| Oh, the carefully chosen adjectives for this spiteful bit of polemic. |
[LATimes] Larry Elder smiled the smug smile of a Black conservative who could very well be liberal California’s next governor."Where do you start with the damage Gavin Newsom has done to the state that we both love?"
He leaned forward to gaze across the room of white Republicans who had come to a hear him speak in Orange County.
"Rising crime? [It’s] because of this phony narrative that the police are engaging in systemic racism and cops are pulling back," Elder said. "... When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up."
Then another smile, this one even more smug than the last.
"Can you say, ’Duh?’"
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I won’t lie. Few things infuriate me more than watching a Black person use willful blindness and cherry-picked facts to make overly simplistic arguments that whitewash the complex problems that come along with being Black in America.
And throughout his career — as a radio host, as a talking head for Fox News and now as a gubernatorial candidate — Elder has made a point of doing just that, usually with a lot of taunting and toddler-like name-calling of his ideological enemies in the process.
As longtime political consultant Kerman Maddox put it: "Larry Elder goes out of his way to be at odds with the leadership in the Black community and at odds with the thinking in the Black community."
Abdullah of Black Lives Matter: "Anytime you put a Black face on white supremacy, which is what Larry Elder is, there are people who will utilize that as an opportunity to deny white supremacy. They say, ’How could this be white supremacy? This is a Black man.’ But everything that he’s pushing, everything that he stands for, he is advancing white supremacy."