Larry Elder was the first radio host I ever interviewed, and he's one of the most influential conservative voices in the business. Larry talks about growing up in the inner city, the stage from South Central LA, and how he became a conservative voice on the conservative-slash-libertarian right. He also talks about how he went from a small town in Ohio to becoming a world-renowned talk radio host, and why he thinks racism is no longer a major obstacle for Black America. He also tells the story of how he ended up on the radio and became a household name in the conservative slash libertarian world, and what it takes to be a conservative commentator in a male-dominated industry like radio and TV. Larry is a force to be reckoned with, and I can t wait to have him on the show again. Thanks to Larry for joining the show, and for being willing to take the time to talk about his life and his views on a topic that matters to so many Americans. Go check out the Sunday Special with Larry on his show on his new website, LarryElderRadio.net. You won't want to miss it! It's a must-listen for conservative radio hosts everywhere. If you like what you hear from Larry, you'll love this Sunday Special! You'll want to share it with your friends, family, and your significant other. so you can be a part of the conversation. and have the chance to be heard on the airwaves and social media, too. It'll help spread the word out there about what's going on in the world. . Thanks, Larry, I hope you're having a great Sunday Special. Thank you, Larry. - Tom, Tom, and Joe, and the rest of your day to everyone else in Cleveland, Ohio, and all of the things you're doing well. -- Thank you for listening to the show. Love you, bye! -- Tom, Sarah, Kristy, Amy, Brian, and Kevin, Sarah and Mike, - Sarah, Tim, Kristian, and Sarah, Natalie, and Jason, and Kacie, and Brad, and Katie, and Rachel, and Evan, and John, and Ben, and everyone else, Thank you so much, thank you, and thanks for listening and supporting you all so much for listening, and thank you for supporting the show and supporting it.
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00:01:59.000So it's been nearly 20 years, which is insane.
00:02:01.000But 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.
00:02:09.000I mean, I used to listen to him on the radio.
00:02:10.000So, 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.
00:02:25.000I'm born and raised in L.A., as you pointed out, and I'm a lawyer.
00:02:29.000Went to college in the East Coast at Brown.
00:02:31.000I went to Michigan for law school, and then I worked for a big law firm in Cleveland, Ohio.
00:02:35.000I stayed there for about two and a half years.
00:02:37.000I 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.
00:02:43.000I wanted to get into commentary some sort of way, but I didn't know how to do that.
00:02:46.000So I left the firm and I started a business.
00:02:48.000Not 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.
00:02:54.000And then I was able to spend some time and start writing columns.
00:02:58.000Didn't have a deal, didn't have a syndication.
00:03:00.000I 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.
00:03:08.000And every now and then one would get published.
00:03:10.000And finally, one that I wrote about 30 years ago where I argued that racism was no longer a major obstacle for black America.
00:03:18.000And to say that now still raises eyebrows, let alone 30 years ago.
00:03:22.000So, the Plain Dealer published the article.
00:03:26.000I get a phone call from the producer of a radio show.
00:03:28.000Do you really believe that racism is no longer a major problem in America?
00:03:31.000He said, would you come on my guy's show tonight and talk about it?
00:03:34.000Now, Ben Cleveland is about 50% black, so virtually every caller was a black person, and they were not happy.
00:03:41.000And 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.
00:05:47.000And I started 1994, I think it was, and I've been on radio ever since.
00:05:51.000So what formed your political viewpoint?
00:05:52.000Because 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.
00:07:34.000And 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.
00:08:35.000My mother had a series of boyfriends, each one more irresponsible than the other one.
00:08:39.000Elder 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.
00:08:48.000If she didn't give it to him, he'd kick the crap out of her.
00:08:49.000If ever I tried to do anything, he'd kick the crap out of me.
00:08:53.000And he was in my life, my dad said, the longest.
00:09:01.000I came home from school, eighth grade, and I was making too much noise for my mom's then-boyfriend.
00:09:07.000My mom sided with the boyfriend when he and I were fighting, and she threw me out of the house, age 13, never to return.
00:09:16.000Athens, Georgia, Jim Crow South, at the beginning of the Great Depression, I defy you to find somebody with a hand dealt like that.
00:09:23.000My father goes down the road, Ben, he picks up trash, does anything he can do.
00:09:27.000Ultimately, he becomes a Pullman porter for the trains.
00:09:30.000They were the largest private employer of blacks in those days.
00:09:32.000And 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.
00:09:39.000And it was sunny, and people seemed to be less racist.
00:09:41.000He could walk into a restaurant and get served.
