As Goes California: My Mission to Rescue the Golden State and Save the Nation

By Larry Elder and Candace Owens

In an entertaining account of his surprisingly strong run for California governor in the 2021 recall election, bestselling author, commentator, and radio host Larry Elder argues that Democrats have systematically failed our country—especially black Americans.

Throughout his years as a popular LA talk radio host, Larry Elder watched California go from bad to worse under a regime of corrupt and ideological liberal management. Rising rates of crime, addiction, homelessness, immigration, and failing schools, skyrocketing energy and housing costs, crushing anti-business regulation, and numerous other problems—all traceable to Democratic policies—made life harder for the average Californian. Then came the COVID lockdowns, school closings, mask and vaccine mandates, the BLM riots, the defund the police movement, and a general breakdown of law and order in San Francisco and LA. People began fleeing the state in droves. In the midst of all this, Governor Gavin Newsom saw fit to drop $12,000 at a trendy French restaurant, sparking outrage throughout the state and leading to demands for a recall. A special election was held, and forty-five candidates jumped in.

Though not personally ambitious for office, Elder was strongly encouraged to run by numerous friends and associates. He performed extremely well, despite having no money or organization, constant sniping from his GOP rivals, and a relentlessly hostile media that absurdly labeled him “the Black face of white supremacy”—which is ironic, since Elder was the only candidate who paid any attention to the social and economic problems of Black people in America.

Now, in As Goes California, Elder tells the story of his lightning campaign and derives from it important lessons on how a new generation of Republican candidates can fight, win, and save our country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bombardier Books
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637586013

Larry Elder

Larry Elder—the “Sage from South Central”—is a nationally syndicated radio host and newspaper columnist, bestselling author, award-winning documentary filmmaker, and one of the best-known media figures in America today. Elder has a BA in political science from Brown University, and a JD from the University of Michigan Law School. His daily radio program, The Larry Elder Show, is heard every weekday in all fifty states on more than three hundred stations.

Book preview

© 2023 by Larry Elder

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Hampton Lamoureux

All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the author’s memory. While all of the events described are true, many names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

../black_vertical.jpg

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1      What’s at Stake?

Chapter 2      What My Parents Gave Me

Chapter 3      Another Routine Spectacular Play

Chapter 4      California’s Long Slide Downhill

Chapter 5      What I Learned from My Campaign

Chapter 6      As Goes California: The Real Problem Is Liberal Governance

Chapter 7      The Black Face of White Supremacy

Chapter 8      The Truth About Race in America

Chapter 9      How We Can Help Black Families Succeed

Chapter 10   The Battle Plan

Foreword

by Candace Owens

if i have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants.

That quotation was written in a letter dated 1675, from Isaac Newton. It ranks as one of my favorite metaphors, as it so perfectly illustrates my own political contributions. If I have been able to contribute anything to the national conversation, let it be known that it is by the grace of those that came before me.

It has been said that for children, most lessons are caught rather than taught. The first giant I came across in life was undoubtedly my late grandfather, a man who led only by example. A man whose life and value system stood in stark contrast to the familial and cultural breakdown we witness so clearly in America today. He believed in secular abstinence, which kept him immersed in works of faith. He knew that happiness could only be found through the eternal source of God. In my adolescence, I resented those beliefs. Pleasure, as I had learned through public education and cultural conditioning, could also be derived from material things. Because like so many others, I was having my ideas engineered by a society on the brink of steep cultural decline. Having myself been immersed in far-left ideologies, I spent the early part of my twenties convinced that black people had to be Democrats and that police brutality and racial inequality would serve as inherent barriers to my success. So firmly committed was I to these philosophies that one would have had better luck moving a mountain than moving me away from them.

Larry Elder was the giant who moved that mountain.

There are few names as powerful in the black conservative movement as Larry Elder’s. There are perhaps even fewer names in the current landscape of political intellectuals, and there are positively no names that have proven more crucial to my own awakening.

My introduction to Larry Elder can only be described as a secondhand, intellectual assault. I was aimlessly scrolling on Youtube one day, when I came across a clip of him speaking to show host Dave Rubin, regarding the topic of police brutality. Rubin (presenting a liberal perspective) quizzed Elder on the reasons as to why Elder would (as a black man) refuse to accept that black Americans were being ruthlessly murdered by racist white police officers. Elder rebutted him, instantly:

"Nine hundred sixty-five people were shot by cops last year. Four percent of them were white cops shooting unarmed blacks. In Chicago in 2011, twenty-one people were shot and killed by cops. In 2015 there were seven. In Chicago (which is about one-third black, one-third white, and one-third Hispanic) seventy percent of homicides are black on black—about forty per month, almost five hundred last year in Chicago and about seventy-five percent of them are unsolved.

