In this episode of the podcast, I talk about how much I love the Midwest and why it's just the sweetest part of the country. I also talk about why I decided to do a live show in front of thousands of people for the first time in 33 years, and why I think it's one of the most important things you can do in your life to be honest with your audience and let them know that they can be as honest as they want without fear of censorship or fear of lying. I hope you enjoy it and tweet me if you do! with any questions or comments. Timestamps: 1:00 - I m so grateful to be in the Midwest 4:30 - The Midwest is a sweet, sweet place 5:00 I m from the coast 6:15 - I love to hunt and fish here 8:20 - My wife is from Wisconsin 9:40 - The accent 10:30 11:20 What's up with the Midwest? 12:15 13:40 14:15 My wife s accent 15:00 | What do you like about it? 16:15 | I m in love with it 17:30 | My wife's accent 18:40 | I love it 19:20 | My dogs 21:30 // 22:00 Is it weird? 23:00 What are you like? 26:00 Do you like it here? 27:10 28:10 | What's your favorite part of my hometown? 29: Is it nice? 30:00 / 32:00 Are you missing something? 31:00? 35:00 Can I do something better? 36:00 // 33:00 Where do you want me to go back to the Midwest ? 37:00 How do you think I m going to go to the next stop on my next stop? 39:00 Why do I like it more? 40:00 I m coming back to Wisconsin? 45:00 My favorite place? 41: Is there a better place to eat meatloaf? 46:00 @ least? 47:00 Don t forget to send me a picture of you? 44:00 Thank you, I m thinking I m having a good time in this area? , 47:40 Do you have a question or a question?
00:30:08.960It was unusual when I was growing up for a mother and a father not to be in the home.
00:30:14.080Now, it is unusual for a mother and a father in the inner city to be in the home.
00:30:18.400And that's the big difference. My father never knew his biological father.
00:30:23.440My last name, Elder, is the name of some man who was in his life the longest, maybe three, four years.
00:30:28.320I'm not even sure that Elder formally adopted my dad, but my dad began using his name.
00:30:32.320His mother could neither read nor write. She was irresponsible, lived off a series of boyfriends.
00:30:36.640My dad, at the age of 13, comes home and starts quarreling with his mom's then-boyfriend. Elder was long gone.
00:30:42.800And the mother sided with the boyfriend and threw my father out of the house, never to return.
00:30:48.800Athens, Georgia, Jim Crow South at the beginning of the Great Depression.
00:30:52.720And my father picked up trash, cleaned up barns, did whatever he could, became a Pullman porter on the train.
00:30:58.160They were the largest private employer of blacks in those days.
00:31:00.960And this little black boy from Athens, Georgia traveled all over the country, Tucker,
00:31:05.040and came to this state called California, the city called Los Angeles.
00:31:08.400And my dad was blown away. You could walk through the front door of a restaurant, sit down and get served.
00:31:14.480So he made a mental note, maybe someday he'll relocate to California.
00:31:17.280My dad always had packages of crackers and 10 cans of tuna, because you never knew in the South,
00:31:21.760if you'd be able to get a meal. Pearl Harbor, my dad joined the Marines.
00:31:26.400I asked him why. Are there any Marines here?
00:31:29.760Are there any Marines here? Oorah. You know what I'm going to say.
00:31:32.880I asked my dad why he joined the Marines. He said two reasons.
00:31:35.840They go where the action is. And I love the uniforms.
00:31:40.400Good reason. So my dad was stationed on the island of Guam.
00:31:43.440He was in charge of cooking for the colored soldiers because the military was segregated in those days.
00:31:47.440My dad can look at a cake and tell you what's in it.
00:31:49.600So the war is over. He goes back to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he met and married my mom
00:31:53.120to get him a job as a short order cook.
00:31:55.200He goes to three or four restaurants and he's told, we don't hire niggers.
00:31:59.600Goes to an unemployment office. The lady says, you went through the wrong door.