00:09:44.000And my dad said to my mom, maybe someday I'll relocate to L.A.
00:09:50.000Pearl Harbor, my dad joined the Marines.
00:12:02.000You get out of life what you put into it.
00:12:04.000"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.
00:12:22.000"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.
00:12:28.000The reason for the title is because after this eight-hour conversation, My father writes me a letter.
00:12:34.000He never wrote me a letter in his life.
00:13:10.000And it does lead to the question, which is, I mean, your dad, obviously an enormously tough individual just from the story.
00:13:16.000And 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.
00:13:22.000Why 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.
00:13:46.000It's a complicated question, but it starts with the family.
00:13:48.000And I know it sounds counterintuitive because my father had no family.
00:13:52.000But 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.
00:13:58.000And 70% of black kids today are born to unwed mothers.
00:14:05.000And 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.
00:14:15.000And the black kind of victimhood mentality is a phenomenon of the civil rights movement going from demanding equal rights to demanding equal results.
00:14:31.000And 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.
00:14:41.000How do you think that conservatives should go about speaking to black folks, obviously?
00:14:45.000Every 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.
00:16:08.000And 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.
00:16:25.000Furthermore, 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.
00:16:48.000Uh, 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.
00:16:55.000Turns out the kids had missed collectively like three, four hundred days of school.
00:17:00.000In comes Jesse Jackson, accuses the school board of racism, files a lawsuit.
00:17:04.000School 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.
00:17:12.000And they mentioned Oakland, which was primarily a school board members of people of color.
00:17:18.000San Francisco, also the majority of the school board members were people of color.
00:17:22.000And yet the black boys were kicked out far more compared to other people when you look at their potential in that given school.
00:17:39.000Sentencing 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.
00:18:20.000It'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.
00:18:29.000I wrote one about the expulsion rates, I wrote one about voter ID, and I wrote one about sentencing.
00:18:34.000All 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.
00:18:41.000As 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.
00:18:51.000People tried to blame President Trump for the rise in increased racial tensions in the United States.
00:18:55.000But 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.
00:19:01.000Barack Obama became president, and then things started to sink pretty quickly.
00:19:04.000And 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.
00:19:13.000He, in his own persona, was unification of black and white, considering his father was black and his mother was white.
00:19:19.000And 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.
00:19:25.000A lot of problems are just people problems.
00:19:29.000Instead 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.
00:19:37.000I want to get your opinion on Barack Obama's impact on sort of the race debate in the United States.
00:19:41.000You know, I was in the Boston arena in 2004 when Obama gave that speech for John Kerry.
00:19:58.000And I said to him, this guy's going to run for president, he's going to get elected.
00:20:01.000He didn't say a damn thing, but he said it well.
00:20:04.000And 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.
00:20:18.000A number of people, I think, pulled the lever for him because of that.
00:20:22.000And he proceeds to do just the opposite.
00:20:27.000Before he became president, he gave a speech as a senator at a church in Atlanta.
00:20:33.000And he was talking about how much racism there is in America.
00:20:36.000And 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.
00:20:48.000And I thought that was reasonable, 90%.
00:20:49.00010% of Americans believe Elvis is still alive.
00:20:52.0008% believe if you send him a letter, he'll get it.
00:20:55.0007% of adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
00:21:40.000The professor from Harvard had forgotten his door key.
00:21:43.000He 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.
00:21:55.000A 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.
00:22:03.000And instead of Obama going on television saying, look, Skip, I know you're a friend of mine.
00:22:07.000You and I have been friends a long time.
00:22:09.000But you have done exactly the wrong thing for young black boys.
00:22:15.000Instead of being respectful, instead of responding to the request, you copped an attitude.
00:22:19.000This 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.
00:22:26.000My 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.
00:22:39.000That's what Obama could have said and should have said and didn't.
00:22:41.000Instead he said, the Cambridge police acted stupidly.
00:22:44.000And the cops then realized that he was not on their side.
00:22:47.000And Obama fumbled around with that stupid beard thing to try and walk it back a little bit.
00:22:55.000If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.
00:22:57.000I don't even know what that even means.
00:22:59.000And of course, Trayvon Martin was found not guilty, and the jurors said race never even came up.
00:23:05.000There 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.
00:23:12.000Obama gave a speech before the United Nations and invoked Ferguson.
00:23:17.000Now this is while Ferguson was still being investigated.
00:23:20.000This cop was assumed to have been a racist.
00:23:22.000Michael Brown allegedly had his hands up, don't shoot.