Where’s the Black Lives Matter on that? The idea that a racist white cop shooting unarmed black people is a peril to black people is complete and total B.S.…The biggest burden that black people have in my opinion is the percentage of blacks—seventy-five percent of them—that are raised without fathers. And that has every other social negative consequence connected to it: crime, not being able to compete economically in the country, being more likely to be arrested, that’s the number one problem facing the black community.

I remember my candid shock. The interview carried on in the same, academically-brutal fashion. Line after line of hard truth was fired by someone who could only be described as a statistical sharp-shooter. The end result was that Dave Rubin looked like an errant schoolchild, being scolded by a teacher for failing to complete his assigned readings. And although I was not physically present, I shared in Rubin’s shame. I was embarrassed by how little I knew; how equally incapable I would have been to rebuff a single fact that had been introduced by Elder. It was for me a pivotal moment in understanding how the liberal establishment had taken a singularity and turned it into a non-existent whole. Larry swiftly and adeptly disassembled the mainstream, emotional arguments, which, as I discovered, couldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

From that point onward, Elder became instrumental in rebalancing my understanding across a variety of topics, but it will always be the shattering of that first lie—the myth of police brutality—which opened a door for me that could never be closed. It was a Big Bang moment—an utter demolishment of a mainstream narrative—which springboarded me, as well as countless others, into our futures: a future unshackled from the victim narrative.

Which begs the question, who or what inspired Larry himself?

Elder’s story of his father Randolph, which he has documented throughout his career, bears the hallmark of an American greatness known only to past generations. Elder describes his father as his personal hero. Randolph was a tremendously hard worker, who served as a janitor before one day becoming a successful café owner, which was his lifelong dream. His life offers a stunning rebuke of race-based narratives today. Just how is it that a man who experienced actual racism in an era when the hangover of generational racism was institutionalized, was able to find success? Just why is it that he did so without complaining and convicting the country as a whole? Just how was it that he was instead able to ignore the plenty of insults he received, adopting the mantra that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Randolph would eventually retire after a long, successful entrepreneurial career. Just like my grandfather who would one day purchase the share-cropping farm that he grew up on, Elder’s father, Randolph, was the embodiment of the American dream.

Looking backward to men like Randolph presents an opportunity to garner lessons for a struggling American society today:

Firstly, the need for a father figure. In a similar way that Christ talks of the prodigal son returning to the father, America needs to return fathers to their sons. The collapse of the nuclear family, a feature so dominant in the generation of Randolph and Robert, speaks volumes to the reason that black culture (and now all of American culture) has fallen into the gutter and continues to slide into the abyss of degeneracy. Value systems that are cultured in the loving embrace of father, mother, children, grandparents, can only be dreamed of when parts of this unit are picked off by the sirens of welfarism. Elder wrote about this in the foreword of my own book years ago, and here I am writing about it in the foreword of his. The issue hasn’t been addressed, solved or even looked at by the progressive political parties that preach about fixing our broken society.

Secondly, the need for tough lessons. Ready to choose the easy path? Ready to amble along the road to destruction? Then adopt the black cultural narrative propounded by our society over the last sixty years. Be a victim, not a victor. Welfare slave, not a winner at work. Baby daddy, not a father figure, and so many more. These are what young Americans are being taught in the schools, in music, from both our political and Hollywood elite. Nowhere in this narrative can one find the truth: Life is tough. No one is entitled to an easy life and few are dealt a fair hand. But with the simple equation of faith, family and hard work, any person can bring to fruition an existence that gives back to the world.

The American dream is one that includes a meritocracy under which all can expect opportunity, but none should expect to be guaranteed success. Our country has been a philosophical experiment, comparatively greater than any other throughout human history. We came together as an experiment of freedom, but in recent years, we have been failing.

Because long gone are the tough lessons and wisdom of previous generations, instead replaced with undisciplined mantras which have brought forth laziness, tethered by a dark culture filled with narcissism and lies.

