social Security, vouchers, abortion, same-sex marriage, all of these issues, blacks are really not in lockstep with the Democratic Party.
But the Democratic Party has successfully convinced blacks that racism, this white cop, this is widespread, the man's out to get you, and vote for us, and we'll deal with it.
If I grant you all of that, right, how much of this is just a messaging problem by the Republicans?
Because it seems to me, and I've said this several times, that someone like Tim Scott, who is a black Republican senator from the South, He should be a hero, not only of the black community, but he should really be a hero of the left, right?
You have the media, you have academia, and you have Hollywood, all of which tell black people that they're victims.
Most professors are to the left, the media certainly is all to the left, and Hollywood's to the left.
And so, you get up and you're indoctrinated all the time with things like social justice, inequality, the man's out to get you, we need a higher minimum wage, you name the left-wing a policy and you pick it up through osmosis.
That's why when we first started the conversation, I said, "I hope to move you towards the center,"
and you said, "I hope to move you towards the center," and I said, "It's not going
to happen because there's nothing you can tell me I haven't heard, but I probably can
say some things your audience hasn't heard."
Because LA Times, New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, you name it, these
are all to the left.
Whatever left-wing position, you're going to hear it.
You're going to hear why, how, and where.
But the other position, you won't hear unless you watch Fox News or listen to talk radio, and a lot of people won't do it if you make them, if you pay them.
So what I did at the top of the show... No, no, it shows you how the Democratic Party has evolved to the left and abandoned principles.
My mom was a Democrat.
My mom was a Republican.
My dad was a Republican all his life.
And my mom stopped voting for the Democratic Party.
And she said, as many people have said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party.
They left me.
She didn't like welfare.
She didn't like the idea of rewarding people just because you had a kid, and then giving you more money when you had an additional kid.
She didn't like any of all of that.
And she started voting for George W. Bush her last two election cycles.
So it's really ironic that... It's not messaging, it's the fact that the country in general has gone to the left, and the Democrats to a greater degree than Republicans have gone to the left.
The country has changed, in part, in my opinion, because of immigration, including illegal immigration.
People who are coming to the country illegally from third world countries like Mexico, they don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about limited government.
They believe healthcare is a right.
They're taught that in Mexico.
They're taught that other places.
And they come here in America, and they pull that lever for the Democratic Party, which is why, in my opinion, the left wants borders to be porous.
The Democratic Party has not won the white vote since 1964.
The more white people there are in the country, the worse Democrats do.
The more left-wing, the more people of color there are in the country, the best the left
does.
And so what incentive is there for them to police the borders?
What incentive is there for them to shut down sanctuary cities, to stop catch and release?
There isn't.
In my opinion, there's been a very subtle and very diabolical changing of the mentality of this country by left-wing people so that a state like California could never vote for Ronald Reagan as they did in the past, could never vote for Richard Nixon as they did in the past.
You have New York and California, just write them off.
And there's 10 or 12 states now that we fight over, everything else is now written off.
So at the top of the show, when I was laying out some of the principles that we're talking about here, I saw classical liberalism falling into the conservative category, as you just said.
And it's funny because while I consider myself a classical liberal, and we can lay out every liberal principle there is that I would defend, it's scary to me because we get so caught up in words that, you know, uh-oh, I don't want to be considered a conservative.
Well, I'm liberal in that I'm for gay marriage, and I don't mind if you smoke weed in your bedroom.
As a general rule, I do like lower taxes, but I think we could have a progressive tax at some level, so we probably disagree a little bit there.
I do think you should, if you keep making more and more, and especially as you're getting into the dozens of millions and the hundreds of millions, yeah, we could have a progressive tax that would tax those people more.
I'm not necessarily for the 90% tax that Bernie wants.
I mean, that—I don't know that that makes Obama any more of a liar than any other politician, as much as they're all just—they're all just pandering, right?
I'm just saying I think the number one issue in this country is self-defense and the number one domestic policy issue, as I mentioned, is the destruction of the family.
These other things, same-sex marriage, war on drugs, global warming, I consider to be further down the list.
Yeah, so how much of that do you think goes to why the black family has been affected?
I mean, when you think about the amount of black people, black men especially, and minorities in general that are in jail, we now have for-profit jails, and a huge percentage of these people are in jail because of drug offenses.
Whatever the percentage is, I think the war on drugs should be rethought and we should deal with it as a health problem and not a criminal justice problem.
But the reason for the large number of black behind bars goes back to what I said earlier about the breakdown of the black family.