00:23:25.000And Obama mentions this to a United Nations address and says, we have our own problems, a place called Ferguson.
00:23:30.000Ferguson turned out to be a complete farce, as you know.
00:23:33.000And the DOJ comes in, exonerates the cop, but nevertheless says that the Ferguson PD is institutionally racist.
00:24:15.000And the answer is you can't do it by numbers.
00:24:17.000You have to do it by differences and offending.
00:24:19.000And 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.
00:24:41.000Uh, 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.
00:24:51.000Christie Todd Whitman ordered a study.
00:24:53.000Study 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.
00:25:26.000And 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.
00:25:39.000And 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.
00:25:55.000And their Democratic Party is definitely afraid of that.
00:25:57.000And 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.
00:26:08.000Well, speaking of that, one of the ways that this has been intellectualized is in this philosophy of intersectionality.
00:26:14.000And 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.
00:26:24.000The 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.
00:26:37.000The 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.
00:26:47.000See, 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.
00:26:56.000If 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.
00:27:07.000Number two, don't have a kid before you're 20.
00:27:09.000Number three, get married before you have a kid.
00:27:11.000And they phrase it a little bit differently, but that's what all three of them have said.
00:27:14.000And 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.
00:27:25.000And 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?
00:27:36.000I would think that anybody would argue we're less racist today than we were in 1965, so you can't attribute it to that.
00:27:42.000In fact, during slavery, a black child was more likely to be born under a roof with his biological mother and biological father than today.
00:27:50.000It is the number one problem facing this country, not racism.
00:27:53.000Take a magic wand and wave it over America and remove every smidgen of racism from the hearts of white America.
00:27:59.00050% inner city dropout rate in some schools.
00:28:01.00070% of black kids born outside of wedlock, as I mentioned.
00:28:04.00025% of young black boys have criminal records.
00:28:06.000The 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.
00:28:12.000And the number one cause of preventable death for young white men are accidents, like car accidents.
00:28:17.000The number one cause of preventable cause of death for young black men is homicide, almost always at the hand of another black person.
00:28:24.000Chicago, 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.
00:28:32.000And we're talking about intersectionality?
00:28:35.000So let's talk about Republicans and their take on these issues.
00:28:39.000Because 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.
00:28:48.000I want to get your take on how President Trump has handled racial issues.
00:28:51.000To be perfectly frank with you, I am not completely comfortable with President Trump on issues of race.
00:28:57.000Who's completely comfortable with Trump at all?
00:29:00.000I don't think Trump's completely comfortable with Trump.
00:29:02.000He may be the only person who's completely comfortable with President Trump.
00:29:05.000But the rap on him, he's obviously been called racist by a large number of people who are running.
00:29:10.000My 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.
00:29:17.000But 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.
00:29:27.000What'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.
00:29:34.000If 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.
00:29:49.000Donald Trump is on a whole other level, I will give you that, but they're always called racist.
00:29:54.000So the idea that Donald Trump is being called a racist should not surprise anybody because that's how they roll.
00:29:59.000He hasn't helped any by some of the comments that he's made.
00:30:02.000But 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.
00:30:10.000And I said, all right, let's cut to the chase.
00:30:12.000Tell me the number one thing that Trump has done that you consider to be racist.
00:30:31.000He 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.
00:31:00.000It was his dad's business practices that he was following.
00:31:04.000And 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.
00:31:17.000So if the 1975 Assent Decree didn't bother them, it shouldn't bother me either.
00:31:23.000I don't know any large landlord who hasn't been sued.
00:31:26.000And by the way, the Washington Post just settled a lawsuit claiming racial discrimination by a disgruntled longtime ex-employee who got fired.
00:31:33.000CNN is right now fighting a lawsuit by a group of people claiming discrimination, as is the New York Times.
00:31:39.000So bring me somebody with clean hands and we'll talk.
00:31:54.000And 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.
00:32:02.000And he's renounced David Duke many, many, many times.
00:32:05.000I don't know how many more times you have to do that.
00:32:07.000Doing something about illegal immigration, to me, is a Big boon to black people.
00:32:15.000George 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.
00:32:25.000So 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.
00:32:33.000Donald Trump wants to do something about that and that makes him a bigot?
00:32:39.000They 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.
00:32:47.000What responsible parent would send their kid to a school where only 3% of the kids there can do math at grade level?
00:32:52.000But if you don't have any money, you don't have any options.
00:32:54.000If you live across the street from Crenshaw High School, your kid's going there, whether you want to or not.
00:32:58.000And by the way, it's a Crip school, meaning the Crips run it.
