We've Got a Country to Save

By Larry Elder

Democrats push the "America is systemically racist" lie because they want blacks to feel angry, oppressed and discriminated against. What's the upside? It guarantees Democrats get a near-monolithic black vote. Democrats tell blacks that in the quest for "social justice" and "equity," the Democrats wear the white hat and Republicans wear the black hat.
       
It is a lie, without which Democrats cannot win presidential elections.
       
When I ran for governor in California, I received 3.5 million votes in that recall election in a state where non-Republicans outnumber Republicans three to one. Of the 46 replacement candidates, which included Republicans, independents and Democrats, I received 49% of the vote. The next highest finisher got 9%. California has 58 counties, and on the replacement vote, I carried 57. I entered the race late but raised $27 million in eight weeks.
       
We got donations from 150,000 individuals, half of whom lived outside of California. Why would a non-Californian donate to a California gubernatorial republican candidate? California, if it were a separate country, would be the fourth-largest GDP in the world. It is also a state with Democrat supermajorities in the Senate and the Assembly and where for the first time in the state's history, people are leaving. Blame crime, the high cost of living, homelessness, poor government schools, underfunded public pensions, excessive taxation and job-killing regulations. People know that as California continues on this road it infects the rest of the country.
       
An L.A. Times columnist called me "the black face of white supremacy." My sin? I noted that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a black male age 10 to 34 is 13 times more likely to be murdered than a white male in the same demographic. This is not a problem. It is a crisis. I advocate school choice in a country where, according to the national report card, nearly 85% of black eighth graders can neither read nor do math at grade level. I am pro-life. I support secure borders and national fiscal responsibility. I know that our biggest foreign adversary is the communist Chinese government, and that we have become increasingly dependent on a country led by a totalitarian communist regime that wants to dominate the world.
       
The number one responsibility of government is to protect people and property. Soft on crime George Soros backed district attorneys are doing neither. The people most hurt are the very black and brown people living in urban America whom the Democrats claim to care so much about. Reduce the chance of a bad guy being caught, convicted and incarcerated, and crime goes up. They may be criminals, but they're not stupid.
       
The 10,000-pound elephant in the room is fatherlessness. Seventy percent of black children enter the world without a father in the home married to the mother; 50% of Hispanic kids and 25% of white children, which was the same percentage as black children in 1965. Today, 40% of all children in America enter the world without a father in the home married to the mother. Former President Barack Obama said a kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in jail. Since the mid-1960s, public policy has incentivized women to marry the government, and incentivized men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility. This is not a problem; it is a crisis.
       
My father, who never knew his own father, always told my brothers and me the following: hard work wins; you get out of life what you put into it; you cannot control the outcome, but you are 100% in control of the effort; and before you complain about what somebody did to you or said to you, go to the nearest mirror and ask yourself what you could have done to change the outcome.
       
I guess that makes my dad a black face of white supremacy. Well, this may be my last column for a while because this son of a black face of white supremacy is considering running again -- this time for president. We've got a country to save.