Larry Elder argues California is ungovernable due to Democratic control, citing 75% of Black children failing reading proficiency and Crenshaw High's 2% math success rate as proof of union obstruction. He blames Governor Gavin Newsom for anti-science mandates, Proposition 47's lenient penalties, and housing stagnation caused by CEQA, while asserting fatherlessness drives social decay more than racism. Elder plans to suspend CEQA, fire incompetent teachers, and leverage emergency powers to challenge the two-thirds Democratic majority, aiming to reverse California's 17-year ranking as the worst state for business despite funding hurdles. [Automatically generated summary]
And here he is sitting there incurring a tab, some people say it's 12 grand, I heard it was as high as 30 grand, with the very medical professionals and the lobbyists that drafted the mandates that they were violating by not wearing masks and by not socially distancing.
And his two kids were enjoying in-person private education and he exempted his own winery from the mandates.
And this kind of arrogant, smug, entitled attitude really started taking me off.
And then you add to that the crime, and the homelessness, and the hellacious cost of living in California.
My dad came to California in 1945, right after the war.
He's from Athens, Georgia.
And he came out here on a run.
He was a Pullman porter.
And he was amazed you could walk into the front door of a restaurant and get served?
And he kind of thought, maybe someday I'll make a middle note and come back to California.
Pearl Harbor, my dad joins the Marines.
I said, Dad, why the Marines?
He said, two reasons.
They go where the action is, and I love the uniforms.
My dad was in charge of cooking for the colored soldiers.
He was a staff sergeant.
My dad could look at a cake, Dave, and tell you what's in it.
That's how good he is.
He goes back to Chattanooga, where he met and married my mom, and he's going to get him a job as a short-order cook.
So he goes to restaurant, to restaurant, to restaurant, and he's told to his face, we don't hire niggers.
Goes to an unemployment office.
The lady says she went through the wrong door.
My dad sees Colored Lonely in the hall, goes through that door to the very same lady who sent him out.
She just wanted him to know what the rules were.
He goes back to my mom and says, this is BS.
I'm going to LA, where I've been on the run.
I'm going to get me a job as a cook, and I'll send for you in a couple of days.
Dad comes out, walks around for a day and a half, and he's told, I'm sorry, you don't have any references.
My dad said, I need references to make ham and eggs?
So he goes to the unemployment office, this time just one door, and the lady says, I have nothing.
My dad says, what time do you open?
She says, nine.
What time do you close?
She said, five.
My dad said, I'll be sitting in that chair until you find something.
Sat there for one day, came back, sat there for half a day.
She calls him up.
Sir, I've got something.
I don't think you're going to want it.
My dad said, of course I'm going to want it.
What is it?
She said, it's a job cleaning toilets at the Bisco Brand Bread.
My dad did that for 10 years, took a second job at another bread company called Barbara Ann Bread.
You're too young to remember that company.
It's now defunct.
Two jobs, 10 years, full-time cleaning toilets.
Saved up enough money to buy a house in South Central Los Angeles that is now valued at $600,000.
I just checked with Zillow the other day.
Wonderful for us because it's in our family.
But somebody, eighth grade dropout, could not duplicate my dad's success from the poverty to middle class if he or she worked three jobs.
That's how bad the cost of living has become in California.
The average price in California is 150% more than the average price in America.
And according to Leo Hanian, one of the many experts that I've interviewed on my radio show over the years, he's a brilliant econ professor at UCLA.
He says, houses in California are 50% more than they would be but for the environmental laws and the extremists that have been using them to stop construction of housing, which is why we have a housing shortage and it's why so many young people are leaving California and going to places like Tennessee and Florida.
And Texas.
There's a magazine, Dave, called CEO Magazine.
Don't know if you're familiar with it.
They've been around 17 years.
And based upon things like taxes, spending, unfunded pension liabilities, the power of public sector unions, and the degree to which the business climate is friendly or not friendly, California has been rated number 50 of all 50 states for the entire 17 years CEO Magazine has been published.
Well, yeah, to answer the latter part of your question, it was a lockdown because of the way Gavin Newsom imposed these mandates against science and the way the teachers union kept getting paid while telling kids not to go back to in-school learning, even after the CDC said it was okay.