00:33:00.000I 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.
00:33:06.000Who 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?
00:33:13.000The 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.
00:33:18.000So, 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?
00:33:51.000We 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.
00:33:58.000You can convert, you can pay a tax, or you can be killed.
00:34:02.000And believe it or not, there are probably about 10% of Muslims, 1.25, 1.5 million or so of them, that believe this philosophy.
00:34:10.000If you look at polls that show How people felt about 9-11?
00:34:14.000It's scary how Muslims in France and Muslims in Britain felt about 9-11.
00:34:19.000There was a funny exchange in a program called 24 a few years ago.
00:34:25.000William Devane played the Secretary of State, and he had a son who was an activist, anti-war activist, a peace activist, anti-nuke activist.
00:34:33.000And he had this conversation with his son.
00:34:37.000His son was trying to convince his father that what his father was doing was immoral.
00:34:41.000And he said, spare me your fifth grade Michael Moore logic.
00:34:55.000One 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.
00:35:01.000One of the issues where you were way ahead of the curve was on drug legalization.
00:35:05.000So where do you stand on drug legalization, particularly as we look at the heroin epidemic that's currently occurring?
00:35:10.000Do you think that drugs should be legalized as far as opioids?
00:35:14.000I'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.
00:35:28.000We ought to be counseling people about appropriate behavior and that sort of thing, but criminalizing something like this has always bothered me.
00:35:33.000Milton Friedman's felt the same way and made the same argument.
00:35:37.000So 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.
00:35:43.000The 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.
00:35:49.000These 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.
00:35:57.000Libertarianism 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.
00:36:12.000Is that a decent counter argument to that?
00:36:14.000I don't think so because the downside is even worse.
00:36:16.000The drug epidemic has also caused an increase in street crime.
00:36:19.000It'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.
00:36:26.000People going into prison and you come out, you can't get a job now because you've had a record.
00:36:30.000There's a lot of people who are going to get a job now because you've had a record.
00:36:31.000The amount of money that society loses because of the theft, the higher cost of insurance premiums because of all the theft related to drugs.
00:36:40.000You know, there are lots of other unintended consequences because of this war on drugs.
00:36:44.000And 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.
00:37:13.000So 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.
00:37:23.000On a libertarian basis, should we care about that?
00:37:26.000Should we care about, you know... Oh yeah!
00:37:35.000And 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.
00:37:42.000It seems to me we ought to have a say in that.
00:37:45.000But 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.
00:37:57.000That'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.
00:38:03.000Well, it is a libertarian problem because to me, you're not just bringing your work, you're also bringing your politics and your culture.
00:38:11.000And 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.
00:38:17.000Do they share our Our belief in a separation of church and state?
00:38:21.000Do they share our belief in a limited government?
00:38:24.000I 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.
00:38:32.000If the Democrats believed that illegal aliens turned voters would pull the lever for the Republican Party, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
00:38:40.000We wouldn't be talking about statehood for Washington, D.C.
00:38:42.000We wouldn't be talking about allowing convicted felons to vote.
00:38:45.000All of these things breed more Democrats.
00:38:47.000We wouldn't be talking about college-free tuition.
00:38:49.000If 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.
00:38:56.000If college meant that you were more likely to come out as a Republican or a conservative, Democrats wouldn't be pushing this.
00:39:02.000So 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?
00:39:52.000The idea that they eliminated state and local deduction and put a cap on mortgage interest deduction didn't help Larry Elder any.
00:39:58.000But the idea that overall Americans got a tax break, I'm happy with that.
00:40:04.000I'm happy with the Supreme Court justices that he's done.
00:40:06.000I'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.
00:40:11.000I 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.
00:40:18.000I 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.
00:40:33.000He's got a collection of views and values.
00:40:35.000You add them all up, it's better than President Hillary Clinton.
00:40:38.000When he ran, I said this, I said, if Donald Trump were a movie, he'd be the good, the bad, and the ugly.
00:40:43.000And 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.
00:41:26.000That 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.
00:41:37.000I said, we have 16 agencies at the time.
00:41:40.000All 16 said at the highest level of certainty that Saddam Hussein had not only WMD but had stockpiles of WMD.
00:42:27.000So with all of that said, you know, President Trump has given, I think, conservatives way more than we could have expected.
00:42:33.000One 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.
00:42:58.000He's not going to turn into a saint anytime soon or anything close to it.
00:43:02.000Isn't it amazing we've had two divorced presidents?
00:43:06.000One was Ronald Reagan, and then one was Donald Trump.
