Larry Elder

Larry Elder

LATEST STORIES BY LARRY ELDER

 

ELDER: The extreme tolerance for black racism

Piers Morgan, in a February podcast, accused his guest, “trans activist” Blossom Brown, of “race-baiting.” Brown replied, “Black women cannot be racist to white women.” Brown then added this inability to be racist to white women extended to Morgan: “How am I racist to you? I’m Black. I can’t be racist to you.” Brown also accused Morgan of lacking “the intellectual capacity to understand” this position.

May 31, 2025 Columnists
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett speaks onstage during the 29th Annual Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on May 12, 2025 in New York City.

ELDER: A taxing issue for America's wealthiest and most powerful 

If the rich are so powerful and supposedly manipulate public policy for their benefit, then why are their taxes so high? Several years ago, at a party, I met a woman who loudly railed against “the rich,” whom she insisted “paid no taxes.” I asked, “What percentage of U.S. federal income taxes do you think is paid by the top 1%, those earning about $350,000 or more?” She said, “Probably barely nothing. Maybe 1% or 2%.” The answer at the time is that the top 1%, while earning about 20% of the nation’s income, paid 40% of the U.S federal income taxes. Her ignorance is common, particularly among Democrats, who chant that “the rich must pay their fair share” or “the rich don’t pay their fair share.” In 2008, Investor’s Business Daily commissioned a poll asking what people thought the top 1% paid as a percentage of federal income taxes. Thirty-six per cent said 10% or less; 15% said 10% to 20%; and 10% said 20% to 30%. Just 12% knew the rich paid 40% or more. Today, the percentage paid by the top 1% is even higher. In December 2024, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation wrote: “According to the latest IRS data, the top 1% of earners paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes in 2022. … The other half of earners, those with incomes below $46,637, collectively paid 2.3% of all income taxes in 2021.” A 2024 poll by the Tax Foundation found that one-third of Democrats thought the top 1% “pay only 1% of all income taxes.” For decades, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has insisted that “the rich” make the rules, call the shots and run the country. In 2018, he said, “We live in a nation owned and controlled by a small number of multi-billionaires whose greed, incredible greed, insatiable greed, is having an unbelievably negative impact on the fabric of our entire country.” On his recent “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, he made the same argument. Question: Why have these greedy millionaires and billionaires failed to apply their “greed, incredible greed, insatiable greed” to prevent an increasing percentage of their income from being taken away from the government in taxes? The rich can no longer even deduct their state and local taxes from their income. In November 2024, Smart Asset wrote: “The state and local tax (SALT) deduction allows taxpayers of high-tax states to deduct local tax payments on their federal tax returns. The tax plan signed by President Donald Trump in 2017, called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, instituted a cap on the SALT deduction. Starting with the 2018 tax year, the maximum SALT deduction became $10,000. There was previously no limit. This has left some high-income filers with higher tax bills.” During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama promised to raise the capital gains rate on the wealthy despite evidence that doing so would generate less revenue. At the Democrat primary debate, moderator Charlie Gibson of ABC News asked Obama: “Bill Clinton in 1997 signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20%. And George Bush has taken it down to 15%. And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28%, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?” Obama’s answer? “(T)o make sure … that our tax system is fair.” After he became president, Obama raised the capital gains tax rate. The rich could not stop him. For a group that supposedly wields so much power, “the rich” sure have lost a lot of battles on the federal income tax rate, on the capital gains rate and on the deduction of state and local taxes. As for the alleged grip Sanders believes the rich maintain over politicians to whom they give money, Willie Brown, the former long-time and powerful Speaker of the California Assembly, said, “Any politician that can’t take people’s money and then turn around and screw them doesn’t belong in the business.”

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May 17, 2025 Columnists
USA flag and American dollars. American flag blowing in the wind and 100 dollars banknotes in the background

ELDER: Canada as the 51st state would decimate the MAGA agenda

Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, called the idea of Canada becoming America’s 51st state “crazy.” This assumes President Donald Trump was serious, as opposed to Trump taking a whack at former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In his acceptance speech, Carney said, “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country … if they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.”

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May 10, 2025 Columnists
Mark Carney and Donald Trump with their thumbs out standing beside each other

