Judging Freedom - 2024 Pres Candidate LARRY ELDER on Crime, Racism, Education & Inflation

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

2024 Pres Candidate LARRY ELDER on Crime, Racism, Education & InflationSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, August 7th, 2023. Welcome to a special edition of Judging Freedom, where we feature my one-on-one interviews with the major candidates for President of the United States. Larry Elder is one of the smartest people that I met, that I had the privilege of meeting, and also one of the nicest in my 24 years at Fox. And we became friends, like a lot of people I became friends with, by meeting them through the prompter. And then, of course, eventually we met in person when Larry was in New York. He is now amongst the half dozen or so Republican nominees for president of the United States. He joins us now from New York. Larry, it's a pleasure. Welcome here, my dear friend. It's been too long. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Of course. What is

your path to the Republican nomination? You are not one of the major candidates. The former president has 50 percent of the likely Republican votes. Your competition, the governor of Florida, has 22 percent of the vote. You're down with Chris Christie and the others. How do you see this going in your best scenario? Well, Judge, I don't see them as competitors. I think we're all auditioning for the job to be president of the United States. And I know what the odds are. I know who the big guy in the room is. And I'm running as an America first, make America great again guy. Why then should I run in the first place? And the answer, Judge, is that there are issues that our side is

not talking enough about, if at all. For example, the number one social problem in America is the epidemic of fatherlessness. 70% of Black kids today enter the world without a father in the home, married to the mother, up from 25% back in 1965. In fact, 25% of white kids now enter the world without a father in the home, married to the mother. What we did in 1965, Lyndon Johnson launched a so-called war on poverty. And since then, we have incentivized women to marry the government and incentivized men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility. And that is not to denigrate the hard job that single moms have done, often with the help of the kids' grandparents, but it is certainly harder. And the stats are clear. Even Barack Obama, Judge, once quoted him. 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. And no one's talking about it. The left doesn't talk about it because they created the problem. Our side does not talk about it because if you're white, you're called a racist. And if you're black, you're called, as the LA Times called me, the black face of white supremacy. But it is the number one social problem. Look at crime. Look at dropouts. Look at the inability to get a job in our very competitive economy. It all stems from not having a father in the home.

Second, Judge, this lie Democrats have been pushing for years and years and years, and that is that America remains systemically racist. It's not just pushing nonsense like reparations, which in my view is the extraction of money from people who are never slave owners to be given to people who are never slaves. It's also pushing stuff like race-based preferences, like diversity, equity, inclusion, all of which are the very antithesis of what MLK wanted. He wanted a colorblind society, not a coordinated society. But more importantly, Judge, it is getting people killed. It's called the Ferguson effect or the George Floyd effect. And that's a phenomenon of cops all over America

in big cities pulling back from their normal proactive policing. As a result, in the last few years, there were thousands of people who've been victimized by violent crime. Many of them are dead who otherwise would not have suffered if the police had been doing their normal proactive job. Then you've got this, the only word to use, Judge, is disaster, known as K-12 urban education. Let me just pick one city, Baltimore. 13 public high schools, I'm not making this up, 0% of the kids can do math at grade level. Another half a dozen, only 1% can. They're all located in the inner city where either only 1% or 0% of the kids can do math at grade level. And as you know, the Democrats oppose school choice, where the money would follow the child rather than the other way around, even as a party

elites, whether it's Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Gavin Newsom. Let me just stop you for a second. You're a lawyer. You're a graduate of one of the finest law schools in the country, the University of Michigan Law School. Where is fatherlessness in the Constitution? Where is this an issue for the president of the United States? It is not. There's education in the Constitution. Where is that an issue for's one of the reasons we have the problem, because the welfare state basically, as I said, incentivized women to marry the government. They created the problem. They won't solve it. We solve it with individuals working. I'm part of the baby boomer generation. My generation is retiring. I'm about ready to retire. And many of us, President Kaye's included, are pretty vigorous. They've raised children. They've raised grandchildren. They've got life experience. They should be there for mentors as these kids.

