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The possibility that Larry Elder may win Californias recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist left. Elders foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card.

Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state Sen. Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.

The media have focused particularly on Elders views about crime and policing. The self-described Sage from South-Central maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths.

When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up, he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.

Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes. Elder has a different take. If a young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man, Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then systemic racism is not the problem.

Such statements are anathema to the establishment left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that at the very least complicate the victim narrative. To the left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction.

Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone. Black people are not more inclined toward violent crimes, nor do blacks disproportionately victimize whites, Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiffs expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.

Unfortunately for Elders critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the lefts favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks age 10 to 34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.

Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence.

These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are more inclined toward violent crimes is indisputable.

What about the claim that blacks dont disproportionately victimize whites? In 2019, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of criminal victimization, blacks committed 127,350 non-lethal violent crimes against whites, while whites committed 17,690 non-lethal violent crimes against blacks. In other words, blacks commit 88 percent of all interracial violence between blacks and whites.

Crime apologists argue that such disproportions are inevitable because there are so many whites in the US. But in cities where racial ratios are more commensurate, the amount of white-on-black violence remains negligible.

Occasionally videos and reports of interracial violence flash mobs, knockout games, and brutal beatings and robberies become public. If the races were reversed, there would be a national uproar lasting months; but such incidents get scant, if any, mainstream media coverage. They are the reason why the press has all but eliminated reporting on the race of crime suspects.

Such voluntary action is not enough to ensure public cluelessness about the reality of crime, however.

Gov. Newsom recently signed a law prohibiting Californias police departments from posting mugshots of arrested criminals if their latest crime was non-violent. The San Francisco Police Department has stopped posting mugshots of all criminals. Police Chief Bill Scott explained that doing so creates an illusory correlation for viewers that vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior.

Actually, mugshots document a real correlation. If the San Francisco Police Department could undercut that correlation by posting mugshots of white muggers, does anyone doubt that it would rush to do so?

Elders dismissal of Black Lives Matter claims about systemic police violence is also grounded in fact. Police officers are at greater risk of civilian violence than blacks are at risk of police violence. And a disproportionate source of that danger to cops comes from black criminals.

Fifty police officers have been murdered this year as of Aug. 25. In 2019, there were 697,195 sworn officers in the US. That employment count would be lower now, in light of the rush of officer retirements over the last year and a half and the inability of police departments to recruit replacements. Conservatively, using the 2019 number, however, those 50 officers represent a rate of approximately seven officers killed per 100,000 on the job.

Four unarmed blacks have been fatally shot by police officers so far in 2021, according to the Washington Post. (Unarmed does not mean compliant; the Posts category includes crime suspects who violently resist arrest, pummel officers after knocking them to the ground, and continue fighting after being tased.) Those four black victims represent .0000085 percent of the nearly 47 million self-identified blacks, or less than one one-hundredth of one person killed by the police per 100,000.

A police officer is 875 times as likely to be killed on the job as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.

Historically, blacks have made up over 40 percent of cop-killers nationwide 43 percent between 2005 and 2013 though they are, at most, 13 percent of the nations population. In New York City, blacks were responsible for 74 percent of the murders of on-duty New York Police Department officers between 1986 and 2020. In 2019, blacks nationally were over 37 percent of all cop-killers whose race was known.

Conservatively estimating that 40 percent of the cop-killers this year have been black, 20 officers would have been killed by a black suspect in 2021, for a rate of nearly three cops per 100,000 officers killed by a black. A police officer is 375 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.

Elder is breaking the taboos about black crime in an effort to save black lives. Police activity must be understood in the context of crime, not simple population ratios, since policing today is data-driven. Cops go where people are most being victimized, and that is in black neighborhoods. The police cannot protect black victims without having a disparate impact on black criminals.

But the lies directed against cops from the highest reaches of government have led the police to back off. The Los Angeles Police Department experienced a 43 percent reduction in arrests in 2020 and a 27 percent reduction in street stops. This year, through Aug. 21, arrests are down another 28 percent, compared with the same period in 2019.

Crime responded predictably. Homicides in Los Angeles through Aug. 21 are up 44 percent compared with the pre-George Floyd year of 2019; shots fired are up over 48 percent, and shootings up 44 percent. In Los Angeles County, homicides were up 111 percent this year through late May. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Latino and black victims account for nearly all the recent surge in homicides in Los Angeles.

Assaults on officers also rose in 2020. Since the George Floyd riots, officers in California have been shot at, assaulted with lethal projectiles, firebombed, and run over. In September 2020, longtime felon Deonte Murray walked up to the parked squad car of two Los Angeles County sheriffs deputies and shot them both in the head as they sat inside. Bystanders cheered; anti-cop protesters continued the celebration later at the hospital, as the deputies struggled on life support.

