Larry Elder Explains How He Became A Conservative

so what formed your political viewpoint because 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 pretty controversial position where did you get that from because it's a pretty rare position i got my dad my father my father didn't get along um my father and i had a huge fight when i was 15 years old and we didn't speak for 10 years and when i say didn't speak ben i mean did not speak not like hi dad and that's it i didn't say a word to him and i graduated from high school and i was able to then go to college on the east coast and law school in the midwest so basically i avoided my dad for almost 10 years now my mom my dad just were still married in the house so when i would come home for vacation for summers i would just make sure i'm not around when he's not around and that was pretty easy because my dad worked long hours he had a cafe so now i'm fast forward i'm 25 years old i've now graduated from law school i have this big job with a big law firm making a boatload of money i'm 25 years old and i should be living large but ben i can't sleep and i know it has something to do with my dad not that i ever thought we'd be buddies but i called my secretary and i said cancel all my appointments i'm flying to la i'll be back in a couple of days i didn't tell my parents i was coming because i didn't want my father to prepare for this summit so i get to the uh airport drive get a cab to the to the restaurant i got in at 1 30 we closed at 2 30. and i came there with these two big bags my dad hadn't talked to me in 10 years he sees me he's of course surprised he said should i put your bags in the back where i said no dad i'm only going to be here for five or ten minutes i want to tell you something he said okay wait till we close i sat there for an hour and i said to myself larry don't tee off on the son of a just give him the highlights don't don't just wail into them and so my dad sat down and i wailed into him for almost 20 minutes you see how i can go and 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 and i gave him everything and i was exhausted i'd run out of ammo my dad goes is that it you didn't speak to me for 10 years because of that and i went yeah and my father said let me tell you about my father and then for the first time i saw my father cry i did not think the man had the ability to summon tears i think he could do that i knew my father was an only child i knew we had no relatives because on his side because we never got any gifts for christmas aside from that i knew nothing about my father i met his mother once when i went to the south but i knew nothing about my dad and didn't care i didn't like him my brother didn't like him either so it wasn't like i was curious about him so he said let me tell you about my father when we're sitting in these two stools in my dad's cafe he said your last name elder i said yeah he said that's not the name of my father i said what what is your father's name he said i have no idea you never met your father no who's elder he was in my life the longest my mother had a series of boyfriends each one more irresponsible than the other one elder was a drunk uh 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 if she didn't give it to him he kicked the crap out of her if ever i tried to do anything he could crap out of me and he was in my life my dad said the longest how long was the longest he said four years i said what after that after that series of boyfriends i'm now 13 years old my dad said i came home from school eighth grade and i was making too much noise for my mom's then boyfriend my mom sided with the boyfriend when he and i were fighting and she threw me out of the house age 13 never to return athens georgia jim crow south at the beginning of the great depression i defy you to find somebody with a hand dealt like that my father goes down the road ben he picks up trash that's anything he can do ultimately he becomes a pullman porter for the trains they were the largest private employer of blacks in those days and 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 and it was sunny and people seemed to be less racist he could walk into a restaurant and get served and my dad said to my mom maybe someday i'll relocate to l.a pearl harbor my dad joined the marines he was the first black marines they were called the monford point marines people don't know the know about them but they were every bit as influential as worthy tuskegee airmen everybody knows about there were 20 000 modford point marines from 1942 to 1940 uh 49 and congress gave them a professional gold medal a few a few years ago my dad got his posthumously anyway he um was stationed in guam became a staff sergeant was charging in charge of the cooking facilities he can cook anything he could look at a cake and tell you what was in it so he goes to chattanooga where he met married my mom and he knocks on doors all these restaurants to get a job as a cook and they told him we don't hire to his face he goes to an unemployment office lady says you went to the wrong door he goes to the hall he sees colored only goes through that door to the very same lady who sent him out he came home to my mom and said this is bs i'm going to l.a i'm going to get me a job as a cook and i'll send for you comes out to l.a walks around for two or three days i'm sorry you have no references and my dad of course told them that he was a world war ii vet he cooked for the service i'm sorry you have no references my dad even offered to work for free just give me a written reference they wouldn't even do that they treated him the same way in l.a as they did in chattanooga they were just a little more polite about it he went to an unemployment office one door sat there in a chair for a day and a half lady calls him up i have a job don't know if you're going to want it my dad says i'm sure i'm going to want it what is it and she says cleaning toilets with a company called nabisco brand bread my dad did that for 10 years took a second job cleaning toilets at another bread company called barber and bread cooked for a family in pacific palisades on the weekends and went to night school two or three nights a week to get his ged the man never slept ben an hour here two hours here you do that week after week month after month year after year and you come home with a with a household full of three rambunctious boys and see what kind of mood you're in the man was tired and so we talked for eight hours i asked him everything i could ask him he asked me about my life the man got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and