And I'm sure people in my generation, even tomorrow- You are a very good man and you have a very big heart and you have a very good handle on cultural issues. Does this play with likely Republican voters in the primaries in which you will enter? I think a lot of likely Republican voters are unaware of the damage. They're unaware of the fact, for example, that 60 percent of the homicides, 60 percent of the robberies, 60 percent of the shootings are committed by Black men primarily. They are unaware that half of the homicide victims in this country are Black, almost all of them killed by other Blacks, not killed by white supremacists. That's what Joe Biden suggested in his commencement address at Howard a little while ago. I think

a lot of people in the primaries are unaware that a young black man aged 10 to 43, Judge, is 13 times more likely to be murdered than a young white man in the same demo. All of this stems from the epidemic of fatherlessness. And I think if I could focus attention on that, then maybe we might be able to get a handle around how in Chicago on Memorial Day, 53 people were shot. This is all stemming from- What would the president of the United States do about this besides the bully pulpit at which you are expert? Would there be legislation? Would there be money spent? Would you go to the Congress? What would you do? No, I wouldn't. It's down to the bully pulpit. Culture has changed. There was a big article in a left-wing publication called The Atlantic a few months ago, and they talked about all the decisions a young family makes when they

have a child, what to name the child, what color to make the nursery. But they said the most important decision is whether or not you've elected to move into a neighborhood where the majority of the residents there come from single or come from two parent households. Even if you're a one parent household, they said, if you live in a neighborhood surrounded by a bunch of two parent households, your outcome is going to be better if you can afford to do that. So when you ran for governor of California, a very liberal state where the social problems that you are addressing are manifest, maybe as bad as anywhere in the country. How was that received? How was your argument received there?

Well, as you know, I lost the recall. I lost it by pretty by pretty sound numbers, even though I was talking about this issue. And the horrible schools were near the bottom of all 50 states. The way this governor shut down the state in a more severe way than anybody else did because of COVID. People are leaving for the very first time. A huge homeless problem, soft on crime DAs backed by Governor Gavin Newsom, and I still lost pretty substantially. A Republican has not won in California, Judge, in 20 years. In 20 years. We are outnumbered. We, meaning registered Republicans, are outnumbered three to one, and many of our voters have left. I liken it to a drug addict. Sooner or later, the voters in California are going to have to hit rock bottom. And then maybe then they'll start voting differently. But there's a super majority of Democrats in the state assembly, a super majority of Democrats in the state senate, and they can pass whatever job-killing, brain-dead law they want, and they do.

So voters need to wake up. Okay. Let's go to some of the issues that confront you in the next couple of weeks. Will you make it to the debate? Have you been able to comply with these Byzantine, in my view, arcane and unfair RNC rules that require 40,000 separate donations from 40,000 separate human beings before you can get on the debate stage. Well, we're past the second base, rounding second base, heading towards third. Based on the pace at which I'm going right now, we ought to be able to make it, but you're quite right. I need 40,000 individual donors, and the donation can be as

small as $1. You can go to my website, larrielder.com, donate $1. Even if you want a different candidate or you think my odds are not very good, at the very least, I'll be talking about what I've been talking about with the judge, which is the epidemic of fatherlessness, the need for school choice, the lie that America is systemically racist. We also need, judge, you'll like this, an amendment to the Constitution to fix spending to a certain percentage of the GDP with the exception of war and for natural disaster. Otherwise, government got bigger under Ronald Reagan. It got bigger under George Herbert Walker Bush. It got bigger under W. It got bigger under Donald Trump. What would you do about debt? Would you have supported the legislation that Republicans

in the House and the Senate supported where they gave Janet Yellen and Joe Biden unlimited ability to borrow all the money they wanted? Even Nancy Pelosi from California insisted on a numerical cap on the borrowing power. Right now, old Joe and old Janet can borrow all they want. Would you have supported that? Well, Judge, the way to solve this, as I said, with an amendment to fixed spending to maybe 10 percent of the GDP, which is half of what we're spending right now. I'll use a word, unsustainable. Barack Obama used that word to describe the so-called entitlements programs. Bill Clinton used that word. Why then does nothing get done? Because you know as well as I knew, if you run promising to reform this, that, and the other, the other side will accuse you of not caring about the sick,