75% of black kids in California cannot read at state levels of proficiency.
50% of all kids in the public sector, public universities in California, K-12, cannot read at state levels of proficiency.
I went to Crenshaw High School.
That was the school that was featured in Boys in the Hood.
I just checked yesterday, 2% are math proficient.
And it's a school that's dominated by the gang called the Crips.
Who the hell sends their kid to a high school where only 2% are math proficient and a school that's dominated by Crips if they can get out?
The majority of inner city parents, black and brown, both want choice.
But they keep pulling that lever for Democrats that don't give them choice.
Explain that to me.
And when I've talked to black media, and I just did that the other day in Sacramento, I said, aren't you tired?
Aren't you tired of the fact that 75% of black kids cannot read at a stable level of proficiency?
Aren't you tired of the fact that an LAUSD teacher, Los Angeles Unified Public School teacher, who has school-age kids is twice as likely as non-teaching families to put their own kids in private school.
44% of Philadelphia public school teachers, Dave, with school-age kids have their own kids in private school, as opposed to 10% of families nationwide, 6% of black families nationwide.
It's the equivalent of opening up a restaurant, putting up a sign and saying, come on in, just don't eat the food.
What are we talking about here?
Aren't you tired of this?
Aren't you tired of bad-mouthing the cops and the cops are pulling back?
And the people who are hurt are the very same people that the left claims that they care about?
And I said, one of the things I'm going to do when I become governor is I'm going to call a state emergency and I'm going to suspend CEQA.
And he goes, what's your name?
Sequel was suspended for the construction of the Sacramento Kings Stadium up in Sacramento.
For a billionaire, somehow they waived sequel, but for people that want to build houses.
So the average person leaving California doesn't realize that stopping construction, of course, means there's going to be a surplus, a deficit of homes.
Economics 101, supply and demand, and as a result, fewer and fewer supply, the demand goes up, and the prices go up.
So young people can't get their starter home the way my father was able to do with an 8th grade education.
And people are leaving.
They don't understand the connection between the declining public schools and the fact that you literally cannot fire a teacher.
Derek Chauvin, by the way, however you feel about how that trial turned out, had about 15 serious complaints against him.
They couldn't get rid of him.
Same thing with the teachers.
There are 300,000 public school teachers in the state of California.
I am told by experts that between 5 and 7 percent of them are incompetent, which means a minimum of 15,000 need to be fired.
You know how many were fired last year?
Two.
Two.
And it took millions of dollars for that to happen.
And they end up in the worst schools.
I subscribe to Spectrum Cable.
It used to irritate me how it defaults to the LA Times Channel.
No matter what you had the night before, it gets there.
But after you're sitting there, you're captive, and every now and then I'm watching this stuff, and when I decided to run for office, it's local, so I wanted to get more into local issues.
And the other day, two or three days ago, there's this black woman who started her own school.
And it turns out two-thirds of black parents do not want to send their kids back to LAUSD.
They've seen how bad the education was because they were able to watch it online, and they are ticked off.
And they believe there is systemic racism.
But not the normal kind of systemic racism, because most of the teachers and the administrators are black.
They believe the worst teachers and the worst administrators end up in the inner-city schools, where they need the best teachers and the best administrators, and they believe that's systemic racism.
The dots, I think, in terms of the zeitgeist of America, have been being connected.
Because you've been talking about the family stuff forever, and that you've got to stop throwing money at all these things.
There do seem to be more red-pilled former lefties like me, that perhaps because of the video that you and I did where you beat me senseless, and everyone's seen it already, But people woke up.
So in that regard, are you feeling hopeful that maybe in pockets of say the black community that weren't open to these ideas that it is working?
I believe I can explain things in ways that Joe and Joe Sixpack can get.
Again, it's not because they're stupid.
It's because they're working.
They're putting food on the table.
They're trying to get that first starter home.
But they don't realize that the connection between this and all the problems that they're complaining about.
We talked about homelessness.
What does Gavin Newsom and the Democrats want to do about homelessness?
Build homes for the homeless.
At a cost three, four, five times of what the private sector could do, A, and B, not dealing with the underlying problem, why they're homeless in the first place.