00:32:02.320My dad goes to the hall and sees colored only, goes through that door to the very same lady who sent him out.
00:32:07.680My dad came home to my mom and said, this is BS. I'm going to L.A. where I was before the war,
00:32:11.600get me a job as a cook. So he comes out to L.A., walks around and he's told, you don't have any references.
00:32:18.320My dad said, I need references to make ham and eggs.
00:32:22.080Goes to an unemployment office, this time just one door.
00:32:25.920Nothing's available. He said, what time do you open?
00:32:28.720She says, nine o'clock, what time do you close? She said, fine. My dad said, I'll be sitting in that
00:32:31.760chair until you find something. Sat in the chair for a whole day, came back the next day, sat there
00:32:35.440until lunch. She called him up. She said, I have a job for you. I don't know whether you're going to
00:32:39.680want it. My dad said, of course I'm going to want it. I'm starting a family. What is it? It's a job
00:32:43.040cleaning toilets and Nabisco brand bread. My dad did that for 10 years, took a second full-time job at
00:32:48.560another bread company cleaning toilets, cooked for a family on the weekend because they wanted my mom to be a
00:32:52.880stay-at-home mom, went to night school to get his GED. After getting his GED, went to night school to learn how to operate a restaurant.
00:32:58.400The man never slept, which is why he was so grouchy all the time.
00:33:08.640And my dad started a little cafe, 47 years old, ran until his mid-80s. When my dad retired, he owned
00:33:16.160that building. He owned the property next to it, plus the house is still in our family right now. He retired
00:33:21.360with a net worth of above a million dollars.
00:33:26.560So I tell you that story, Tucker, to say that being raised by a single mom is not a death sentence. You're still
00:33:33.120responsible. Life is still all about choices. My dad was a lifelong Republican. My mom was a lifelong Democrat. You should have been in the house.
00:33:40.480My dad said, Democrats want to give you something for nothing. You try to get something for nothing. You almost always end up getting
00:33:45.600nothing for something. And my dad would say this, hard work wins. You get out of life what you put into it.
00:33:51.520You cannot control the outcome, Larry, but you are 100% in control of the effort. Before you
00:33:56.320bitch, moan, or whine about what somebody did to you or said to you, go to the mirror, look at it, and ask
00:34:00.720yourself, what could I have done to change the outcome? And finally, he said, no matter how hard you work,
00:34:05.040how good you are, sooner or later, bad things are going to happen, how you deal with those bad things,
00:34:08.800tell your mother and me, if we raised a man.
00:34:15.280He sounds like an amazing man, but he never made the sale politically with your mom.
00:34:22.080No. Live to be 95 years old. During Watergate, you should have been a fly on the wall. My dad thought
00:34:28.080Watergate was inconsequential. Even if Nixon sent the plumbers in there to bug Larry O'Brien's office,
00:34:35.520my dad thought it was, so what? No evidence whatsoever that Nixon did it. He covered it up.
00:34:40.880My dad thought it was inconsequential. And he said, over time, you're going to realize
00:34:44.720this is no reason to get rid of a president. My mom thought it was horrific. She hated Nixon.
00:34:49.600The polls now show most people believe that what Nixon did does not rise to the level of him leaving
00:34:54.560office. My dad was right. Well, you know, it turned out that Deep Throat was the number two man
00:35:02.240at the FBI working in concert with the CIA to crush his sitting president. So something we've seen
00:35:09.760subsequently, but your dad was onto that. You know, you graded on the curve. Now look at the Biden crime
00:35:15.760family, $27 million, all this corruption. What Nixon did was inconsequential compared to what's going
00:35:21.920on right now. He didn't get rich in China, that's true. No, he sure didn't. So California, your home
00:35:30.480state, my home state, give us a status report from the left coast, if you would. I think this story
00:35:37.440probably illustrates how bad things are. I ran for governor, as Tucker pointed out. I ran in the recall
00:35:43.440election. It was a two-part deal. The first part is, do you want this man recalled? And a 50% plus one
00:35:50.320that said yes. Whoever got the most votes on the replacement side would have become governor.