Yet despite this open season on cops, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascn declared in December 2020 that officers authority may be resisted with impunity and will not be prosecuted a declaration that strikes at the heart of civilization itself, as Elder understands.

Trying to ensure that blacks get the policing they need in order to stay alive would not seem to be the gesture of a white supremacist, black or white.

If Elder were running as a Democrat, the press would be celebrating the possibility of Californias first black governor. Instead, we hear nothing about shattering glass ceilings or diversifying the ruling elite.

The New York Times ran an entire front-page article on Elders candidacy without once mentioning that he was black. (The article did claim in passing that Elder was an affirmative-action admit to Brown University, an unthinkable charge regarding a black liberal.) A column by Paul Krugman two days later was equally colorblind regarding the Elder candidacy.

Has the Times renounced identity politics? Only selectively. Adjacent to the Aug. 25 front-page article was a story on New Yorks new governor, headlined Hochul Breaks a Barrier and Pledges a New Era. The story opened with the observation that Kathleen C. Hochul became the first woman to ascend to New Yorks highest office on Tuesday.

Yet Hochuls entry into the governors mansion in Albany does not even signify anything about gubernatorial voting patterns; she was not elected but slotted in after Andrew Cuomos resignation.

Black governors have been much rarer than female ones. Elder would lead the nations largest state and be just the third black governor ever elected in the United States, following Douglas Wilder in Virginia and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts.

Elder is indifferent to the silence regarding the historic nature of his candidacy. But the medias effort to portray his run merely as a resurgence of alleged Trumpian racism depends on a shameful duplicity regarding crime and policing. As long as that duplicity remains in force, in the California governors office and elsewhere, the country will continue sliding toward anarchy.

Reprinted with permission from City Journal.

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Liberals play race card on black talk show host Larry Elder -- because he's speaking the truth - New York Post

It has since gained almost 18,000 followers on its Instagram page, more than 20,000 people have signed its petition calling for a plan for schools to urgently reopen a position that aligns with the state Liberal Party and it has featured in reports from the ABC, Channel Seven and the Herald Sun.

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Ms Blackwell said she was not motivated by politics and argued the group was valuable because kids dont have unions they have mums.

We arent anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown or anti-government, she said. We supported the lockdowns last year, but we want a plan for schools to go back and experts to be consulted.

Kid are losing their spark. They have missed so much school; thats socialising, sport, education We dont have answers for them anymore when they ask what date theyre going back.

Influencers including Rozalia Russian, whose husband Nick Russian unsuccessfully ran on an unofficial Liberal party ticket for lord mayor last year, Nadia Bartel and Rebecca Judd have recently promoted Shadow Pandemic Victoria on their Instagram accounts. Judd landed in hot water last year after she referred to Premier Daniel Andrews as Dictator Dan on her Instagram account.

The group recently shared a tweet from Victorian Liberal MP and former opposition leader Matthew Guy, who said he was fed up with the government telling him that home-schooling was somehow good for kids and they should learn to enjoy it.

Multiple state Liberal and crossbench MPs have contacted Ms Blackwells group in the hopes of collaborating. The group has declined these approaches in order to avoid a perception that it is aligned to a party.

Data from Google Trend shows interest in the phrase shadow pandemic is isolated to Victoria and peaked on the weekend of August 24.

The group has rallied against the governments playground ban, which was the lockdown measure that arguably generated the most negative media attention. The Andrews government overturned the ban on Wednesday despite recording the highest number of daily cases in more than a year.

If you or anyone you know needs support call Kidshelpline 1800 55 1800 or Lifeline 131 114.

Stay across the most crucial developments related to the pandemic with the Coronavirus Update. Sign up for the weekly newsletter.

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McGorry withdraws from event run by shadow pandemic mums group with links to Liberals - The Age

Bruce Anderson: While theres a voter-rich battle to their left, Liberals must notice OToole is relaunching the fight for the centre that his predecessors weren't interested in

Bruce Anderson is chairman of Abacus Data and Summa Communications and a partner in Spark Advocacy

Having worked in several national elections, some for the Liberal Party, some for the Progressive Conservative Party, the polling I studied made one thing really clearwhile its common to talk about the base as fundamental to electoral success, its really the swing voters that matter.

Elections in Canada are won or lost by a margin of 1 to 2 million votes, and the trading of these votes among parties can be tricky to see on the surface of polling data, but vital to study below the surface. Vote switching is what campaigns turn onfinding some share you can take from your opponent, figuring how best to win those voters, and then closing the deal.

