The Patriot Post® · Odds and Ends, Ends at Odds

By Larry Elder ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/83783-odds-and-ends-ends-at-odds-2021-10-28

Why doesn’t President Joe Biden place illegal immigrants in college dorms? They would be around people who love them and want them here. They would get better food, housing and medical care. And they would get a firsthand look at the open-mindedness and tolerance of the young American Left.

Just as the welfare state changed the culture of out-of-wedlock births by incentivizing women to marry the government and men to abandon their financial and moral responsibility, free money and eviction moratoriums have changed the culture of work by reducing the stigma of not doing work.

Students in communist China study science, technology, engineering and math. Students in America study “critical race theory.” What could possibly go wrong?

It’s a shame Biden did not choose Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., for Housing and Urban Development Secretary. He could have explained how a socialist can acquire three houses.

If you are black and believe in hard work, accountability and personal responsibility, then you become the black face of white supremacy. If you are white and believe the same things, then you become the proof of white supremacy.

Real quick. Has anyone asked LeBron James what to do about the supply chain backlog?

Reporters described the white woman who threw that egg at me during my gubernatorial campaign as “wearing a gorilla mask.” At the risk of my sounding sexist, how do we know it was a mask? Maybe she was having a bad hair day.

As long as California Democrats hate Republicans more than they hate rising violent crime, rising homelessness, rising cost of living, poor urban schools, bad forest management, water rationing due to inadequate water infrastructure, “rolling brownouts” due to an inadequate power grid, and COVID-19 mandates of dubious legality, California will continue having these problems. California will not reverse its decline until Democrats and independents, like drug addicts and alcoholics, realize the state has hit bottom. What is the definition of bottom? When a homeless guy takes a dump on your front lawn.

As compliments poured in at the passing of Colin Powell, let us recall the following criticism leveled at him when he served as secretary of state: “In the days of slavery … you got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master. … Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.” —Harry Belafonte, 10/8/02.

When I lived in Cleveland, a city with a majority black population, I went to a Harry Belafonte concert in a nearby suburb. Aside from the staff working in the sold-out 3,000 seat theater, my girlfriend and I were about the only blacks in the audience. Wonder if Harry was thinking, “Thank goodness the master bred the white folks in this house”?

I had a far-left white friend who took pride in living in a nearby “racially diverse” suburb on a “racially diverse” street. A few years later, he moved his family further away to a nearly all-white suburb in search, he said, of “better schools.” I asked him why he continues to vote for the party that opposes school choice. We are no longer friends.

“I have said in the past — and I’ll repeat again — that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed.” —former President Barack Obama, 2008. “So the bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. … Everybody potentially can make the claim that we should all be treated fairly.” —Obama, 2016. “So, if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes.” —Obama, 2021. Had Obama not done a 180 on reparations, he would have been canceled. Cancel culture eats its own.

COPYRIGHT 2021 LAURENCE A. ELDER