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...
Author: Larry Elder (Larry Elder)
On Reparations: John F. Kennedy vs. Robert F. Kennedy
When did the civil rights movement go off the rails? The answer is when proponents went from justly demanding equal rights to unjustly demanding equal results. As to exactly when this occurred, that’s more difficult to answer. But consider statements, made five years apart, from the Kennedy brothers, John F. and Robert F. Neither brother was...
Is COVID-19 Relief Encouraging People Not to Work? Dems Say, ‘No Evidence.’
“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...
Maxine Waters’ Anti-Cop Rhetoric is Getting Black People Killed
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...
Derek Chauvin: The Great White Defendant
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...
Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Cashes In on ‘Systemic Racism’
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...
The Case Against Reparations: Part 2
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 percent of those enslaved and shipped to the New World were sold by Africans to European slavers. All...
Applying the Greene Standard to Rev. Sharpton
Because of offensive tweets posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., before she won office, House Democrats joined by 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments. If this is the new standard, can we apply this to the Rev. Al Sharpton, aka a Democratic “kingmaker,” whose support was solicited by every major...
Trump Won His Other Campaign—to Destroy Media Credibility
Convinced that President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the media suddenly became less hysterical. Just like that, the media, at least to some degree, rediscovered concepts such as fairness and perspective, AWOL the last four years. Two weeks after the election, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof haltingly, grudgingly, and reluctantly,...