So even if they were able to get up and go to the homes, they wouldn't stay.
Meanwhile, you're sending a signal to the other states, cold weather climates, I can go to California where the weather is nice, people are going to treat me humanely, and I get a free home, come on down!
And that's what's happening.
I talked to cops who tell me that many people on Skid Row aren't even from here.
And one of the reasons because of Proposition 47 that the voters in California foolishly voted for, which meant that if you still At $9.50 or less.
By the way, you can do it every day.
You're not going to go to jail because you'll be committing a misdemeanor and if they catch you, they'll give you a ticket.
The whole point was, and it was a legitimate point, was to get people in treatment because many people who are stealing are stealing to support their meth habit.
When you take away the stick of going to jail, there's no reason to go to rehab.
We have two left-wing DAs, one in the Bay Area, San Francisco, and one in LA.
And by the way, they're both facing recall elections.
And I also avidly support the recall of those two DAs because they're soft on crime.
And this mow-mowing of the police, the police are pulling back.
It's called the Ferguson effect.
Now they call it the George Floyd effect.
You're a cop.
Much of police work is discretionary.
You don't have to get out of the car if you don't want to.
You see something that looks suspicious, why get out of the car and run the risk somebody's going to get their cell phone, video you, and accuse you of systemic racism?
So they stay in the car, they're answering radio calls, and that's it.
Bad guys know it.
Crime is going up.
Guess who gets hurt?
Black and brown people, the very people the left claims they care about.
Well, how many interviews have you seen Gavin Newsom have We've reached out a million times.
No, of course not.
How's he going to defend rising crime?
How's he going to defend these crappy schools he wouldn't put his own kids in on a bet?
How's he going to defend basically buying homes for homeless at ten times or five times the cost of what the private sector can do?
How's he going to defend any of that?
He cannot.
How's he going to defend how ticked off people are about the arrogant way he shut down this state in the most severe way than any of the other fifty governors have done?
He can't defend that.
He doesn't want you.
In the 33 years that Buckley had his show called Firing Line, the last day he ended the show, somebody said, why didn't Robert Kennedy, in all the times you extended him an invitation, come on your show?
And Buckley said, why does the baloney avoid the grinder?
Okay, so I was told by people like Dennis and people like Pastor Jack Hibbs and others, Larry, because of your celebrity, because of your social media profile, platform, you've got 2.5 million.
And so I was told, unlike the average politician, you're not going to be on the phone 75% of the time raising money because you're so well-known, and all I have to do is tell people that you're going to run, and all of a sudden the money is going to be flung again.
I'm on the phone 75% of the time trying to raise money, just like any other politician.
There's a $34,200 limit, max individual contribution.
By the way, the five-year tax stuff that I had to return, that is apparently the problem by getting on the ballot, again, that's going to be overturned, I'm sure, does not apply to him.
He does not have to return over five years of his taxes.
More than that, I cannot win unless I get money from people in California and outside California who recognize how California goes.
So goes the rest of the country.
And I want millionaires and billionaires, to quote Bernie Sanders, set up PACs along the lines of my philosophy about school choice, about what to do about crime, what to do about homelessness, so that I can spend beyond that.
Otherwise, I'm not going to win.
Shortly after it was obvious I was going to run, a union gave this man $5 million.
So, without getting money from other people and outside other people to set up political action committees along the lines of my philosophy, I don't have any hope of beating this guy.
I've always been that, but I'm a registered Republican.
And the reason I registered Republican about, I think it was 12 years ago, is I was going to run against Barbara Boxer.
I wasn't going to run against a libertarian.
They always lose.
And, by the way, this is kind of one of the reasons I didn't want to go into politics.
I had such a bad experience then.
They said, go to Washington, D.C., meet the Senate people, John Cornyn, who's still there, and Inhofe from Oklahoma, who's still there, and just show them how charming you are, give them your back story, and then they'll back you as the official candidate, and the money will come in.
I fly to DC on my own dime.
I didn't want there to be any shenanigans.
And I sit there with Cornyn and I tell him about my background and talk about my father and how he came to California in 1945.
He was a Marine and all this.
I thought I'd won them over.