In our latest Abacus Data work, something caught my eye. The number of Liberal/NDP switcherspeople who say that they will vote for one of these two parties, but if they change their mind it will be a vote for the other oneis a lot bigger than the number of Liberal/Conservative switchers. Today, one fifth (21 per cent) of the electorate indicate their choice will be red or orange. About half as many (9 per cent) say their choice will be Liberal or Conservative.

Historically, this wasnt the case. The deepest pool of swing voters was Liberal/Conservative switchers, a mass of people who lived around the centre of the spectrumpeople who didnt like too much government spending or too little government services, whose progressive instincts were tempered by a frugal mindset, who could feel tempted either by grand ambitions of the Liberal Party or worried that we were getting out over our skis and needed to be more practical.

I think a few things caused the pool of Liberal/Conservative switchers to shrink and probably the thing Im most curious about is whether Erin OToole is making progress in turning that around.

Heres what made the pool shrink in my opinion.

When the Progressive Conservative Party was replaced by the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance and then the Conservative Party of Canada, most of the campaign energy of that new party went to cementing the foundation rather than building. It was as though self-styled mission conservatives were so relieved at the thought of not having to water down their personal agendas that they paid little attention to how many voters they were pushing away, as long as they could see a path to about 38 or 39 per cent popular vote. Turns out that approach did make some people who would normally consider Conservative their second choice decide the party wasnt for them, and it left the Conservatives working with very thin margin for error if they were going to win an election.

More recently, a great deal of Conservative energy has been poured into brittle criticisms of Justin Trudeau. Ive no doubt it feels good within the Conservative caucus rooms and raises plenty of money from diehard Conservative voters but it hasnt connected with other voters who might be open to the idea of a Conservative government, but dont hate Justin Trudeau. Trudeau haters are mostly a lock for the Conservative Party, they arent going anywhere, especially if they see the prospect of a victory. But a campaign about anger at Trudeau is counterproductive among voters who havent been interested in that argument so far. On that point, 62 per cent of the Liberal/Conservative switchers have a good impression of Trudeau, 42 per cent have a good impression of OToole.

Its early days, but in Erin OToole the Conservatives may have a leader who gets this math, quite possibly because it is the math of his political birthplace in Ontario. The absent voice of Jason Kenney, the relative silence of Pierre Poilievre and some other front benchers, no campaigning with Doug Ford are all things you would do if you wanted to win votes from the Liberal Party and not only excite the base. He saw in Derek Sloan a line that needed drawing and he drew it.

These moves have given the Conservatives more potential to grow. And while straying from base rallying might have driven down support among hard core conservatives, his popularity with them, which had been relatively soft, is firming up.

OTooles platform might fail a stress test on some big issues like climate change and childcare. His caucus includes a substantial number of people who, left to their own devices, would revisit abortion and waffle on the rights of some minority groups. A fascination with China bashing is unlikely to grow support. Tone deaf harangues about vaccines earlier this year helped the Liberal Party more than his own. The Conservative brand is still a heavy burden to carry into a conversation aimed at winning young, urban and suburban centrist voters. But with policies aimed at helping gig economy workersOToole is making a pitch that his recent predecessors werent really into.

For the Liberals, it may have been tempting to focus almost exclusively on the battle on their left flankwhere the number of winnable votes is large and the philosophical differences small. However their path to another victory will require attention to the centre and the efforts by Erin OToole to present his party in a different light.

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The Conservatives opportunity and the Liberal imperative - Maclean's

As party leaders head to Montreal to prepare for the French-language debate that will air on Quebecs TVA network on Thursday, each will be touting his platform to woo crucial voters in the province.

Green Party Leader Annamie Paul and Peoples Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier havent been invited to participate in the debate.

Bloc Qubcois Leader Yves-Franois Blanchet has been criss-crossing the province since the election call on Aug. 15, hoping to increase his 32 seats in the House of Commons. But one riding he might not have to spend much time in is Rivire-des-Mille-les, in the northern suburbs of Montreal.

The riding was created in 1996 and given its current name two years later. The Bloc held it until the orange wave in 2011, when Laurin Liu took it. Liu was one of five NDP candidates attending McGill University who won that year, making Thomas Mulcair the official opposition leader. She lost the seat in 2015 to Liberal Linda Lapointe.

Four years later, Bloc candidate Luc Desilets defeated Lapointe by 2,620 votes.