ELDER: Uncovering the 'dirty' truths about electric vehicles

Are electric vehicles better for the planet than gasoline-powered vehicles? This is the question we explore in my new documentary, Electric Vehicles — The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Whether one agrees with former president Joe Biden, who calls climate change “an existential threat,” or whether one agrees with the late physicist Freeman Dyson, who dismissed Al Gore and his An Inconvenient Truth as “lousy science,” this question remains. Are electric vehicles better for planet Earth than “gas guzzlers?” After all, fossil-fuel-generated energy is required to manufacture an electric vehicle and transport it to the dealership. The electricity required to charge it comes mostly from fossil-fuel-generated power. Electric vehicles are a triumph of technology, with incredible features. They are quiet, fast and fun to drive. The self-driving feature, while not foolproof, will likely save lives because human driving errors are more common. (There are some gas-powered cars with a similar feature.) There are concerns about the driving range, as well as the availability of charging stations for long drives. Right now, an EV compared to a gas-powered car of similar size may be more expensive. There are still tax incentives available, but they may be reduced, if not phased out at some point. With the more expensive purchase price, mandates to buy an EV or to restrict the sale of gas cars stand to hurt those less well-off. Then there is the China factor. The computer chips required for the EV disproportionately come from China. The minerals in the batteries — lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese — are mined, processed and manufactured in China, or in places under China’s control, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Take cobalt in the Congo. Two years ago, NPR wrote “How ‘modern-day slavery’ in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy.” It featured the work of Siddharth Kara, author of the book Cobalt Red. Kara said: “People (including children) are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain. … Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese (workers) touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust. … There’s complete cross-contamination between industrial excavator-derived cobalt and cobalt dug by women and children with their bare hands (for $1 or $2 a day).” As for reviews about Electric Vehicles — The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Paul Bond, veteran journalist formerly of Newsweek” and The Hollywood Reporter, wrote: “Larry Elder’s latest documentary … begins with … provocative claims: EVs might harm the planet more than gas-powered cars, they rely on child labor and open the door to privacy invasions and hacking. … Whether you’re waving a Trump flag or preaching clean living, Elder’s film demands a second look at the EV craze. It’s not just about cars — it’s about who controls your life, your data, and your future.” Tyler O’Neil of The Daily Signal wrote: “While environmental activists and EV manufacturers have crafted a narrative that EVs are not just the cars of the future but our only clean solution to an ostensible climate crisis, Elder uncovers the dirty truth: EVs require more energy to produce, provide less freedom for drivers, empower America’s chief rival in the world, and actually make things worse for the environment.” “Mass delusion has always fascinated me,” Elder says in the film. “Scientists, media people, politicians, academics have convinced the average person that our climate is in peril and if we don’t do something real fast to get us off fossil fuels, we’re going to be in trouble. I just, intuitively, am skeptical about that.” O’Neil wrote: “He asks the hard questions and comes away with unsettling answers — for the proponents of EVs. Ironically, only the oft-demonized fossil fuels give viewers a sense of hope for the future, and many political and ideological forces are attempting to snuff out the lights powered by the internal combustion engine.” Electric Vehicles — The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is available on SalemNow.com.

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April 27, 2025 Columnists
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ELDER: Trump haters see only evil, hear only evil, speak only evil

Disdain for U.S. President Donald Trump translates into a refusal to accept reality if doing it gives Trump a political victory. Examples include, but are certainly not limited to, the continuing assertion that Trump, about Charlottesville, said some variation of, “There were good and bad white nationalists and neo-Nazis on both sides”; the denial of the Hunter Biden laptop; that Trump “mocked” a disabled reporter; that Trump said to “drink bleach” to fight COVID; and that the Trump tax cuts “only benefit the rich.”

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April 20, 2025 Columnists
President Donald Trump speaks as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Washington.

ELDER: How can the left ignore Freeman Dyson and Elon Musk?

In March 2009, The New York Times wrote a lengthy piece about renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, then 85. Four years earlier, Dyson began publicly to express doubts about the global warming or “climate change” alarmism promoted by the likes of former vice-president Al Gore, whom Dyson disparaged as “an opportunist” engaging in “lousy science.” About Dyson’s intellect and stature, the Times wrote: “Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him ‘infinitely smart.’ “Dyson, a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory, not only did path-breaking science of his own but also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the ‘high priest of string theory’ …” Described politically as an “Obama-loving, (George W.) Bush-loathing liberal,” Dyson immersed himself in the science of climate change, read prominent and influential studies and watched Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. After this deep dive, Dyson said he was coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned” while acknowledging that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” About climate change alarmism, Dyson concluded: “The climate studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models. … Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” One would think that Dyson’s observations would cause at least some of the most ardent climate change alarmists to say, “Dyson is brilliant. What does he see that I don’t? If one of the world’s leading physicists, universally recognized as a genius, thinks climate change alarmism is nonsense and that nonscientist Al Gore is full of it, perhaps I need to rethink this?” Instead, according to Dyson’s son, his father’s views have “cooled friendships.” This brings us to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a brilliant technologist, whose achievements include co-founding the electronic payment firm PayPal; starting the rocket and spacecraft company SpaceX; becoming one of the first major investors in Tesla; starting an artificial intelligence company; and founding Starlink, a satellite internet service. He bought the company formally known as Twitter, reined in its discrimination against conservative users and fired nearly 80% of its workforce without any harm to continuing operations. Musk, a long-time member of the political left, renounced the Democratic Party and became not just an admirer of Donald Trump but campaigned on behalf of his second term. Far worse, as far as his former left-wing admirers are concerned, Musk joined the Trump administration as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, with a mission to wring out bloat, inefficiency and corrupt spending by the federal government. Musk recently said: “The government waste and fraud is so high that it’s causing a $2-trillion annual deficit. … The cost of our debt has gotten so high that just the interest payments on the debt exceed the entire military budget. … If a country overspends and doesn’t spend wisely, just like a person, the country will go bankrupt. … (A)nd if we don’t do something, the ship of America is going to sink. We are all on that ship.” One would think many on the left, especially those who once admired Musk, would at the very least say, “Musk is brilliant. What does the man behind SpaceX and Tesla see about the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and President Donald Trump that I don’t? Maybe I need to rethink this?” Instead, Tesla owners have seen their cars defaced and set on fire. Musk is regularly denounced by Democratic officeholders as “dumb,” “evil” and “a Nazi.” Question: As to the late Dyson and still-alive Elon Musk, a recipient of death threats, what’s wrong with this picture?

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March 21, 2025 Columnists
Freeman Dyson and Elon Musk.
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