Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder joined Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss the new documentary Uncle Tom, which examines the history of black conservatives.
Elder, an executive producer of the the film, addressed the related narratives of Democrats and Republicans “switching” on matters of racial segregation after the 1960s and the claim of a “Southern strategy” deployed by the GOP to court white voters.
Marlow asked, “You debunked a myth that I’ve been dying to debunk on the show. Did the parties switch? Did the Democrats and Republicans just — all of a sudden, overnight — decide they’re going swap places like I’ve been told my whole life?”
Elder replied, “No, it’s a lie and, it’s really easy to dispute it. If you look at all the Democrats that voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was supposedly the act that tore the relationship between the Democratic Party and the racists, how many of them actually switched to the Republican Party?”
Elder continued, “In the case of the Senate, one did, Strom Thurmond. In the case of the House, one person did. I can’t even recall that person’s name. That’s it, and if you are a white racist and you’re unhappy because of the passage of Civil Rights Acts, you’re going to leave the Democratic Party and join the party where a greater percentage of [its members of Congress] voted for the act that you despised? It doesn’t make any sense.”
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Elder reflected on the Democrats’ leftward political momentum over time.
“The reason the South became increasingly more conservative is because the the Democrats became increasingly more left-wing,” Elder explained. “They became increasingly anti-religious, increasingly pro-abortion, increasingly higher taxes [and] pro-union. They were anti-Vietnam War, and the South felt very differently about that.”
Elder remarked, “There was a gradual change [in the South] from pro-Democrat to pro-Republican, and that change wasn’t even completed until the 1990s. It took 30 years for the South to go from Democrat to Republican, but we’re turning this all on race and the 1964 Civil Rights Act?”
Elder maintained, “It is simply not true. This narrative that they have to use in order to airbrush over their skanky history. This is the party of slavery. This is the party that founded the Klan. It wasn’t Democrat Party that did it, but Democrats founded the Klan, and the [Ku Klux Klan members] were all belonging to the Democratic Party. In fact, the NAACP used to refer to the KKK as the terror wing of the Democratic Party.”
Elder added, “Never mind the first Republican president to win was a guy named Abraham Lincoln, and the reason for the start of the Republican Party was to stop and eventually to end the practice of slavery. The fact is that history is taught by the left. Government schools are dominated, of course, by the left. Hollywood is dominated by the left. The media as dominated by the left, too, so this message of ‘the switch’ has been unchallenged, has been perpetuated, and now a lot of young people believe it.”
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Marlow and Elder lamented the political commodification of victimhood.
Elder regularly mocks left-wing and partisan Democrat activists, politicians, and polemicists as “victicrats.”
Democrats and the broader left are politically invested in characterizing American society as pathologized by “racism,” observed Elder, sharing his motivations for producing Uncle Tom.
“I anticipated that racism would still be an obsession, because the media drives that narrative,” Elder stated. “A lot of young people actually do believe that racism remains a major problem in America. They’ve been taught that by media, by academia, [and] by Hollywood. Also, I think the newspapers believe it makes money. I think people care about racial stories, and if they can suggest that what happened to George Floyd is a microcosm of law enforcement in general, I think that’s a theme they can run with.”
Democrats’ political fortunes depend on denigration of dissent as being rooted in “racism,” noted Elder.
“Politicians do it, of course, to get that 95-percent monolithic black vote without which they cannot win,” Elder said, “so it’s necessary to to characterize Republicans as evil, vicious, Nazis, racists, and to characterize the Democrats as having been gladiators on behalf of the black America.”
Uncle Tom‘s producers describe it as “a collection of intimate interviews with some of America’s most provocative black conservative thinkers [that] takes a different look at being black in America.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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