00:35:55.200I got 49% of the votes on the replacement side. The next highest person got 9%. The 49% was exactly
00:36:01.280the same percentage that Schwarzenegger got in 2003 when he successfully recalled a previous governor.
00:36:07.360Since then, there are 5% more registered Democrats, 25% fewer registered Republicans,
00:36:12.880and 50% more registered independents. And independents in California vote Democrat. There hasn't been a
00:36:18.000Republican elected statewide in California in 20 years. So the race is over. I collected,
00:36:24.800I raised $27 million in eight weeks, three and a half million votes. California has 58 counties.
00:36:30.800On the replacement side, I carried 57 to 58 counties. The only one I didn't carry was San Francisco.
00:36:36.080I didn't spend one dime or one minute campaigning there because I thought it was a lost cause. I lost
00:36:40.080that by 149 votes. So the race is over, Tucker. I go to a restaurant in the west side of LA to meet a
00:36:48.080buddy of mine. He's late. So I'm sitting at a table. There's a table next to me with two ladies. I think
00:36:53.840they feel sorry for me because I'm sitting by myself. We start talking. It turns out they're 85 years old.
00:36:59.440They've known each other since the second grade. One was celebrating her 85th birthday. And they told me
00:37:05.280they were Jewish. One said she was a human rights activist. One said she was a psychotherapist.
00:37:09.280And then about 15, 20 minutes into the conversation, one of them said, wait a minute. I know you.
00:37:15.920You're that guy that ran for governor. You're that Larry Elder. She said, guess who we voted for?
00:37:20.560I said, you didn't vote for me. She said, how do you know that? I said, let's see. We're on the west side
00:37:24.560of LA. You're both Jewish. You're a human rights activist. It doesn't take Columbo to put that
00:37:29.760together. You didn't vote for me. And they said, we didn't. Let me ask you something. How do you feel about
00:37:34.080the way Gavin Newsom shut down the state in a more severe way than did any other governor because
00:37:39.040of COVID while sitting up there at that French laundry restaurant, yucking it up with the very
00:37:43.360same people that drafted the mandates, not wearing a mask, not social distancing? They said we were
00:37:48.720outraged by that. How do you feel about the fact that a million people have left California the last
00:37:53.120three years, the first time anybody's left this state in 150 years? We've lost friends. How do you
00:37:58.640feel about the homelessness? They both told me that they had a homeless encampment near their homes,
00:38:02.000and they were outraged by it. I said, how do you feel about the quality of schools?
00:38:05.280Do you have kids? Yes. Did you put any of your kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District?
00:38:09.520No, we would not because the schools are substandard.
00:38:14.160So here we are completing each other's sentences, and you didn't vote for me.
00:38:18.080I said, have you ever had a conversation with a conservative Republican before?
00:38:22.000They said, no. She said, what are you drinking? I said, double vodka, splash of cranberry.
00:38:27.440Other one said, what are you eating? I said, well, I wasn't going to have steak.
00:38:29.920Now I'm going to upgrade it to lobster. You pay for the meal.
00:38:33.600So we had a marvelous time. They had never had a conversation. Another one,
00:38:38.720I have some back issues, and so a buddy of mine recommended a massage therapist. So he gave me
00:38:43.680a dress. I'm assuming it's going to be some office building. I turn down a residential street.
00:38:47.120It's a house. I knock on the door. Lady opens the door. She's got tattoos everywhere,
00:38:52.000ear piercings everywhere but her eyeballs. I smell this big flume of marijuana. Not that I would
00:38:58.080know what that smells like, of course. I've read about it. So she's working on my back,
00:39:04.320and she's playing Motown music, which is my favorite genre of popular music. And you name
00:39:08.640the song, I can tell you about it. They played my girl. I said, that was written by Smokey Robinson.