Lapointe is back this election, challenging Desilets for the seat. The other candidates include Conservative Marc Duffy-Vincelette, NDP Joseph Hakizimana, the Peoples partys Hans Roker Jr., and the Greens Alex Ware.

According to a new Mainstreet riding poll, Desilets might survive the challenge. If an election were held today, 35 per cent of leaning and decided voters in the riding would vote Bloc, 30 per cent would vote Liberal, and 18 per cent would vote Conservative.

The survey of 436 adults was conducted on Aug. 31 using automated telephone interviews and online samples.

Meanwhile, heading east, the ground game in Fredericton is telling a different story than what polls suggest.

Since 2008, the riding has gone from Conservative to Liberal to Green. Its currently held by Jenica Atwin, who crossed the floor in June to join the Liberal caucus. In 2019, Atwin won the election as a Green with 33.68 per cent of the vote, compared to Conservative Andrea Johnsons 30.38 per cent and incumbent Liberal Matt DeCourceys 27.41 per cent.

Johnson is again running for the Conservatives, while Nicole OByrne, whos taught law at the University of New Brunswick since 2009, is running for the Greens. Shawn Oldenburg is representing the NDP.

This election is closer than what polls suggest, says Thomas Bateman, a political science professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, and if Atwin had remained with the Greens, she would have won the seat handily.

Atwin lost the endorsement of the popular Fredericton MLA David Coon, who campaigned hard for her in 2019, Bateman told iPolitics in an email. And the Greens have put up a serious candidate in law prof Nicole OByrne.

A new Mainstreet survey shows that if a federal election were held today, 42 per cent of leaning and decided voters in the riding would vote Liberal, 33 per cent would vote Conservative, 11 per cent the NDP, and the Greens would nab six per cent.

The survey of 307 adults was conducted on Sept.1 using automated telephone interviews and online samples. As this survey used non-probability sampling to collect this sample, a margin of error cant be applied to this sample. However, the margin of error for a probability sample of this size would be +/- 5.6 per cent at the 95 per cent confidence level. Margins of error are higher in each subsample.

This is a three-way race of females, and while the Green party might not be doing well nationally, it has a strong following in Fredericton, said Jamie Gillies, a professor of public policy and communications at St. Thomas University.

The grassroots for the Green party are a real army of volunteers, he said. They fundraise, they work very hard provincially, and they do very well. Federally, this is the best Green riding other than Vancouver Island.

One thing is certain, Gillies added. There will be a female MP representing (Fredericton) after the election.

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Bloc and Liberals poised to hold two key ridings - iPolitics.ca

OTTAWA, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Canada's ruling Liberal Party said on Wednesday that if re-elected it would raise corporate taxes on the most profitable banks and insurers to help pay for the cost of the COVID-19 recovery.

The Liberals said they would hike the rate to 18% from 15% on all earnings over C$1 billion ($793 million) and vowed to establish a special dividend, so that those same institutions contribute more. The measures are expected to generate C$2.5 billion per year over four years, starting in 2022/23.

Polls show the Liberals, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have a slender lead over their Conservative rivals ahead of the Sept. 20 election.

"Given that our banks have posted extraordinarily large profits, have continued to be incredibly successful, including through a pandemic ... we're going to ask them to do a little bit more," Trudeau told a campaign event in British Columbia on the same day that two banks reported big profits.

British Columbia is an influential province, accounting for 42 of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. Polls indicate the Liberals face a fight there from the opposition New Democrats, who also appeal to center-left voters.

The Canadian Bankers Association criticized the news, saying that "singling out specific economic sectors for special taxation is a proven detriment to economic growth".

The Canadian banks index (.GSPTXBA) slipped just 0.6% after the announcement, compared with little change in the Toronto stock benchmark (.GSPTSE), but still ended the day up 0.5% from Tuesday's close.

Maria Khoury, senior vice president for North American financial institutions' credit ratings at DBRS Morningstar, said

the muted reaction in part reflected skepticism over campaign promises and the broad expectation that some tax increases were inevitable following the flood of government support.

Large banks include Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) (RY.TO), Toronto Dominion Bank (TD.TO), Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) (BNS.TO), Bank of Montreal (BMO) (BMO.TO) and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

RBC beat analysts' expectations for third-quarter profit on Wednesday after Scotiabank and BMO did the same on Tuesday. read more

Large insurers include Manulife Financial (MFC.TO), Sun Life Financial (SLF.TO), Intact Financial (IFC.TO) and Great-West Lifeco.

($1=1.2617 Canadian dollars)

Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Ottawa;Editing by Sandra Maler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Canada's ruling Liberals vow higher taxes on big bank profits to help fund COVID-19 recovery - Reuters