California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, who might just defeat leftist Gavin Newsom in the upcoming recall election, is popular for a reason. He’s a controversialist unafraid to say the unsayable.
In an 11th-hour hit job on the candidate just days before next week’s recall vote, the Daily Mail dredged up a short snippet from 2019 of Elder saying the unsayable to black conservative Candace Owens.
The two were discussing reparations for slavery, and Elder, a libertarian who strongly defends property rights, said that if slaves were owed money, so were the owners because their property was seized without compensation
Not Unusual
Elder uttered the unutterable by observing the obvious: Slavery was legal in the United States until the War Between the States ended it.
After Owens said the United Kingdom abolished slavery before the United States, Elder informed Owens, apparently clueless about the matter, that the “slave owners were compensated.”
“After they lost their ‘property,’ the government compensated slave owners. So when people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation?” he continued:
Like it or not, slavery was legal. Their property, their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War. So you could make an argument that the people that are owed reparations are not only just Black people but also the people whose “property” was taken away after the end of the Civil War.
Elder said the money involved was “substantial” and that compensated emancipation explains why England did not suffer a wrenching war among its people. “The slave owners got substantial amounts of money.”
USA Today put that figure at 20 million pounds, the equivalent of 17 billion pounds ($23.4 billion) today and, at the time, 40 percent of England’s government budget. Remarkably, the government did not finish compensating the descendents of slave owners until 2015.
In the United States, compensated emancipation was proposed but defeated except in Washington, D.C. Wikipedia’s entry on that measure says the government paid the city’s 900 slave owners $300 per slave, about $8,109 today. The total, $270,000 at the time, would be about $7.3 million today.
Other countries that compensated slave owners were France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and almost all of South America.
What Americans did not pay in treasure, they paid in blood.
Four years of brutal war, fought mostly in the South, killed 620,000. That does not count the wounded, or widespread property destruction in the South when General Philip Sheridan razed the Shenandoah Valley, and General William T. Sherman destroyed everything in his path on a march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia.
Elder’s Chances
The hit piece won’t have much effect on the race. Elder’s popularity, recent polls show, began to diminish before his remarks surfaced. Most of those polled say they don’t want Governor Gavin Newsom recalled.
The most recent, a Trafalgar poll of 1,108 people, showed that 52 percent want Newsom to stay in office. Just 44.4 percent want him recalled.
That datum is consistent with 14 polls before it. The Real Clear Politics average of those surveys is 52.4 to 43.8 in favor of keeping the leftist where he is: in a position to finish destroying the state.
That said, Elder is only one of the five GOP candidates with even a remote chance of beating Newsom: 29.2 percent of those in the Trafalgar survey favor Elder over the governor.
His closest GOP competitor is Kevin Faulconer at 4.1 percent. Bruce Jenner, who calls himself Caitlyn, is at 1.1 percent.
A Democrat, Kevin Paffrath, stands at 22 percent.
About 30 percent of voters are undecided.
More than 40 candidates are running.
