California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) rallied supporters in Long Beach on the final night of campaigning in the California recall election, telling them that a vote for his main opponent, Larry Elder, is a vote against “diversity” and “racial justice.”
Elder, who is African American and was born and raised in Compton, would be the state’s first black governor.
However, Newsom, devoting most of his speech to attacks on Elder — as he has throughout the last month of his campaign — said that Elder’s views on race and gender were out of touch with the left-wing views that California Democrats hold.
The governor has said nothing to criticize racial attacks against Elder in recent weeks — including a violent assault in Venice, where a white woman wearing a gorilla mask pelted Elder and his security detail with eggs. Newsom also remained silent when a Black Lives Matter leader said that Elder was the “black face of white supremacy.”
But Newsom was voluminous in attacking Elder, recycling debunked attack lines he has used in his stump speech, including the false claims that Elder believes climate change is a “myth” (he does not) and that women are not as smart as men. (Elder — writing in 2000 — had cited a University of Pennsylvania study, run by a female researcher, that measured women’s and men’s knowledge of current events (she called her findings “perplexing”).
He also claimed Elder believed that slave owners should be paid reparations for their freed slaves. (Elder, in a discussion of reparations with Candace Owens, mentioned that the United Kingdom had compensated its slave owners when it abolished slavery to avoid conflict over the issue, using that example to make the point that reparations was a complicated topic.)
Both diversity and racial justice were “on the ballot,” Newsom said.
Newsom delivered his closing message ahead of remarks by President Joe Biden, who flew to California to campaign with the Democratic governor, after visiting fire-damaged regions further north in the state.
The final day of voting is Tuesday, Sep. 14.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