00:43:09.000Not 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.
00:43:16.000As my colleague Dennis Prager says, it shows you that God has a sense of humor.
00:43:21.000The 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.
00:43:29.000There is a math under which Trump's presidency ends up being, for me, a net loss.
00:43:37.000The math is that we get all this good stuff.
00:43:39.000We 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.
00:43:46.000And 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.
00:43:51.000But 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.
00:44:25.000Much of the attack against Donald Trump I think is unfair.
00:44:28.000I mean, 90% of the news against him is negative, and yet the economy is booming like this.
00:44:33.00069% of people think they're going to be better off next year than last year, and still he's being hammered like this.
00:44:39.000I think we need to call the media out for their unfairness.
00:44:43.000When 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.
00:44:54.000We had more flattering pictures of Obama on the front page.
00:44:56.000More stories of Obama on the front page.
00:44:58.000More flattering stories of Obama on the front page.
00:45:02.000So 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.
00:45:11.000And if we call him out on it and defend him when he needs to be defended, I think he can get reelected.
00:45:15.000So right now he's riding pretty much where he always has in the low 40s in approval rating.
00:45:32.000I mean, he bounces around, but he seems pretty stable.
00:45:35.000He has a ceiling, he has a floor, he doesn't tend to move around too much in between those things.
00:45:39.000And 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.
00:45:44.000And 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.
00:46:31.000I 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.
00:46:38.000The myth is that President Trump was a transformational candidate in 2016.
00:46:42.000If 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.
00:46:53.000He got a lower percentage of the white vote than Mitt Romney did.
00:46:56.000He got fewer absolute votes in Wisconsin than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
00:46:59.000And he won Wisconsin because no one showed up to vote for Hillary.
00:47:03.000And number two, everybody thought she was going to win.
00:47:05.000So Democrats did show up in the last midterm.
00:47:07.000Republicans did too, and Democrats blew out Republicans, which makes me skeptical, more skeptical, I think, of his chances in 2020.
00:47:14.000But 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.
00:47:22.000So I don't mean to make you a prognosticator, but if you have to put odds on Trump.
00:47:25.000But that's a saving grace that they're overcorrecting.
00:47:28.000Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the base of this party.
00:47:31.000I don't mean she's a leader, but I mean her ideas are the base of this party.
00:47:34.000Medicare for all, getting rid of ICE, $15 minimum wage, college free tuition, this new Green Deal.
00:47:45.000Part 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.
00:48:18.000I 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.
00:48:52.000The country is better off in the last two years because of Donald Trump.
00:48:55.000And 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.
00:49:04.000OK, so let's talk for a second about the expansion of executive power.
00:49:08.000Because as a libertarian, this is something that's been happening under both parties.
00:49:11.000President Trump has continued that trend.
00:49:13.000The amount of spending under President Trump has increased, it has not decreased.
00:49:16.000So size and scope of government continue to increase with a Republican administration.
00:49:20.000And of course it didn't surprise you because when they campaigned in 2016, neither Hillary nor Trump said a damn thing about the entitlements.
00:49:25.000Even Obama said the entitlements were unsustainable.
00:49:29.000I 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.
00:49:39.000And 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.
00:49:47.000And so people that were worried about that went, oh, okay.
00:49:49.000And so he pulled over some squishies, some independents, some so-called conservative Democrats because of that.
00:49:54.000Had 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.
00:50:30.000So I want to get your opinion, because this week the president declared a national emergency on the border.
00:50:34.000It'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.
00:50:43.000Where do you stand on the national emergency declaration?
00:50:48.000If 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.
00:50:58.000The 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.
00:51:03.000So 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.
00:51:13.000If that means declaring a national emergency to moving some money around, I'm okay with that.
00:51:19.000I know that the left believes that it is, but I don't think it is.
00:51:22.000I had a real problem with what Obama did with DACA.
00:51:25.000I 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.
00:51:35.000I'd love to do that, says Obama, but I can't.
00:51:37.000And then he gets pressure, and then all of a sudden he does exactly what he said he couldn't do.
00:51:41.000That bothered me a lot more than what Donald Trump is doing.
00:51:43.000What Donald Trump is doing is for national security, at least he says so with a straight face.
00:51:47.000Obama could not make that argument regarding DACA.
00:51:49.000Okay, so in one second, I have one final question for you.
00:51:52.000I want to ask you specifically, you mentioned that libertarian ideas, if they're the right ideas, they may not get us elected.
00:51:58.000We may not have libertarianism any time in the near future.