00:39:12.800He wrote the song for David Ruffin, the lead singer of the Temptations. This song is written by Marvin
00:39:17.120Gaye. Marvin Gaye was trying to dissuade it from doing that What's Going On album by Barry Gordy,
00:39:22.400because he wanted to control. I went over every single, and she said, I know who you are. When
00:39:28.080you contacted me to make your appointment, I knew who you were. I wasn't going to say anything.
00:39:32.720Had I known you were this funny and this personable, I would have voted for you. I said,
00:39:38.960do you know any Republicans? She said, no. I said, none. She said, no. I said, news bulletin.
00:39:45.200We have personalities. We have senses of humor. I mean, honestly.
00:39:51.040Well, I mean, in her defense, I remember that campaign very well, and I think the
00:39:56.880LA Times called you a white supremacist. No, no, no, no.
00:40:00.720Maybe she thought you were a white supremacist. I don't know.
00:40:02.560Let's be accurate. I was called the black face of white supremacy.
00:40:06.080Sorry, sorry. I worked very hard for that title, Tucker.
00:40:09.520What does that even mean? I never figured. That's like a zen cone. That's the sound of
00:40:15.840one hand clapping. I don't even understand it. Well, I've been on radio for 30 years,
00:40:21.120and the first six months I was on radio, every third caller called me an Uncle Tom or a sellout
00:40:25.600or a bootlicker, bug-eyed, bootlicking Uncle Tom, Sambo Tom. So I'm on the radio for about six months,
00:40:31.120and I'm walking to a restaurant, and there are a couple of brothers sitting on a brick wall.
00:40:36.160Based on the way they were dressed, they weren't investment bankers, and one of them said,
00:40:41.360Larry Elder, I hate you, and I love you. Come on over here.
00:40:46.160Now, Tucker, I'm thinking, if they were going to shoot me, they'd have done it by now.
00:40:50.800I can't outrun a bullet. Might as well go over there. So I went over. He goes,
00:40:54.320you know, I've been listening to you about four, five months now,
00:41:00.560and at first I couldn't stand your black ass.
00:41:02.480But the more I started listening to you, the more I said,
00:41:06.960he ain't doing nothing but telling people to get off their ass and stop complaining.
00:41:10.640You're like castor oil. It don't taste good going down, but it's good for you. Keep it up.
00:41:15.600A lot of bad things going on in the world that honestly, not many of us can have an effect on.
00:41:28.160Rising crime, failing schools, a tanking economy. What can you do about that? Well,
00:41:34.240not a lot, but you can get your own house in order. And above all, you can spend money with merchants,
00:41:40.640with companies that support your values, that are making this a better country and not a worse
00:41:44.960country. But how do you find those companies? Well, that's where Public Square comes in.
00:41:50.000Public Square actively curates the best products from America's small businesses to help families
00:41:54.800lead happier, healthier, more productive, and connected lives. That means fewer errands to big
00:42:00.000box stores, less searching to find wholesome alternatives to the garbage being offered in
00:42:05.120our culture and more quality time spent with people you love most. If you want to fix your
00:42:10.080country, you've got to strengthen yourself and your home and you need to spend your dollars where
00:42:13.920they do good and not bad. Rebuilding America takes place one small change at a time with wise spending,
00:42:22.240supporting people who support your family, not funding people who hate you. If you want to do that,
00:42:28.320publicsquare.com is the answer, publicsquare.com.
00:42:47.440That's such a great description. All I'm doing, all I'm doing is telling the truth.
00:42:52.320Um, you mentioned, truth, George Floyd, um, four months worth of protests, violent protests,
00:43:02.56025 people killed, 2,000 police officers wounded, $2 billion in insured property damage, maybe another
00:43:09.520billion or two in uninsured property damage, Tucker. All because of what happened to George Floyd.
00:43:14.960However you feel about what happened to George Floyd, however you feel about what Derek Chauvin did or
00:43:19.520didn't do. There is zero evidence that what happened to George Floyd had anything whatever
00:43:26.000to do with his race. Zero. The lead prosecutor, the lead prosecutor was a black man. And I'm a lawyer.
