‘I Love It’: Larry Elder Talks Nomination to Radio Hall of Fame in Exclusive Interview

Larry Elder at the 5th Anniversary of Comedy Central's 'South Park' at Quixote Studios in
Kevin Winter/Getty

Larry Elder joined Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his recent nomination to the Radio Hall of Fame. He reflected on his nearly three decades in radio while recalling his early dealings with Andrew Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, and Stephen Miller.

If inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, Elder will join talk radio hosts Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Dave Ramsey, and Michael Savage.

“I want you to get in,” said Marlow, highlighting his first job as an intern with Elder’s eponymous radio show. “I think that would be very meaningful to me. … I would love nothing more than to see this. You’ve had an unbelievable and lengthy career. … You’ve been influencing people for a couple of decades now, and it’s got to be pretty cool, right?”

Elder replied, “Are you kidding me? I love it. We talked about some of the people that I influenced, according to you and Ben Shapiro and Andrew Breitbart. Michelle Malkin told me I was the first one to ever put her on radio. Steve Miller — who’s a top aide to Donald Trump — I’ve had him on the show ever since he was 13, 14 years old over the years. And so, my fingerprints are pretty much everywhere for good or for ill.”

LISTEN:

Elder addressed the passing of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).

“John Lewis just passed,” began Elder. “He was a civil rights icon, and one of the reasons I did my movie Uncle Tom is to show that people like that helped win the civil rights war, and the civil rights war has been won. Black people have their fundamental civil rights.”

Elder contrasted equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, noting the Democrat and left-wing push for the latter.

“What we’re now fighting for is equal results, and equal results and equal rights are two different things,” Elder stated.

Elder shared an anecdote of a conversation he had with Thomas Sowell, one of his mentors, who urged people to “appreciate the amazing [and] astonishing progress blacks have made since liberation,” highlighting the expansion of literacy among a majority of black Americans within two generations of emancipation. “We underestimate exactly the kinds of things we had to overcome,” he added.

Contemporary left-wing and Democrat focus on “white racism” does not improve the welfare of black Americans, Elder said.

“A black person has been elected president, and reelected — despite, in my opinion, a lousy economic recovery — and we’re still talking about institutional racism?” asked Elder. “It is insulting to the memory of people like John Lewis, MLK, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, and all the others who marched, [were] often attacked, and some who even died … and we’re still talking about taking down Confederate statues as if that’s the issue?”

Elder went on, “If we developed a vaccine to get rid of white racism, would the major problems facing black America today still be there? Seventy percent of black kids raised without fathers, a 50 percent inner-city dropout rate — and many of those who graduate from these urban high schools cannot read, write, or compute at grade level — and 25 percent of young black men living in the inner city having criminal records.”

Elder continued, “[If] we would still have all of these major issues if white racism went away, I suggest that’s not the issue. We ought to be searching for something else to deal with these kinds of problems.”

Low-quality public schools cause more damage to blacks’ well-being than Confederate statues, Elder insisted, highlighting Democrat and leftist opposition to educational reform proposals seeking to enhance competition between schools.

“We should be concentrating on what’s important,” Elder concluded. “We have a finite amount of time [and] indignation, and as far as I’m concerned, the energy that we spend on this can be spent on other issues, most notably, the issue of choice in public schools.”

Forty-four percent of schoolteachers in Philadelphia and 39 percent of schoolteachers in Chicago send their children to private schools, Elder remarked, contrasting these percentages with the American average of nine percent.

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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