i got smaller and smaller and smaller by the end of the hour eight hours i'm crying and i said dad i am so sorry and he said larry don't be just follow the advice i've always given you and your brothers hard work wins you get out of life what you put into it 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 going to happen to you 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 the reason for the title is because after this eight hour conversation i fly back to cleveland my father writes me a letter he never wrote me a letter in his life and it said dear son i wrote him back and i said dear father i never called him father before and so then we began this relationship that lasted 35 years and arguably even closer than my mom and i were my mom and i were very very close so i was able to uh to salvage my relationship with my father and have 35 really good years and the book is called dear father dear son two lives eight hours and it's on paperback also called um a lot like me the reason we changed the title is because people thought it was a collection of letters and the publisher realized that that turned off people it's really a it's a novel it reads almost like a novel but it's a book of memoirs well it's an amazing story and it does lead to the question which is i mean your dad obviously an enormously tough individual just from the story and and 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 why 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 individual decision making but the first thing that we have to overcome as a society's institutional racism or some sort of miasma of discrimination that is preventing people from achieving their goals it's a complicated question but but it starts with the family and i know it sounds counter counterintuitive because my father had no family but if you don't have a a family role model inside the house father inside the house you're in trouble out of the gate and 70 of black kids today are born to unwed mothers and the number was 25 in 1965 and 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 more responsibility and the the the black kind of victimhood mentality is a phenomenon of the civil rights movement going from demanding equal rights to demanding equal results and that's what we have right now people are demanding equal results results have to be earned uh rights come from god uh and 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 how do you think that conservatives should go about speaking to black folks obviously because that's been a serious issue every time somebody tries to engage with the black community uh they're they're folks on the left who particularly start calling them those people racist right suggesting that they're pandering and that's because nobody really wants to tell the truth uh cory booker just the other day said he wanted to have an honest dialogue about race no you don't if you have an honest dialogue about race you don't want to hear it uh to me the most dangerous race hustler in america is not sharpton he's bad not jackson he's bad not some of the yahoos you see on cable television they're all bad but it's eric holder because people listen to eric holder he's sophisticated he's got degrees from from columbia undergraduate and uh and law school works for a very prestigious law firm was a respected to the left uh a.g he says the most outrageous things and gets away with it for example he gave a speech in which he talked about pernicious racism this is around the time that donald sterling lost his team remember he was taped by his girlfriend and made some disparaging comments about blacks and ended up losing his team and eric holder said that kind of blatant racism that kind of blatant bigotry we got that that's not the problem the problem is the pernicious racism and he gave three examples none of which hold up the first example was the push for voter id polls show that about 80 percent of whites want voter id and about 70 of hispanics do about the same number of blacks do and there was a study recently by by researchers from yale from stanford and from penn and they looked at the research paper that reported the 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 furthermore 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 so it's nonsense the second one he gave is that black kids are expelled at disproportionately high rates compared to their percentage of that given school and um and it's true they are jesse jackson some years ago sued the decatur school board which was was all white because they kicked out a bunch of black kids who were fighting after a football game turns out the kids had missed collectively like three four hundred days of school anyway they kicked him out in comes jesse jackson accuses the school board of racism files a lawsuit school 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 and they mentioned oakland which was primarily a school board members of people of color uh san francisco also the majority of the school board members were people of color and yet the black boys were kicked out far more compared to other people when you look at their position in that given school so it's just a lie and the lawsuit was thrown out the third thing that eric holder said is that black criminal defendants who commit the same crime will get a longer sentence than white criminal defendants and that's true but the u.s sensing commission says the reason for that is that judges taken 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 so even the u.s sensing commission to which eric holder referred said you can't conclude one way or the other whether or not bias is is operating here there could be all sorts of factors to explain this so that's the best you can do and this is the front runner guy uh who's articulating the the racism in america uh all you could do is come up with voter id and this expulsion stuff uh and the sentencing stuff he didn't even say uh they were dispersingly arrested didn't even didn't even come there come near and near saying that so uh it'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 i wrote an article about each one i wrote one about the expulsion rates i wrote one about voter id and i wrote one about sentencing did you know that every like on this video creates one additional glorious leftist here don't ask me why that's called science to take advantage of this amazing opportunity just hit the like button

Channel: Ben Shapiro

Views: 1,444,034

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Id: Tr6aCsk0edk

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021