Larry Elder

On a beautiful Sunday morning, I was out of town for a business meeting in the city of Santa Barbara, California, an affluent area where the rich and famous live. Demographically, it isn’t exactly Wakanda. Before getting on the 101 Freeway for the long drive back to Los Angeles, I pulled into a gas station to fill up. Just as I got out of my car, I heard a booming male voice shout, “Hey, want…

The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, released findings in March that showed a rise of 149% in reported anti-Asian American hate crimes from 2019 to 2020. PolitiFact wrote: “The report doesn’t mention former President Donald Trump. However, it does show that Google searches found spikes for racist terms such as ‘China virus’ and ‘Kung…

House Republican leadership removed Rep. Liz Cheney, (R-Wyo.), from her leadership position, a position her indignant liberal defenders likely did not even know existed until days ago. Cheney became Republican roadkill when she not only voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump but also became a vocal critic of his alleged “big lie” about the 2020 election. Cue the fake outrage by Democrats…

“Experts” predicted 1 million jobs would be created in April. The actual number fell far short, at 266,000. Republicans warned that overly generous COVID-19 relief benefits create a disincentive to work. The day before this disappointing jobs report, Bloomberg wrote: “In earnings calls and business surveys, executives often blame stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits for hampering…

I recently came across the term "white-savior movies." According to critics, this is a type of film that features a white hero or heroine entering the life of a helpless, troubled, often clueless Black person and, as one Black critic puts it, "swoops in" to turn his or her life around.

In June 2018, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., publicly exhorted her supporters to harass cabinet members of the Trump administration. At an outdoor rally in Los Angeles, Waters, with microphone in hand and amplifiers nearby, shouted: "Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you…

In the brilliant novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities," author Tom Wolfe describes what he calls the intense media interest in covering "The Great White Defendant." A review of "Bonfire" explains: "The overarching theme of the book is the search for the great white defendant. The vast majority of defendants in New York City are minorities, arrested for killing another minority. The vast majority…

Patrisse Cullors is a co-founder of Blacks Lives Matter. About her background, she said in 2015: "The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia (Garza, BLM co-founder) in particular are trained organizers." Cullors also said: "We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to…

A couple of years ago, I gave a speech before a conservative, predominantly white audience. I couldn't help but notice a tall, heavyset Black man, arms folded, standing in the back. From time to time, I would look at him, only to see him frown and shake his head, I assumed disapprovingly, when I made what I considered important points. After the speech, he came up to me. "I am angry," he said…

San Francisco's Lowell High School is one of the top public high schools in California. Beginning with its 2021 freshman class, Lowell plans to switch from a merit-based admission system to that of a lottery. How good is Lowell? It ranked 68th nationwide by U.S. News last year.

How would reparations be funded? Conservative writer Michael Medved estimates that only 5% of whites in America "bear any authentic sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave labor." Why should anyone but Democrats pay? Scholar Dinesh D'Souza notes that all but a "handful" of slave owners were Democrats. The Ku Klux Klan, at its height of power and popularity, was known by the…

With reparations, there is the issue of who pays. Do African countries owe reparations to Black Americans? After all, Harvard's director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Henry Louis Gates, wrote that 90% of those enslaved and shipped to the New World were sold by Africans to European slavers. All whites? Only whites? Nonwhites? Are payments owed before the…

Last week, I testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties regarding H.R. 40: Examining the Path to Reparative Justice in America. In other words, reparations. This is the first part of the statement I submitted: "Reparations is the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners to be given to people who…

A new Anti-Defamation League study labels conservative commentators and members of the “Intellectual Dark Web” as “gateways” to extremist content.