I get back to LAX, phone rings.
We're going to Carly Fiorina.
I said, why?
They said three reasons.
One, she's a woman.
I said, well, I'm not going to have a sex change to run.
Number two, she has more money than you.
I said, I'll give you that.
Number three, she has higher name recognition than you do.
I said, no, she doesn't.
She does in D.C.
because she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but nobody knows her out here in California.
She lost by 10 points and didn't put nearly as much money into her campaign as they thought.
So that was my only foray into politics, other than when I ran against William Moore for fifth grade class president.
I took three out of four rolls.
They're still cleaning up the blood.
So I just was turned off by the whole thing about politics.
I read a piece in the LA Times a day or two ago about, yeah, and you know, it was something like Trump acolyte, something like that, Larry Elder's like, and it ends in the most, I mean, the media is so awful, nothing surprised me at this point, but like the last line was in effect, and there was Larry Elder once again defending white people, something to that effect, I'm loosely quoting it.
She also said Larry has been falsely using crime stats about black people.
Didn't say what crime stats I was falsely using.
And the one she's talking about is when I told her that the number one cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, like car accidents, drowning accidents.
The number one cause of preventable death for young black men is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man.
Now, unless you're prepared to say black people are just genetically inclined to commit more crime, you have to ask yourself, what the blank is going on here?
And the answer is fatherless homes.
There's a direct line between all these problems we're talking about and kids coming from homes without a father.
And forget about elder.
I think I gave you this stat before.
Obama once said, a kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.
Now, how have we gone from 25% of black kids being born outside of wedlock in 1965 to 70% now?
You're telling me that America's more racist now than it was in 1965?
It kept getting more races after Obama gets elected and reelected.
It's kind of a tough argument to make, but they make that argument.
And the fact is we've incentivized women to marry the government and we've allowed men
to abandon their financial and moral responsibility.
That's why we have these problems.
And speaking of racism, and you're quite right, the Democrats are really pulling out the race
card now because Donald Trump improved the percentage of black vote from 8% to 12% from
2016 to 2020.
That's a 50% increase and they are scared to death.
In 2007, Gallup did a poll.
Obama's running for the nomination against Hillary and Mitt Romney's running for the nomination on the Republican side against John McCain.
What percentage of Americans, Gallup asked, would not vote for somebody who's black?
Five percent.
What percentage would not vote for somebody who's a woman?
Eleven percent.
What percentage would not vote for somebody who's a Mormon?
Twenty-four percent.
What percentage would not vote for somebody who would be seventy-two when he became president, and that would be John McCain?
Forty-two percent.
So Obama had a lower hurdle than these three white politicians.
What are we talking about here?
Grow up!
Knock it off!
There's a sociologist at Harvard, he's still there, his name is Orlando Patterson, Back in 1991, he said, America, despite its flaws, is the least racist majority white society in the world, provides more opportunities for blacks than any other country in the world, including all of those of Africa.
That was 1991, well before Obama got elected.
Last time I was on CNN, I reminded Don Lamond of a poll study that was done by Time Magazine and CNN.
Black teens and white teens.
They asked them both, is racism a major problem in America?
Both of them said yes.
Then they asked a follow-up question to the black teens.
I've never seen anybody do this before.
Is racism a big problem, a minor problem, or no problem in your own daily life?
Eighty-nine percent of black teens said it was a minor problem or no problem in my own daily life.
In fact, twice as many black teens said, quote, failure to take advantage of available opportunities is a bigger problem than racism, end of quote.
That was 23 years ago.
What are we talking about here?
Knock it off!
Knock it off!
These guys are playing the race car because they know that they have to scare 13% of black people and a bunch of liberal white people into believing that racism remains a major problem because they pulled that lever for them, 95%, until Donald Trump came along and said, what do you have to lose?
Most people want people to realize their potential.
Why would it be in anybody's best interest for a group of people to perceive them as racist?
How is that making things better?
Don't you want everybody to be law-abiding, drug-abstaining, tax-paying people?
Doesn't that make everything good?
And whenever I ask people about systemic racism, I always say, "Can you name names?
What do you get, David Duke?"
After that, the list is pretty short, isn't it?