00:43:36.400The most important part of a trial is the opening statement. And in the opening statement, he took
00:43:40.640pains to say the police in general were not on trial. The Minneapolis PD in general was not on trial.
00:43:45.840This individual is on trial for what he did or what he didn't do to, uh, George Floyd. And he never
00:43:51.280even intimated that the officer committed a hate crime. He was never charged with a hate crime.
00:43:56.880Yet you had all these protests all over the country based upon the assumption that what happened to
00:44:01.680George Floyd had to do with his race when there was zero evidence of it. The police kill more whites
00:44:07.120every year than blacks. They kill more unarmed whites every year than blacks. Most people couldn't name an
00:44:11.600unarmed white person because nobody cares. If an unarmed white person gets killed, as my mother
00:44:16.880puts it, he's just a dead fly. But an unarmed black person gets killed, in comes CNN, in comes the New
00:44:22.320York Times. They make a big deal out of it without any understanding whatsoever what's really going on.
00:44:27.040It's been studied for decades. The police are more hesitant, more reluctant to pull the trigger on a
00:44:32.320black person than a white person. By far. It's a lie. There's a website called Policemag.com,
00:44:39.600and they asked self-described, very liberal people, how many unarmed black men did the police kill in
00:44:44.5602019? Fifty percent of the self-described unarmed black people thought the, of the, of the unarmed,
00:44:52.960fifty percent of the self-described liberals thought the police killed one thousand unarmed black men in
00:44:58.0802019. Eight percent thought they killed 10,000. What you asked about the regular liberal people,
00:45:04.640self-described? Thirty-nine percent of self-described liberal people thought the police killed one thousand
00:45:09.920unarmed black men in 2019. Five percent thought they killed 10,000. The answer, according to the
00:45:14.720Washington Post database, was twelve. Twelve. That's the gap between what the left thinks is going on
00:45:22.240versus what is really going on, which accounts for why we had four months of protests in the streets of
00:45:26.160America in 2020. So the, the numbers you just cited were publicly available. They were, they were right
00:45:31.680there. Right there. But no one cited them except you and a few other people. So this is my last
00:45:37.360question and most important question before I bring Bobby Kennedy out. What advice would you give to the
00:45:42.560people in this room, since you are in that one hundredth of one percent of the population who says what he
00:45:48.160really thinks, how would you encourage people to have heart to do the same? What makes you different?
00:45:54.560Why are you able to just go on the website and see that it's incorrect and just say it in public when
00:45:59.840most people are afraid to do that? What advice? It's what you said in your monologue. Think for yourself.
00:46:04.160Use your own judgment. Be skeptical. Ingest the news in a discriminating way. The Media Research
00:46:12.240Center found that ABC, NBC, CBS, 85 percent of their coverage was positive regarding Kamala Harris
00:46:19.840and Walls. Ninety-three percent of it was negative regarding Trump and Vance. And ABC News was the
00:46:26.480worst. Of 25 stories they've done since Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee, 100 percent have been
00:46:33.440positive. Ninety-three percent of the ones for Donald Trump have been negative. And ABC alone from CBS, NBC,
00:46:41.120is the only one of those three that has never referred to Kamala Harris as a liberal or even
00:46:46.560a progressive. You're being lied to. Use your own common sense. Use your own judgment. And thank goodness
00:46:52.160for alternative sources of news like Tucker, like a Glenn Beck.
00:46:55.840Think for yourself. It's not that hard. Larry Elder, you're a hero. Thank you. Thank you.
00:47:13.440So, as noted at the outset, I would like to ask this man to join us. Bobby, thank you for doing this.
00:47:25.840So, I hate to ask you this because it's almost too sensitive, but it just happened. And so, I can't,
00:47:42.000I can't not ask you. There was a second, appears to be a second assassination attempt
00:47:47.360on Donald Trump in just a couple months. What do you make of this?