the elderly, the poor, and you will lose elections. That's why the can gets kicked down the road. We all know these programs need to be reformed. The only way Congress will do it is if they are forced to do so by law. That way they can come out of a locked room, look the voters in the eye and say, please don't punish me in the ballot box. The law made me restrict the spending. That's the only way the spending is going to be reined in. Is Donald Trump qualified to be president of the United States? Of course he is. He was an extraordinarily good president the first time, and I think he'll be a good president again this time. What happened to him with these indictments? Outrageous. Judge, even if Donald Trump lied, knowingly lied and said, I did not lose the race when his heart and

his brain, he felt that he did. That may be unethical, but how is that criminal? Presidents lie all the time. Beyond that, he didn't lie. There's lots of reason to feel that the election in 2020 was unfair. You start with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Start with the amount of money that Zuckerberg spent to get out the vote. Start with the two and a half year collusion nonsense that he had to deal with.

And then you look at the argument in the 45 page brief, which I read, indictment, which I read, Jack Smith repeatedly praised Mike Pence for resisting the pressure that Trump put on him to not certify the election. What he doesn't say in that indictment is that just a few weeks before the indictment, Mike Pence is on CNN and said, I'll never agree with President Trump. I believe President Trump behaved recklessly, he said, but I'm not convinced he did anything unlawful. So the guy you praised doesn't even believe he did anything unlawful. And finally, I know Jack, John Eastman, he's one of the indicted co-conspirators, one of Donald Trump's lawyers. Unindicted, Unindicted. Unindicted.

Unindicted. I've known him for years. And he argued that the Electoral Count Act gave Vice President Pence powers that most people interpret the act not to give him. Well, isn't that what lawyers do? Lawyers are supposed to make arguments. And John Eastman, as we speak, Judge, is facing disbarment in California for making a novel legal theory. Lawyers have always made novel legal theories. My goodness, the lawyers that represented Dred Scott argued that he was a free person. That was not carried the day for a long time. The lawyers that argued against separate but equal were wrong legally. That didn't carry

until Brown v. Board of Education. So lawyers make unpopular arguments, and sometimes those unpopular arguments become accepted legal theory. So- What are lawyers supposed to do when their client lies to them and says, tell the grand jury that I surrendered all the national defense information documents? I really have them here, but you tell them that I surrendered them. Well, that's a problem. That is really a problem. And that certainly is not the lawyer's problem. That's more of the client's problem. All right. Ukraine, where are you on that? Well, Putin has already lost this war. I watch a lot of the experts. Putin has lost the war? He's already lost. My God, this thing was supposed

to be wrapped up in a matter of days, if not weeks. This is now deep into the second year. He's lost 200,000 troops. By American terms, that would be as if we lost 400,000. About 20 generals have been either killed on the battlefield or disappeared. He had a quasi-insurrection. His economy is in freefall. He's looking for an off-ramp. In my opinion, we ought to put pressure on both sides to give him one and end this thing. Should we be killing Russian boys as we're doing

now with $100 billion in cash and military equipment to the most corrupt government in the West? Well, we have been on the side of lots of corrupt governments in the past, including Stalin's Russia during World War II. It's not uncommon for us to get in bed with bad guys or quasi bad guys. But I do think that this thing ought to be ended. There shouldn't be an open-ended check, and in no way, shape, or form should we ever, ever put American boots on the ground. But I do believe that Putin has lost the war already. If he wants an exit, we ought to give him one. I'm trying to find some ground that you can share with my viewers. Does the Second Amendment preserve and protect the individual right to keep and bear arms, or does

that right belong to the militia? Let me think about it. I thought about it. Of course it belongs to the individuals. Are you kidding me? Absolutely it does. And it took a long time for the Supreme Court to finally come out with a definitive decision along these lines. But of course it belongs to the individual. And in my opinion, we are not even have to have a permit to carry concealed weapons. Excellent. Wonderful. Wonderful. Where are you on abortion, Larry? Well, I am someone- Is the baby in the womb a person? Yes. Life begins at conception. However, this is a state's rights matter. To me, Republicans are hypocritical if they argue that Roe v. Wade should be overturned because it invalidated laws in all 50 states and

then promptly put in a law that they like, because the Democrats can then come in and put a law in that they like. This is something that should be done on a state-by-state basis. I'm in California, a deep blue state. We've had a couple of initiatives to restrict abortion, one for parental rights and one for notification, waiting periods rather. And I voted for both those, but I was overwhelmingly defeated in my state. I didn't leave the state. I recognize I live in a state surrounded by a bunch of left-wing people, people who feel very differently. That is what federalism is all about. You're going to sometimes win some, sometimes lose some. Well, not when you're talking about killing innocents. If the baby in the womb is a person, then all abortion is homicide, right? That's how I see it. But again,