Give me the name.
Who in Congress on the Republican side is systemically racist?
Give me the name.
Give me the name.
And sometimes they say Trump.
Are you kidding me?
Best economy ever under Trump.
He pardoned Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, that Obama didn't do, despite the fact that Ken Burns, the lefty documentarian, came to Obama and said, please pardon this guy, didn't do it.
Sylvester Stallone, please pardon the guy, didn't do it.
Trump does it.
He also commuted the sentence of a woman named Alice Johnson.
When you were watching the State of the Union, and he mentioned lowest black unemployment of all time, and then to watch the Congressional Black Caucus sit there like this, to me that was everything that you've preached about in your 40 years doing this.
How many years have you been on air at this point?
Obama's mom sent him back from Indonesia when he was 10 years old to eventually go to Punahou, the finest prep school in the state of Hawaii, because she wanted him to have better education.
Michelle Obama did not go to a charter school.
They didn't exist then, but she did not go to her local government school because it was so bad.
She got on a bus and went to a much better school, Ice Cube, the rapper.
He didn't go to his local government school.
He went to TAF, which at the time was predominantly white.
So what are they telling you?
They're telling you they want choice, but you don't get choice.
And they're beholden to the teachers' union that adamantly opposes choice for all the reasons I just now mentioned.
They don't get their automatic dues from the teachers' union, and therefore it threatens them.
They couldn't care less about the quality of education.
And I mentioned the 300,000 teachers in, in, in, in public school teachers in California
and the average year only 2.2 were fired.
Imagine, I told you between 5 and 7 percent of them are perceived to be incompetent.
There are 20,000 cops here in LA.
Imagine if 5% of them were bad cops.
That's 1,000 cops on the streets!
We wouldn't put up with it!
We put up with 15,000 bad teachers?
Who wants to do something about that?
We do!
They don't!
But I'm the bad guy?
I'm the Uncle Tom?
Think about it!
Open up your eyes!
Who's on your side?
Now, the beauty of our private ballots is you can go in there, And you're a mail-in ballot and you can vote for a Republican and nobody has to know about it.
So I'm telling these Independents and Democrats, pull the lever for me.
Well, let's talk about elections for a little bit because I voted for Trump during the presidential election and I voted against all of the tax increases that they wanted to throw on us here in Cali and in LA, but I didn't have to show an ID.
And I was actually quite amazed because then I thought, well, I could just walk back.
All you need is your name and your address.
I could be my neighbor and vote the next day and the next day and the next day.
How broken do you think the whole system is at this point?
And actually, related to California specifically, are you confident that once you're in and that the election will even be legit in such a broken state?
But what's happened, as I've given interviews, is they've tried to get me to slice and dice my rivals.
And I said, I'm not playing that.
We should turn our cannon fire towards the prize, and the prize is Gavin Newsom.
Keep our eye on the prize and everything will be just fine.
I think the more the merrier.
I think everybody brings a little bit of the audience, a little bit of intensity with them, and our intensity level versus the Democrats, off the chart.
So this woman, Barbara Ferrer, who's the one that actually put this mandate in place, what do we do about that elected class?
I don't even, is she elected?
I'm not even sure if she's elected.
What do we do about that layer of these people, like the woman who, you know, voted to shut down all the restaurants outdoors, but then knew it wasn't gonna kick in for 48 hours, so then she ate outdoors in Santa Monica?
And thank you so much for bringing me to a whole new audience of young people.
You've often talked about the interview where you feel that you kind of had your assumptions torn asunder, but you also elevated me to another level of popularity that I did not have.
I think I told you before, a young person suggested I interview with you.
I didn't know who you were.
I said, Larry, get your head out of your, you know, take the pole out.
And you exposed me to a whole generation of young people who did not know who I was.
So I also blame you for my feeling that I can turn around some of these young people
because a lot of people wrote me in the comments, I saw you on Dave Rubin, I saw you on Dave
Rubin.
And when you told him about the stats regarding the police, that the police are more likely to be hesitant to pull the trigger on a black suspect than the white suspect, I didn't realize that.
I went back and I saw the stats.
And so thank you so much, David, for introducing me to a whole audience that I never would have known but for you.