Indeed, this value system, or lack thereof, has now permeated our national identity. Look no further than California to see a third world nation on the verge of collapse, only supported by a federal life alert system of bailouts that keep the not-so-Golden state from its brink of collapse. Indeed the economic collapse and corruption is so endemic to California that the current Governor Gavin Newsom of California has been able to flagrantly flout his dictator-like laws and regulations without so much as batting an eyelid. Whereas a similar flouting of self-imposed Covid regulations in the United Kingdom effectively brought down a Prime Minister, Newsom still holds the office of Governor of a failing state. The woes of California have become so synonymous with socialism that Larry Elder chose the state as the location for his next battle—a battle well documented throughout this book.

Larry Elder for Governor of California. If there was one phrase I had not expected to hear when I was listening to that Rubin Report interview in 2017, it would have been that. But of course, no Elder move comes without meticulous research, planning and strategy, and no greater planning is required than to try and win a recall election. The historic recall election of 2003 that saw the displacement of Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a political earthquake that upturned what was possible in Sacramento politics. Elder hoped to recreate that magic in 2021, all over again.

And while I will leave it to Larry himself to detail that battle and the lessons learned from his experiences within a consequential, gubernatorial race, I will at first offer to you a quotation that will serve your interest throughout. It is one that many are familiar with, from a novel by G. Michael Hopf, Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. There is no doubt that the good times of the last generation created many weak men, and that those weak men have allowed the hard times to fall upon us, particularly in Elder’s home of California. No place is more synonymous with the historical easy-going life and sunshine paradise than that of California, yet no State in the Union bears the prophetic warning of what weak men can breed more aptly than the homeless-filled, drugged, illiberal dystopian nightmare that it has become.

Larry has spent his entire life fighting for and contributing to a better America. He inspired millions to choose a path that involves sacrifice and extreme diligence, but also enormous reward, pride, and achievement. For those willing to receive it, Larry has established the groundwork to truly comprehend the level of damage done by the welfare state. There is no person better versed in the government-sponsored destruction of the family unit and every societal ill which surrounds us today—a destruction conjured up in the halls of political establishments who bear little to no real experience to underpin their car-crash policies which have wreaked havoc upon American society up to the present day.

There is no doubt Elder has already indelibly left his mark on America, both directly and indirectly. His work and influence will bear fruit for generations.

If you thought that Larry Elder for Governor of California was something you weren’t prepared to hear in 2021, buckle your seatbelt for another political tsunami to hit you in the pages of this book as Elder unveils his comeback plan from the West Coast to the White House.

Elder in name, Elder in wisdom. Mentor, political father figure and friend—thank you Larry for everything but not least of all revealing to me a very simple truth: that black people really don’t have to be Democrats.

I will forever be humbled by the truth; that within the sphere of politics I am but a dwarf that has managed to catch a view, standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, one of the giants.

Chapter 1

What’s at Stake?

A few days after the California gubernatorial recall election in 2021, I was sitting in a restaurant on the west side of Los Angeles. I had arrived early for dinner and, after checking my phone for emails, I just sat there looking around.

I think the two ladies at the next table felt sorry for me, sitting alone, and we started talking. Turns out they were eighty-five years old, had met in the second grade, and one of them had picked her favorite restaurant to celebrate her birthday. They told me they were Jewish. One called herself a human rights activist, or something like that. The other said she had a psychotherapy practice.

About ten minutes into the conversation, one stopped herself in midsentence. Wait a minute, she smiled and said. I know you. You’re that Larry Elder guy. You ran for governor.

Guilty as charged, I smiled back.

Guess who we voted for? she asked.

Well, you didn’t vote for me.

What makes you say that?

Let’s see, I said. You’re both Jewish. We’re in a restaurant on the westside of Los Angeles where Republicans are practically protected under the Endangered Species Act, and one of you is a ‘human rights activist.’ It doesn’t take Colombo to put that together. You’re both Democrats, and you most certainly did not vote for me. Am I right, or am I right?

They laughed. You’re right.

Of course I’m right. Bet you haven’t voted for a Republican since the Titanic sank. But tell me, how do you feel about the crime here in Los Angeles?

They both called it outrageous, and one described in detail how a friend was recently a victim of one of those follow out of the store robberies, in which two thugs followed her friend out of a department store, tailed her friend to her high-end car, and followed her home. As she was waiting for her gate to open, they robbed her. Both verbally attacked Los Angeles district attorney