It's like kicking a puppy though.
kinds of values and that has all sorts of other social consequences including a
And because he looks so young and looks liberal, whatever that means, he was able to get on the record all these Hollywood producers, people that did Golden Girls, people that did Cops, and got them on the record saying, I would never hire a conservative.
A conservative in this town will be screwed.
A conservative in this town cannot make it.
I intentionally put left-wing messages in my fair.
I try to influence culture this way.
He has them all saying this and has them on tape.
And the book came out, and it didn't make any difference.
They didn't say, I'm sorry.
They didn't say, we ought to rethink our assumptions.
He interviewed Fred Silverman, who at one time was the head of ABC, CBS, and NBC, has Fred Silverman on the record saying, a conservative cannot make it in this town.
Now, if Hollywood has a great impact on how we think, on our culture, and you have this Gestapo essentially shutting out people who are conservative, what does that say?
Yeah, well, messaging is everything, which actually brings this back to what you said about Trump before, which I think is sort of fascinating, that he's polling better with the black community because he has this sense of swagger, which I think you could probably relate directly back to, you know, rap music and stuff like that.
These guys aren't, they're not ashamed of their success.
And that, so in a weird way, Trump is sort of doing the exact same, the exact thing that you want.
I agree, but I think there's another big reason that Trump is scoring with black people.
One of the most under-polled things in this country is how black people are pissed off about illegal immigration.
When I was younger, there was a movie that came out in the 70s called Car Wash.
Richard Pryor was in it, and George Carlin was in it.
And it was about a day in the life of this car wash in South Central, not too far from where I grew up.
Virtually all the employees were black.
I defy you to go to a car wash in South Central now and see any employee who's black.
Illegal immigrants have come over and taken over this business.
And black people see it, and they realize it, and they are angry about it.
And the Democratic Party, however, because of what I said earlier about trying to shift the electorate to the left, has, in my opinion, thrown blacks under the bus on this issue.
And a lot of blacks who are aware of it are not happy about it.
And Donald Trump's position on immigration resonated with a lot of black people.
The other thing about Donald Trump that I think in general, not just black people, is appealing to me anyway, and I'm not quite sure why some of my fellow Republicans are so adamantly opposed to Donald Trump.
This guy, Dave, can self-fund.
He doesn't need your money.
Donald Trump was at a group called the Republican Jewish Coalition, and he was asked a question about does he feel that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel.
His answer is not important.
He said something like, I'm not sure, I haven't thought it through, and he got booed.
And Donald Trump looked up and he said, I don't need your money.
Now, there's a guy named Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas.
He's a multi-billionaire.
Last election cycle he gave Newt Gingrich $10 million.
And a lot of people feel that but for that Newt Gingrich's attack on Mitt Romney and
all the footage that he gave Democrats to use in the general election, Romney might
have won.
That's not the point.
The point is, he is a kingmaker.
And right now, he is trying to decide whether he wants to give money to Ted Cruz or to Marco
Rubio.
He has lost Vegas business interests.
I'm not mad at him for doing something to pursue his interests.
But the point is, he expects his phone call to return, to be returned.
Donald Trump can say, "Screw you" to all these people.
The people that get subsidies for milk.
The people that get subsidies for sugar.
The people that get subsidies for this ridiculous product known as ethanol.
The unions that keep Amtrak running.
Donald Trump does not need their money.
He does not have to take their phone call.
This guy can really do what should be done for the American people, which is to get all the crony capitalism and all these so-called special interests out of our government and get it down to the size it ought to be.
Boeing gets money from the government.
Google gets money from the government.
Dutch Royal gets money from the government.
This is corporate welfare, and the reason it happens is because they give contributions to the politicians, who in turn then do their bidding.
Donald Trump does not need their money.
He is in a position to downsize the government in a way unlike any other politician I've ever seen.
So in a weird way, even if you don't like, so for my liberal friends and my friends that left, even if you hate the messaging and, you know, all the Muslim stuff and all that, even if you hate all that, the unmasking of the system, and that's why I've also talked about how Bernie and Trump have a lot in common, because the core of what they're doing is the biggest threat to the system, right?
Yeah, and again, this may go to show why the system's just broken, because both sides in the primary process have to stake out these positions that they know that they're not going to govern by.
Richard Nixon used to say, when you want to win presidency in the primary, you run to the right, and then when you run in the general election, you run to the center.
That's kind of how it works.
In the primary season, you have to run to your base and then kind of run to the center to try and get independence.
How do you feel about giving a black person or a brown person additional points just because they're black and brown over some equally qualified white person?
But that's exactly why I want to have these conversations and why especially I think that liberals and libertarians should realize that we're sort of in the center together and that there's a way to work together.