each state can make that decision, just like each state makes its own decision about homicide, how to define it, how to define first degree, second degree, third degree, manslaughter. Every state makes its own individual decision. And certainly there ought not be one dime of federal money spent for abortion. How does fundraising and the crushing need to raise huge amounts of money impede your ability to get your message out, Larry? It's the hardest part of what I do. On the phone, asking people for money. It's the hardest part. It is absolutely, however, critical. You have to advertise on television, on radio, and in print. Otherwise, you're going to lose election. If there's any silver lining, I also know that Joe Biden has to get on the phone from time to time and fundraise. I remember looking at his schedule one time, and he blocked

out some hours for it, and he was unhappy about it. I said to myself, wow, if the President of the United States has to fundraise, why should I be whining about it? So it's part of the job. If I believe in myself and I do, I believe in my message and I do, then asking people for money is not that difficult a thing to do. Should the federal government be involved in all this transgender stuff? No. Again, state by state to determine that, just as states are to determine the school curriculum. We ought not even have a Department of Education. One of the things I would ask is if I'm running for a cabinet position, if I was offered secretary of education, would I take it? I said, only if I can take some dynamite and blow up the building when nobody's in it after a few months.

Nobody in it, Judge. Nobody in it. I'm not a terrorist. All right. What would you do to shrink the federal budget? Would you shrink defense? Would you examine Social Security? Would you examine Medicare? Are there these sacred cows, in your view, that exist in most Republican views? Again, nothing sacred. Once you put that amendment that requires government to be limited to that percentage, as I mentioned, they're going to have to make some huge, dramatic cuts. Larry, the Defense Department receives $860 billion with a big dollars a year. We have 903 foreign installations around the world.

What the hell are we doing with all that? And we're borrowing $5 billion a day. And our credit rating has just been downgraded, which means we're going to be paying even more money for that borrowing. How would you fix all that besides your amendment, which will never pass? It will pass if I am a salesperson that I think I am, and I talk about it. The Constitution has been amended on average every 10 years since it's been ratified. So it can be done as long as you can explain to people, especially young voters, these programs are simply not going to be there for you unless there's severe reform.

If I can do that and get people talking about it, I believe there can be an amendment. To say that it won't happen. You are speaking to thousands of people right now who believe that the federal government is way too big, way too bloated, has burst through the chains of the of the Constitution. Jefferson's phrase beyond recognition. Absolutely. What can you say to them? What can you say to this libertarian audience as to why they should vote for Larry Elder and not Donald Trump or not Chris Christie or not Ron DeSantis. I would say to them, help is on the way. I was on Fox and Friends a few months ago, and I mentioned that in 1900 at all three levels, federal, state, and local, government took less than 10% from the American people.

Now it takes about 32%. I get a phone call from one of these left-wing fact-check organizations. You said that government in 1900 took less than 10%. What's your source? I gave them a source. Right now you say it takes 32%. I gave them a source. And they were published an article and they said Elder was right about both those arguments. My point is these were young reporters who were gobsmacked at how small government was in 1900 compared to what it is right now. And we are rocking and rolling at sometimes 4% per year GDP growth, 5%, 6%. Now we're averaging about 2.5% in the last 20 years. That's because so much of our money is taken out of our pockets and spent

inefficiently by the government. Government needs to get down to what the founding fathers intended. And when I come in, I'm going to come in with not just a pocket knife, but a machete to cut down government to the size that ought to be cut down. If you're elected, will you pardon? And Donald Trump has been convicted. Will you pardon him? Yes, I will. They won't. Will you consider me for the Supreme Court? No, you don't have to answer.

I'm just asking you, Josh. You and I have talked about this. I've already promised it to Joshy Smollett. Thank you, Larry. It's a pleasure chatting with you. You're as sharp as a tack. I disagree with much of what you say, but I welcome your voice in this campaign, and I hope you make it to the debate stage. And don't forget larryelder.com, $1. Get me up there on that debate stage.

There you go. larryelder.com, $1. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.