By Ruben Navarrette Jr. | Originally Posted on East Bay Times
Twenty-seven years ago, I was co-hosting a nightly radio show at ABC News Radio in Los Angeles. Across the hall, in the same studio, sat an African American conservative who was hosting a show of his own.
After both shows wrapped up at midnight, we’d sometimes go to breakfast at an all-night diner in Hollywood and do what talk show hosts do: talk.
We’d talk about where the city, state and country were going — and where they should go.
That radio host was Larry Elder. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Elder graduated from Crenshaw High School before going on to Brown
University and University of Michigan Law School. A success story even then, he was changing careers and trying his hand at talk radio.
My show went off the air in 1995, and I went back to opinion writing in pursuit of a national column. Elder stayed in radio. And after several ups and downs, he went on to become nationally syndicated in 2002.
Today, Elder is the Republican frontrunner vying to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom in California’s Sept. 14 recall election.
And, predictably, my friend is — as a Black conservative — being attacked and ridiculed by White liberals in the media. He’ll never get a fair shake.
Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg caricatured Elder as a “right-wing talk show host” and “the candidate I liked least.” Tops among Elder’s sins, wrote Goldberg, is that he has called climate change a myth. The scoundrel!