00:47:51.760I don't know what to make. I mean, I think we're seeing an impact, at least partially. I mean,
00:48:03.280I don't know if the, I just don't know enough about what's happened. And I've been reading some of the
00:48:10.480internet stuff about the connections that this man may or may not have had to the intelligence agencies,
00:48:19.280etc. But I don't know what to make of it. I do know that there's a, there's an antagonism and a violence
00:48:30.000in our society now that I feel is orchestrated. I feel that we're living in a,
00:48:36.240a, and you remember a couple of years ago when they had the, the Walls Occupy Wall Street movement,
00:48:51.760and they were trying to frame this debate as the 99% against the 1%. And I think, I feel like since then,
00:49:01.760we've all been turned against each other where it's 50% against 50%. And at, you know, when the king
00:49:09.200and queen go out on the balustrades of their castle and they look out across their people and they're
00:49:16.160all fighting each other, they go back to the banquet hall and they pop champagne corks because they know
00:49:22.720nobody's coming over the wall against them. And boy, is that true. And I think, you know, so many of the,
00:49:34.640I mean, I, I announced my campaign almost 18 months ago. And what I said at that point is I'm not going
00:49:43.040to feed into the vitriol or the anger or the name calling, the demonization of my opponents. I'm going
00:49:49.520to be civil, um, to all of them. And I'm going to try to identify values that all of Americans have in
00:49:59.200common rather than focusing on these smaller issues that are used, the kind of cultural issues
00:50:07.200that are used to keep us all at each other's throats. Because I, you know, I've watched what's
00:50:12.880happening in this country. And there's all these systems that have been put in place
00:50:17.680to shift wealth and power upwards, to clamp down totalitarian controls on the rest of us.
00:50:23.040And they all kind of culminated during COVID where we saw all of our 3.3 million businesses shut down
00:50:31.520with no due process, no just compensation. 4.3 trillion dollars shifted from the American middle
00:50:38.720class to this new oligarchy, um, that of billionaires. We created during five, during 500 days, 500 new
00:50:51.360billionaires were created, the lockdown. And the American middle class has essentially been obliterated
00:50:59.520in this country. And, oh, I think one of, and all this money is being shifted up to, you know, to Blackrock
00:51:10.240and State Street and Vanguard and the, the other big, uh, financial houses and big pharma and big tech and big
00:51:19.920ag and big, big food that are strip mining the American public of wealth, sucking it upward and, uh, and leaving
00:51:31.600nothing below. And the way that they keep that system in place, that they keep us from doing anything about
00:51:38.000it. It's to keep us all hating on each other. And one of the things that I admire about you is that
00:51:52.640you have more children than I do, which is not that easy. Uh, you have a lot of children and you have made
00:51:58.080your campaign about them, which used to be a pretty conventional thing. Politicians would run on children,
00:52:02.800help the children, save the children, the next generation. You're one of the very few people who still
00:52:06.880talks like that. Explain if you would, because I think you're sincere when you talk about it,
00:52:12.480how children, your children, uh, and other people's children, mine, have inspired you to stay in
00:52:19.120politics when you could have just gone away and gone back to L.A. How my kids inspired me to do that?
00:52:27.760You know, let me finish the thought that I think I left incomplete on that last question.
00:52:33.120I think the anger that we have at each other also turns into violence. And, you know, when my uncle
00:52:40.800was running for president, I mean, when my uncle was president in 1963, there was a tremendous anger
00:52:48.000that was coming out of the civil rights movement and other things that he was doing, shutting down
00:52:54.720the, um, you know, the war against Castro and the war against, uh, against Russia. There was tremendous
00:53:02.160anger and poison. When he landed in Dallas on November 22nd, there was a full page ad in the, in the mid,
00:53:11.120the big newspaper in Dallas saying, wanted dead or alive, and with a picture of my uncle on it. And there
00:53:16.240were posters all over the street that day. And there was, you know, my uncle was clearly