Voter Suppression: “It’s a Lie”

Audio By Carbonatix

Published: March 17, 2022 | Date of Source Audio: March 16, 2022

Transcribed and modified for publication from the original audio program

Larry Elder debunks actor Michael Keaton’s claim about voting rights

Larry Elder: Over the weekend, the Great Elderski was forced to watch something called the Critics Choice. You never heard of it. Neither had I. And it’s awards given to actors and TV series, movies, miniseries, online shows that I've never heard of, to people I've never heard of.

Now, that's not a dis. They're, you know, I'm not in their demo. They're not in mine. So, that whole world I know very little about. When I get home, I watch news. I watch sports. I watch movies. I don't watch these series because I just can't devote the time to following them anyway. I think I was probably the last person on earth to watch “Breaking Bad,” that series about a school teacher turned drug dealer. They got a lot of popular reviews and was very, very successful. I was told about it for a number of years, but I never got around to watching it until I watched one or two episodes. And I really liked it, but that was after it had been taken off already. So that's how hip I am.

Anyway, Michael Keaton is in some series I never heard of, the one who played Batman. And he came up and was quite entertaining and amusing when he accepted his award. But then he said this:

Clip of Michael Keaton: Thank you to fellow actor, President Zelensky, and keep up the fight. And there's only one way to change things environmentally, socially, and for some sort of racial justice and social justice, two words: voting rights. Voting rights and voter suppression.

Elder: Sigh. Voting rights and voter suppression. What the devil is he talking about? Voting rights and voter suppression. He's pushing that line that these dastardly Republicans are asking people to show voter ID, to make sure that the person who's voting should be voting is some sort of scheme in order to suppress the vote of people of color. That's what he's doing.

What's your evidence of that? Former AG then-AG Eric Holder once gave a speech and talked about examples of pernicious racism. And one of the examples was the push for voter ID. He called that an example of pernicious racism.

There is a Supreme Court case, 6-3, about an Indiana law that required voters to show photo ID. The person that wrote the majority opinion, approving, affirming, saying that the law was lawful, was Justice John Paul Stevens, the most left-wing justice up there, and said that there is a legitimate interest in making sure that we have voting integrity. He said that, I didn't.

“Poll after poll has shown that black voters support photo voter ID.”

There was a study that was widely published, widely talked about by researchers from UC San Diego, Michigan State I think it was, and Bucknell that claims that these laws that these dastardly Republicans were pushing was suppressing the black and brown vote by a certain percentage that would otherwise had not been the case had it not been for these laws. There was a follow-up study by professors from Stanford, Yale, and Penn that looked at the methodology that was used by these professors, and they trashed it. And they said based upon a legitimate methodology, we can't find any effect one way or the other by these laws. Furthermore, poll after poll after poll has shown that black voters support photo voter ID.

It's a lie. And yet, here he is saying this in front of all these left-wing people because only left-wing people watched it. And even only a subset of that. It’s a lie.

And I've played you that funny thing done by Ami Horowitz where he went to UC Berkeley and talked to all these left-wing students about voter ID and how they thought it was racist and how they thought it was designed to suppress the vote and how they knew that black people could not get ID because they were just not capable of getting it. Then he went to Harlem and talked to a bunch of people. They all had voter ID. They all knew how to get it. And they did not know anybody who didn't have voter ID.

So it's just a left-wing, idiotic, condescending insulting thing that is making the country worse. It's one thing to say you disagree with your opponent. It's another thing to say your opponent is doing something illegal, unlawful, trying to suppress you, which is exactly the line that Michael Keaton fed everybody when he gave his acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards, which I watched so you didn't have to.